Today’s Prompt Write a poem that begins with the last thing you can remember someone saying to you today or yesterday. See if you can use that line two or three times.

Poetry In-depth Part II The Image

No one cares about your feelings… Well, we do care about your feelings, but no one wants to read them unless you make it worthwhile. We’re not writing diaries or confessions. We’re writing literature and literature takes work. Daily consideration & revision.

The Audience of One… If we just write for catharsis and don’t use poetic tools wisely and precisely, we’re doomed to write for an audience of one. Or just our friends. We must strive to make our work univseral

Let’s look at this quote from Ben Lerner’s novel 10:04… “When I learned this facts while writing a term paper in high school, I didn’t feel cheated: I loved the idea that a poem written by a young man weeks before his fiery death would be quoted by a speechwriter and read by a president and felt in the chests of a million American children in the wake of another aerial disaster. It showed poetry’s power to circulate among bodies and temporalities, to transcend the contingencies of its authorship… I find this less scandalous than beautiful: a kind of palimpsestic plagiarism that moves through bodies and time, a collective song whose origin has been erased— the way a star, from our earthly perspective, is often survived by its own light… I wonder if we can think of them … as a way of organizing meaning and time that belongs to nobody in particular but courses through us all.”

So, how do we write poems people care about? Well, there are tools of poetry… But the first and most valuable is… THE IMAGE!

So, let’s look at some poetry Let’s explore some poems that really knock the imagery out of the park…