Poetry prompt: Reclaiming language
Many years ago, beloved illustrator Floyd Cooper gave a keynote presentation at a conference I co-chaired. When we were planning his lunchtime talk, he wanted to know if he could possibly walk around the banquet hall instead of standing at a podium. Of course, we said, and made the arrangements.
During the event, he wove his way between tables as he spoke, a slow meander as though he simply enjoyed people and being surrounded by them. And although he rarely seemed to glance at his hands as he walked and talked, he held a flexible eraser that flew across some paper. I assumed that (like me) he thought better with something in hand and while moving.
Partway through his talk, he paused and held up his work in progress: the portrait of a child who seemed lit from within.
It was astonishing.
I was astonished by both his art and the metaphor of his art.
So many diverse voices and stories have been erased from history, and here was art created through erasure — instead of silencing, his work revealed and reclaimed a supposedly blank space.
In an earlier post, Padma Venkatraman offered a prompt to create a blackout poem using “a piece of prose that speaks out against hate or about surviving with hope and that is written by a BIPOC author.”
I love to use blackout poems as an introductory exercise in creative writing workshops because they show students that poems can be found anywhere, including in another’s words. There’s also a joyful creative energy that is generated by sitting together and striking out expanses of text; poetry is both physical and playful. Then when we share these poems, we realize how different our creations are, even when starting from the same extract of prose. Poetry is personal.
As a complementary exercise: compose either an erasure poem or a poem that repurposes homogenizing language. Just as Floyd Cooper used erasure to reveal in his art, writers can do the same with text. Like blackout poems, erasure poems have a found element, but the goal of this exercise is to cast a critical eye on the original text and to respond to its intent by reclaiming the language that is used.
Here are two examples:
(1) “‘Pages 1-4,’ an excerpt from The Ferguson Report: An Erasure” by Nicole Sealey
As Sealey describes on the linked page: “This poem is lifted from the Department of Justice’s 2015 report, which details bias policing and court practices in Ferguson, Missouri. While the official document serves as backdrop, a reminder of the context in which we live, the erasure is a lyric lamentation on police brutality.”
(2) from WHEREAS ["WHEREAS when offered..."] by Layli Long Soldier
WHEREAS was written in response to the Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans, a document in which the US Government acknowledges harm to Native Americans but offers no reparation. In fact, it ends with:
(b) Disclaimer.—Nothing in this Joint Resolution—
(1) authorizes or supports any claim against the United States; or
(2) serves as a settlement of any claim against the United States.
In this poem, Long Soldier uses the same legalistic language of the resolution to show that an apology is a personal, physical exchange, not an abstract text with no action. She goes on to consider the nature and physicality of language itself.
EXERCISE:
Take a legal document that marginalizes or minimizes a group’s experience. Either 1) erase the text until a personal experience remains, or 2) co-opt the language of the text to create something new. In either case, the poem should engage with the themes of the source text.
This exercise can incorporate texts studied in a History or Civics course and serve as an additional entry point for analysis.
ALTERNATIVE:
Instead of contradicting a legal text, build from a poetic text in a kind of “Yes, and” exercise. Take a short poem in which you recognize an aspect of your experience and incorporate it into a new one. For example in “American Sunrise,” poet Joy Harjo takes the classic poem “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks and expands upon it in sonnet form. The original poem is immediately recognizable in this homage, and while Harjo’s poem has thematic connections to the original, she also stretches the scope of the poem to encompass an entirely new experience. You do not have to use another poem in its entirety, but incorporate enough words and phrases that the original is recognizable in the new poem.
