Word Spiral

For the second part of the exercise I want to encourage you to consider the two pieces I’ve attached here: one prose, one poetry and notice how the authors use words, rhythm, description (or the lack of it), line breaks and punctuation and re-write your previous post using what you recognize as their style. If you wrote poetry and connect with the prose section, feel free to re-write your poetry in prose (or the other way around). The point here is to play with your own voice by mimicking someone else’s.

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excerpt from Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“When I came home from work with my arms full of the latest books and my mouth full of stories, sometimes there was food cooked, and sometimes there was not. Sometimes there was a poem, and sometimes there was not. And always, on weekends, there were the bars.

Early Saturday and Sunday mornings, Muriel and I wandered the streets of the Lower East Side and the more affluent West Village, scavenging the garbage heaps for treasures of old furniture, wonders that the unimaginative had discarded. We evaluated their future possibilities and dragged our finds back up six flights of stairs, to add them to the growing pile in the kitchen of things we were one day going to repair. There were wooden radio cabinets, gutted, that could be fitted with shelves for a fine record-holder. Old dresser drawers supplied stout wood for bookcase shelves, supported by scavenged bricks. There were brass lamps and rococo fixtures to be re-wired, and a magnificent old dentist’s chair with only one arm support missing. Occasionally we found something that needed no repair (my bed-lamp still sits on a Victorian lampstool that we dug out of a junkheap in Chelsea on our way home from the Grapevine one Sunday morning).

Ordering and re-ordering our world, Muriel and I sat up into the small hours reading the books I would sneak out of the cataloguing bins at the library, and eating pasta with margarine and oregano when we were poor. Other times we had wondrous meals concocted from our adventurous buys in Chinatown, together with a scrap of meat or a few chicken feet or a piece of fish or whatever we could afford and took a fancy to in the First Avenue Public Market. Around the corner from us, we did most of our food shopping there in the many stalls of busy hawkers.”

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The Eldership of Praise by David Whyte

Wordsworth’s body

was a slow turn

in a great river

feeling its own way

to a distant sea.

His child’s eyes

accustomed to loss

grew strong

in their aloneness,

taught him to feel

the terrible weight

and onward flow

of things

as joy.
His own blood

moved like that river

alive to the slow

inward turn of attention,

the soil

of the mountains

on their way

to the sea,

filling

the estuaries of his own

desire

branching

into the dark

invisible

workmanship of his first

belonging.

Our age

mistrusts his balance

demands, if not a saint,

a devil

to make our weakness

right.

He knew

his own doubt

and saw the dawn

in which he came alive

clouded by fear

but found

doubt’s door

led back

into the world,

and lived

to see it

flower

into a larger

sun.

Suckled in his outworn

creed

he saw a desert

but grew

larger with that thirst,

saw the dark

subterranean

stream of natural revelation

rising to the surface

and brought us

to the spring to drink.

We lived in those

islands

a thousand years

without

the eldership of praise

for what is hidden

in the woods

the water

the land and sky

until the long chant

of his song

began to move

our lips again.