Creative Writing Exercises

1.) Make a list of 10 or 15 images and anecdotes. These things can be—or should be—as disparate as possible. Image of a flower and a newspaper story about a drowning and a memory of your sister—whatever. Your job is to write a poem that, meditatively, connects all of these things together into a continuous, sinuous utterance. My poems "Reading Plate" and "Riffing" are examples of this. The idea here is to construct the lyrical needle and thread which will allow you to sew together many things which don't necessarily go together. You're writing a monologue in which the conscious and subconscious come together somehow.

2.) This will be an exercise in concision. You have to write a self-portrait in 14 lines. Having to represent yourself within the sonnet's tight space will be a challenge: you'll have to really pare down. You can write a poem in which you deal with one specific anecdote that exemplifies your sense of your "self"—an anecdote that's a memory or an experience that only you would know how to describe. Or you can write a poem which catalogues a set of things you love, so that each line becomes a kind of non-sequitur that delineates one particularity about you. So there are two ways of writing the poem: the tightly narrative way, or the more impressionistic and meditative way. But it has to be done within 14 lines.