I’ve been re-reading old poems as I write this month, perhaps hopeful that I have old work I just salvage instead of doing the hard work of making something new. With both of the books I’ve written so far, I have folders full of tons of drafts, easily two or three times as many poems as ended up going into the final book. Though there are interesting phrases and images and ideas in those discarded poems, most of the time I can see why they didn’t make the cut. Many of them were a kind of testing ground: I was working on a new voice, playing with line breaks, falling in love with second person, and I iterated that until a couple poems worked. This kind of obsessive practice is a good way to teach yourself new things in writing, but it’s also easy for those things to devolve into tics.
In other words: it’s so easy to fall into habits in writing. Let’s break those habits.
Prompt #12: Opposite Day
Find the 7-10 words you use most in your poems. (A word cloud generator can help you identify common words.) For each frequently-used word, write its opposite and use those opposites in your poem.
But don’t stop there with your opposites! What are your other habits in poems? Do you tend to use long, endstopped lines? Try some wild and jarring enjambment. Do you only write in first poem? Try second or third. What tone, landscapes, and images tend to show up in your poems? Re-read a couple of recent poems, identify two or three trends or habits, then do their opposite, or at least do something different.
If you’d like a formal suggestion, write this as an epistle or an apostrophe.
Sharing your work helps sustain momentum. I’ll leave the comments open, so you can share a poem title, a snippet of a line, or something else about your writing life.