Happy Thanksgiving!
So I’ve started to think of my poems as living beings. And I’ve been wondering about what happens to them before they were written on loose leaf. Because of Christy, I’ve noticed that almost all of my poems have characters in them. I believe that characters have lives before and after their story is told, and I think it would be interesting to write about what a character in your poem, or what your poem itself, did before you put pen to paper.
For my poem “Dear Brother” I believe that before the poem was written the sister and brother were watching their mother’s favorite movie. And having their mother’s favorite breakfast before visiting her grave.
Well that’s my example. I haven’t gotten a poem out of it yet, but if you get a poem out of wondering stuff like this then awesome! If you want to share then please do!
Hi Diego!
I think this an interesting concept–wondering what your “characters” were doing before they were in a poem. Now that I think about it, it would be interesting to narrate our speaker’s lives–but isn’t that fiction? I don’t know, but I think this is a really cool concept. Now I’m thinking about it in a chapbooky way–you could write a poem about a specific moment (different ages) in your “character’s” lives, stringing them together. That could be really cool if you did that with the brother-sister poem–having different interactions between them at different ages. Just an idea!
Arianna