Not much happened between school and my writing class. I managed to escape the rain. A button came loose from my coat. The lamb meatballs and black lentil salad tasted delicious.
I felt kid like excitement to be in the writing class.
For the warm up the teacher gave us a list of seventy five nouns e.g. tears, helplessness, smile, devotion, joy, loss, greed, listener etc. We had to choose five. Then we had to think of adjectives that would be opposite to the usual ones you would use with the nouns.
My pairs:
cold smile
restless joy
meaningless knowledge
light sadness
boring award
The next step was to choose one pair and see where the writing would take us. I enjoyed this exercise and thought it might be something to share with you.
1.
Disclaimer: the "he" in the writing is nobody specific, I made the person up
meaningless knowledge
he knows
the exact distance between Moscow and Beijing
the circumference of Mars
Ohm's law
he can name
the number of steps in the old town hall tower
the price of gasoline
all the capitals in Europe
he remembers
the date Gagarin was born
the names of hobbits
sixteen literary quotes
he doesn't know how to make soup
he can't find his tie nor socks
he forgot to bring flowers to his mom
and
he doesn't dare to say "I love you."
2.
Cold smile
six years of brecets
soda wash and whitening
Colgate and floss
behind the shiny fangs
a sharp tongue
is ready to sting
I adore the way you took these oddly paired words and turned them into poems. The COLD SMILE one was the one I had hoped to see as a poem... and there it was!
ReplyDeleteI like this activity. What a great way to start a writing workshop to get the writing juices flowing.
ReplyDeleteVery creative. The process is interesting. Thanks for sharing.
ReplyDeleteThis sounds like a great class! I wish that I could join you!
ReplyDeleteI want to try this - pairing up oddly paired words together and creating a poem. You did this so skillfully!
Exercises like that can bring out writing we didn’t know we could do. Good work!!
ReplyDeletewhat a wonderful writing exercise, and I loved what you did with "meaningless knowledge." My mother had a store of what she and we jokingly called "useless information" -- and when she came up with an explanation for why, say, the cat had behaved in a particularly weird way, we would often ask, "is that true, or did you just make that up?"
ReplyDeleteKid like excitement - what a great description for your writing class. And you had fun with words!
ReplyDelete