Happy Poetry Month! This April I am so delighted to bring you poetry prompts, lessons, insights, and the chance to feature YOUR poems. So drop your writing in the comments for a chance to be featured! This post is FREE so go ahead and share this with a friend. Sharing is a great way to support the work of this project. But nothing is better than becoming a paid subscriber where you get you access to 100% of past and future posts. Ok. Now onto the poetry part.
Picture a circle.
That circle represents all that you are. Every piece of music you heard, every bit of food you had. Everytime your mother put you to bed or said good morning. Every thought, feeling, instinct, friendship, and laugh and every experience. I could go on, but by now I think you know what I mean.
Ok. Now draw a line down that circle. One half is your waking life. That is, everything you do and see and hear and feel while you are awake. And the other half is your dreaming life. I never was good at math, but I know two halves make a whole (they do, right?) so that means that yes, we experience half of our lives dreaming!
Besides that being TOTALLY CRAZY, how does it relate to poetry?
Well, sometime around 1920 a bunch of guys in Europe were thinking how dreams and our “unconscious” can be involved in making art. Afterall, our dream life is waaaaay more imaginative, way more captivating, and strange. But mostly they were asking themselves, is there a piece of our creative potential that we can unlock if we can tap into our dreams?
After some thinking The Surrealist Manifesto was written by Andre Breton and the movement of Surrealism was born. A few key things about this movement:
The main idea is not to limit the imagination.
To make poetry social and fun.
Combine the waking and dreaming mind into one.
And how did they manage to pull something like that off you ask? Well with these three things.
Automatic writing (free write) where you write whatever comes to mind. No editing.
Surrealist juxtaposition. Where you pair unrelated and unexpected things to give a dream-like feeling.
Games like exquisite corpse.
Prompt
How can we write a surrealist poem? First let’s start by reading one! Here are the first 10 lines of Breton’s poem Free Union:
My wife with the hair of a wood fire
With the thoughts of heat lightning
With the waist of an hourglass
With the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tiger
My wife with her rosette mouth and a bouquet of stars of the last magnitude
With the teeth of tracks of white mice on the white earth
With the tongue of rubbed amber and glass
My wife with the tongue of a stabbed host
With the tongue of a doll that opens and closes its eyes
With the tongue of an unbelievable stone
What do you notice about this poem?
I notice the repetition at the beginning of every line and the strange dream-like logic of the end every line. Instead of saying his wife’s hair is red, or firey, he says wood fire. Its surprising and yet is makes sense. Instead of saying her mind is sharp, her thoughts are fast, he says thoughts of heat lightning. And instead of silent, or quiet, he says her tongue is like a stone, and not just ANY stone, an unbelievable one!
For your writing prompt, I would like you to rewrite these lines about yourself. What is your hair like? If it is short, what is something that is short? What is another way you can say short? If your waist is straight, what else can you compare it to that is straight, a beam, a tree? Here is the poem for you to fill in. Hope you have fun with it and share your writing in the comments!
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