Office Duties

“Good morning”

“Good Morning”

“How was your weekend? Do anything exciting?”

“I bought a new vacuum cleaner.”

“I went to see a horror movie.”

“How are you really?”

“Fine, how are you?”

“How am I? I’ve been in a rather depressive state for about two months now, but I’m coming out of it.”

“Oh.”

“This time next year I’d like to be in the Bahamas.”

“I’d like to finally be accepted by Master Charge.”

“Do you think we’ll keep our sanity?”

“I don’t know. How do people do it?”

“My dear, I sit beside you everyday.”

“Will that be of some consequence?”

“I’ll never see you again after I leave here.”

Okay, now your turn! Write a dialogue poem and share on this blog.

This is a challenge that was presented yesterday at the open reading at The Leslie Jean Porter Gallery by fellow poet Dixie Kanold. Write a two word poem. Please share. Here’s mine: Existing scrumptious.

Exercise from The Creative Process by Carol Burke and Molly Best Tinsley. (This was the textbook I used in my creative writing class at Cathedral City High School). copyright 1993

The Found Poem

“Look through ads, travel brochures, textbooks, the daily paper, and tabloids for a short passage (a few sentences) that might be interpreted in more than one way or that has a few interesting words you might play with. Experiment with line breaks, noticing that as you break a piece of prose into lines you create emphasis, with the greatest emphasis resting automatically on the word at the end of a line.

Notice the obvious linguistic playfulness in this student’s found poem based on a professor’s introductory comments fro an engineering course syllabus:

To the Stud

ent: You are a

bout to ex (a)

mine material

that will cap

tivate

and en

gross you.

Take time

to gr

asp the id

eas and con

cepts.

Make a D

et er

mine D

eFFort.

After all the class

revolves around

just three

fun

dam

mentals:

energy,

entropy,

and proper

ties.

Brett Howe”

Let’s try one and share!

Do you often wonder where your line breaks should be? What about how to punctuate your poem, if you punctuate at all. Share with me your concerns and insights.