| Write about a group of your friends (yourself
included if you wish) or any other group of people you know, or
about a group of people that you don't know but imagine.
Try writing in very long lines. Make each line a certain
scene in these people's lives-- a scene typical more of the way
they all act than of how just one of them acts-- on the street,
in a living room, on a bridge, in a vacant lot, in a car, in a
drugstore, at the movies, at a party, in a classroom, at a
dance.
It may help if you exaggerate everything these people do
together and completely leave out the lives they live separately.
Give names of streets, towns, hangouts, everything, crowding
into every line many details of the scene. However
inconsequential the things they do may seem at certain times,
you might try making the poem heroic as if everything they do
were part of some pilgrimage, some mission.
Don't worry about punctuation or connections or making
perfect sense; more important is the excitement, the putting
together of great lines of vivid, harsh, particular details.
(Koch 238) |