Sunday Spinners #2

My phone says one hour and four minutes–my laptop says one hour–before I would have missed the second Sunday Spinners. It really would be embarrassing if I couldn't keep a series running for more than a week.

This week's Sunday Spinners is an exercise I did in a poetry workshop at writing camp. Although it is a poetry exercise, you don't need to be a poet to try it. Lord knows I'm not a poet...but I still really enjoyed this exercise. If you don't want to write poetry, feel free to be creative and stretch the exercise to whatever medium best suits your interest.

Here's the prompt (the pictures are only examples of the types of things you could write about...your possibilities are literally endless):

Write a poem about something ugly using beautiful language.

This is the bathroom in the hotel room I stayed in all by myself when my flight back from Ohio was cancelled...that's another story for another time.

OR

Write a poem about something beautiful using ugly language.

This is just a daffodil.

***

If you're feeling stuck, here's the last stanza of the poem I wrote for this exercise. I titled the poem "Full Moon." In my poem, the speaker is a heartbroken woman who stares at the beauty of the full moon and is filled with anger, because she thinks of all the lovers who share that full moon together. It's a work in progress. I need to watch out for using too many big words. I got too carried away with the thesaurus.

We may like to raise our thumbs

to the moon and cogitate 

about the “universality” of how everyone

somewhere in this world is seeing 

the same moon,

but I glower at that moon

and I raise my thumb and ruminate

about how I would crumple it like a bad idea 

or crack it like an egg and let the yolk run, 

spewing false shooting stars 

so people could wish on them and spend

their lives with the credence 

that their wish may actually come true. 

I kept looking up synonyms for words like "think" and "believe," trying to see if I could find words that had more negative connotations. The words themselves don't have to be "ugly" though...think about the images you use. The metaphors. The similes. Think particularly about the tone of your poem. As I wrote my poem, I strived to keep a spiteful tone.

Good luck!