ManicDDaily

Iron Pan

18 days of draft poems!

I have to confess that it was hard today to come up with something to write about.  My mind felt blank;  anything I did come up with seemed too personal for a blog post.  (It’s one thing to be personal in a finished poem;  another to be overly personal in a draft.) Finally, I bugged my husband for a topic;  in the middle of cooking, he came up with “iron frying pan.”   Although this seemed a promising starting point, my blank mind had a hard time fitting words around it until I decided to try my own advice from prior posts, and turn to a traditional poetic form, a sonnet.

The sonnet is one of my favorite forms:  the interlocking lines lead you through the poem, which, because it is only fourteen lines, thankfully, can’t, go on too long.  I heartily recommend trying one!

A couple of hints:  it is useful to number your lines (in the margins) after you get to the 8th or 9th, as it is amazingly easy to lose track of where you are.   Also, I find it easier to write sonnets in a notebook by hand, than on the computer.   Nearly every time I begin to run out of steam, I re-copy what I’ve done up to that point; sometimes tearing out my prior page so I can see it better.  The re-copying allows me to refresh my momentum, and also to clarify where the poem is going, or stuck.   Weirdly enough, it seems  easier to cut out whole lines and phrases when you are writing by hand and re-copying than when you are on the computer.   It is much easier to give undeserved authority to words in typeface than to barely legible scribbles.

Anyway, here’s the draft of the day:

Second Marriage

He’s the kind of guy who carefully seasons
an iron skillet, oiling the surface,
eschewing soap.  I know all the reasons,
understand rust, stickiness, nonetheless,
I squeeze Dawn right onto the blackness,
and when I smell that low-heated oil, I
rebel.  “Are you,” I charge (nearly senseless),
“seasoning my frying pan?” As if to try
traditional method, some slow process
of caretaking, is intended to defy,
deny, descry, the rushed independence
I’ve professed, those hurry-up lone years I
scraped so many sharp implements across,
getting rid of the hard bits, loss and loss.

This entry was posted on April 18, 2010 at 10:05 pm and is filed under poetry, writing exercises. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

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