Poetry Exercises from Kim Addonizio

Ahnnlee Lee, Under the palm tree, 2024. from n+1

 

poetry exercises from Kim Addonizio

1. Find a line by someone else and look for different nouns or adjectives beginning with the same letter as the line. Play with substitutions.
2. Write a poem for the end of something with "last" in the title. See "Last Poem" by Ted Berrigan.
3. Name a specific time or place in your title and then write a poem about it.
4. Write ten openings that begin in media res.
5. Write a poem to the future modeled on Brecht's "To Those Born Later" or Ruth Stone's "Look to the Future."
6. "Jot down a list of things you see around you and fall recklessly in love with all of them."
7. Make a list of 50 favorite words and write a poem with them. Then experiment with framing by adding in words from a cookbook or a how-to text.
8. Write a lyrical list poem like A. Van Jordan's "afterglow" which uses slashes to build pauses through a string of associations.
9. Anaphora is the repetition of an opening word or phrase. Write one that borrows "but" or "the bluest".
10. Write a poem that repeats the last word or phrase of a line in the beginning of the next line.
11. Article, adjective, noun: article, adjective, noun, verb, adverb.
12. Write an opening sentence. Now change period to comma and add "as if" or"because" or etc or although.

From best American poetry 2024

Of "Existential Elegy," Addonizio writes: "I have twenty-odd pages of drafts and notes for this piece. I'd given my students a writing prompt: find an interesting quotation and respond to the idea(s) in it. I'm always trying to think of ways to move them-and myself— beyond the anecdotal and into the multivalent, mysterious place where poetry lives. Browsing quotations from existentialist philosophers led me to de Beauvoir and Sartre. I reordered several lines, deep-sixed many sentimental statements about my cat, and struggled, as I often do, to figure out an ending. I thought about D. A. Powell's concept of elegies that refuse consolation, which is how the image highlighting de Beauvoir's grief at the loss of her longtime partner/lover/fellow philosopher migrated to the final line. Another of her quotes that spoke to me: 'Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.' I like the idea that poetry, too, perpetuates and surpasses itself and our existence."