I've been given an assignment. The goal is to write a poem. The theme is "disasters". I suppose this could entail many things. Actual historical disasters like the Titanic and personal tragedies are up for grabs, but so are less dramatic things, like fashion disasters. Or the Monster Omelet sandwich. I can write about bad decisions I've made, injuries that have befallen me or my loved ones, car crashes, break-ups, missed opportunities, terrorist attacks, deaths. The world is my oyster.
As I write to this subject, the first lines that appear are:
I was shooting with my father, we were wearing
Heavy winter coats and I could see his breath
Climbing up the gray fire of the sky
It was just target shooting, there’s not much else
Inside this memory but gray fire, permafrost
And a target I never hit.
These words appear in my mind effortlessly, and stop abruptly. Poems are such teases. Now comes the hard part of continuing the initial image and developing the narrative of the poem. Before, I would have strained to try and figure out what "happens" next. This time, however, the approach I'm going to take is a more linguistic one: What are the connotations of these words that I've chosen? What am I trying to say here that's outside of the poem's setting? Obviously it has daddy issues,possible impotence implications, but other than that, why did these words appear first under a topic heading of "disasters"?
From here the poem needs to take some surrealist leaps in imagery, breaking free of the setting ("gray fire"). Nobody cares what happens after this. The father and son see a deer, the father shoots the deer, whatever. Instead of following the characters, let's follow the author for a little bit. I'm kidding about the impotence by the way.
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