Describe Your Surroundings – Black Barrel

Creative nonfiction has always been my primary lane. I say primary because I have, on occasion, done different things. I won my first writing competition in the 5^th grade. It was a Red Ribbon Week essay detailing my amazing 10-year-old insight into the dangers of illicit drugs and my philosophy on how to avoid them. It was revolutionary for its time. Really.

Not surprisingly, my hormones turned me to poetry. I still have stacks of yellowed typewriter paper (because that’s how old I am) that I have attempted to go through to see if there is anything salvable. I can’t do it. It is just that bad. Of course, I have only tried to do it sober, so maybe I am gonna need a little help. Really, it’s horrible and there’s a lot of it.

Poetry, with the exception of this small little tryst in my teenaged years, has never been my thing. I don’t read it (which is probably why I couldn’t write it), and I’ve never really “gotten” it. I had the good fortune last semester to have an amazing professor for American Lit. Dr. Town did two things that, although I didn’t know it then, has set me up to be a better writer and a more interested reader of poetry:

• She was okay with the fact that I didn’t like it. She just needed me to engage with it enough to ask an intelligent question.
• She didn’t insist that poems meant anything in particular. We were free and encouraged to find our own meaning in them provided we could provide intelligent support for our interpretation.

Once the class was over, I still wasn’t a poetry fan, but I wasn’t an eye roller anymore either. That’s definite progress.

Good thing too. Although our first writing assignment lent itself easily to prose, that’s the last time we have seen that style in class. Poetry is first, then fiction, then creative nonfiction. This means, as one would expect, I have read more poetry than I would have opted for myself, and I have to write it. And by “write it” I mean I have to turn it in with the knowledge that it may very well end up projected to the whiteboard in the front of the class.

Great.

Fortunately, Dr. Morris is a poet. This has been immeasurably helpful for a few reasons:

• He is super passionate – I mean like really passionate – about it and that makes it far more interesting than it typically would have been.
• Remember the “freedom to play, to suck, to expand, to nurture one small idea into something readable”? He employs that belief in poetry too.
• And probably most importantly (to me at least) is that he taught me how to read poetry.

Ok, that last one may seem like a silly no brainer. I have a pretty extensive vocabulary. I know how to read. It is one of my favorite things to do. Reading poetry is easy – it’s the understanding that is hard.

Except when you are reading it wrong. I thought for my whole reading life that you just read it. Start at the front of the line, go to the end of the line, stop, go to the next line, rinse, and repeat. I had NO IDEA what a caesura or an enjambment was. I didn’t know that you read to punctuation not necessarily to the line’s end. I did not know that poetry readings weren’t just some weird beatnik thing, that it actually did need to be heard out loud, that sound is inseparable from the meaning. It all kind of came together and created an epiphany when I read W.H. Auden’s quote, “Poetry is memorable speech.”

I am not ready to create “memorable speech” yet. But I am far more open to reading it now. I am creating assignment speech. I offer my first assignment to you just the way I turned it in.

Write a poem (minimum fourteen lines) about your surroundings. You can write in first person (“I am sitting at my desk, which is littered with papers and old coffee cups.”), or write in third person, simply describing what you see (“The room is bleak and empty except for one old wooden chair.”). Challenge yourself to use descriptive language to set the scene. Rather than saying, “The light is shining through the window,” you might say, “The morning sun is streaming through the window, spotlighting a million dancing dust particles and creating mottled shadows on my desk.”

You want to write intriguing descriptions that invite the reader into the setting so they can “see, hear, smell, taste, feel” what you observe.

 Black Barrel
  
 Oaky smoke
 Cherry chill
 In my chest
 Burns it still
  
 Honey warm 
 Invites me in
 Fills my cup
 Described as sin
  
 Buttery smooth
 Leaves lips wet
 Entwined like strangers
 Or lovers just met
  
 Dew drips
 Sweat slides
 Whispered secrets
 To glass confides
  
 Fingerprints
 Destructive heat
 Tucked away
 Till next we meet