Any fellow writers out there?
That might like an exercise to get the juices flowing? Here's one I like.
EIGHT
Pick a fiction book from your shelf.
Go to page eight and find the eighth sentence on the page.
Start with that sentence and write an eight-line poem that connects in some way to your work-in-progress or work you’d like to begin.
For instance, write from the POV of a character, or set the poem in a story setting. Don't worry about poetry forms. Just write eight lines of any length that flow and explore some aspect of character, setting, or theme.
Okay I just did it. I used Barry Hannah’s “Long, Last, Happy”
The sentence: “Finally, it drove me crazy, and I came out to Farte Cove to rest, under the pretense of a fishing week with my chum Wyatt.”
I jotted this down in about 2 minutes so I wouldn't over think it. So here goes. It's from the novel "My Life as a Rat" by Joyce Carol Oates.
“Turning his eyes from her, the bloated white belly, flaccid thighs, breast like a cow’s udders.”
Can’t escape the indelible image
I cringe at the thought
Maybe return to the Motherland
Get drunk and forget it all
No patience for fatherhood
It’s not my fault
But possibly my flaw
Lost in the path of what might have been…but isn’t
From Pamela Lu’s Ambient Parking Lot
“We found ourselves standing in a mini-mall amidst a crowd of blasé evening shoppers, mere blocks away from the park”(8).
The potential for nothing or trouble is always present.
It’s not more sleep that I need but rest—real rest.
The kind that happens in an afternoon nap—guiltless.
The music I make will never be heard.
That was never the point.
Cannot continue because the women I have been writing about have changed so much that it is hard to know where to restart or begin again.
Patsy is dead. Maria has possibly become more destructive in some sense as she seems to have nothing to lose.
I do not want her to die—the suicide thing could change—and I could focus more on aging.