Draft of the Week

24º and still no sign of snowy clouds

My earlier prediction of getting some word work done came true! Woo hoo! My goal during my teaching months is to draft one new poem a week. In 16 weeks, I hope to have 10- 12 poems ... knowing that some weeks things won't work out or that the draft will ultimately fail, which is fine b/c I'm still showing up ... still playing with the language.

Today I returned to something I posted about last fall: the word bank and the random number generator. I started by beginning to read Beth Bachmann's Temper, which I'll post about later, but then I really wanted to write. After casting about for a time, I knew I needed a springboard to launch myself back into the writing mode. I flipped back to the beginning of Bachmann's book and randomly picked nouns, verbs, and adjectives that called to me, making lists of words in my journal. Then, I numbered the words (1 - 51 today) and used the random number generator at random.org to form pairs of words. Once I had about 10 pairs, I already saw several lines forming. Eventually, I drafted a 15-line poem in 3 stanzas of 5 lines each. This is a bit unusual for me, since I normally draft in couplets or tercets. Also a bit unusual is that this is a character poem about a woman I just made up in my head based on several lines the random number generator suggested. Cool. I have no idea if it will survive, but the draft is called "Having Been Entrusted with Safekeeping."