Poetry: Day 6

Today’s prompt (optional, as always) is a variation on a teaching exercise that the poet Anne Boyer uses with students studying the work of Emily Dickinson. As you may know, although Dickinson is now considered one of the most original and finest poets the United States has produced, she was not recognized in her own time. One reason her poems took a while to gain a favorable reception is their slippery, dash-filled lines. Those dashes baffled her readers so much that the 1924 edition of her complete poems replaced some with commas, and did away with others completely. Today’s exercise asks you to do something similar, but in the interests of creativity, rather than ill-conceived “correction.” Find an Emily Dickinson poem – preferably one you’ve never previously read – and take out all the dashes and line breaks. Make it just one big block of prose. Now, rebreak the lines. Add words where you want. Take out some words. Make your own poem out of it! (Not sure where to find some Dickinson poems? Here’s 59 Dickinson poems to select from).

Adapted from "A Bird, came down the Walk" by Emily Dickinson

A little robin bird, flew down, came down,
the walk he did not know I saw him alight on the earth.
He bit an angle worm in halves and ate the fellow raw,
and then he drank a dew from a convenient grass.
Soon he hopped sidewise to the wall to let a beetle pass,
he glanced with rapid eyes that spied all abroad
they looked like frightened beads, scanning, seeking.
I thought he stirred his velvet head like one in danger
Cautious, I offered him a crumb of biscuit and he,
unfurled his feathers and took wing, gliding him softly
home to his wife and babes.