All entries for Wednesday 14 January 2009

Beyond the Blowfish

This poem was a homework from Peter Blegvad, and it had to be written using these rules/constraints:

1. The poem can be of any length, but each line must contain only ten syllables.

2. Each line must contain one of the words Peter read out when we were doing the free-writing exercise in class: blowfish, cuddle, detonate, Cyprus, destiny, anti-semitism, couch, beyond, convulsive, car, bass, demi-god, convex, Alaska, cypher. A word can be repeated or not used at all.

3. The first word of all the lines save the last one must be I, you, he, she, we, or they.

There was also another rule which was that the poem should contain one or several of the phrases that we underlined in our free-writing exercise, but I forgot about this one, as did everyone else, so this will just have to do for now, and maybe I'll write another version later.

Beyond the Blowfish.

I gingerly prod deflated blowfish —

We wait for the moment — damp — detonate!

We see convulsive inflations — small fish —

I, the demi-god, cannot understand:

We say, why did the bass fish not go bang?

*

I cast the blowfish onto the old couch:

We see our destiny in Alaska.

We climb into the car — convex — bent — squash…

The blowfish twitches out its life — gone now.

Sarah Cuming : 14 Jan 2009 19:10 |  Tags: Creative Writing Creative Writing Class Poetry |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem