It's good to try out these writing exercises. For the children. Who are the future. Here's one called "Looking at Water."
1. Learn something about a body of water.
Okay, I should pick something that will increase my Nevadan cred. Perhaps a local lake? (Why is Wikipedia down tonight? Grr.)
Hmmmm..... "Lamoille Lake." It's a tarn... what's a tarn? Oh! How nice; a tarn is a lake or pool that forms in a hollow in the mountains. In this case, the Ruby Mountains. Sounds lovely already.
Facts, facts... okay, the lake has a lot to do with other natural and unnatural things also called Lamoille before joining part of the Humboldt River. It's also right by Dollar Lake.
"Lamoille" comes from Lamoille County, Vermont. It was originally la moutte, or "gull," but the story is that a mapmaker didn't cross the T's. The county has a Lamoille River, and on 1837 they also had 28,677 sheep. But anyway.
2. Include a reference to food preparation or a recipe
Mike has remembered his frozen maple sausages. (See last post for an account of how I was starving my only husband.) Maple is very Vermonty. The living room is also very Vermonty right now. Pew. In this spirit, maybe I'll abandon the western lake for the eastern river. Who needs credibility in Las Vegas anyway?
3. Include a reference to a piece of literature
Well, you know who liked lakes. And maybe rivers. Wordsworth. Let's find a poem by Wordsworth that I haven't read yet. (This will be easy if he's written more than five.)
Here we go: The Reverie of Poor Susan. (Damnit - I no longer have JSTOR access. What did bother Charles Lamb about Poor Susan?)
4. Start a line with the exclamation "O"
5. Include a dream fragment
O, this is going to suck. {wavy lines}
Okay, I'm giving myself a 600-second limit and it will be in the form of a cinquain. No, not just a cinquain, but a cinquain-cinquain!
See, there are two poetry forms called "cinquain." (Not really that unusual a coincidence when you consider that any five-line stanza is called a cinquain, just as four-liners are quatrains and three-liners are tercets and so forth.) In one form, the poem is five lines and usually in ABABB scheme. In the other form, inspired by the Japanese and containing only 22 syllables, the syllables are divided by line as such: 2-4-6-8-2. The latter style of cinquain doesn't rhyme, but we'll break that rule in order to create a cinquain-cinquain with ABABB and the aforementioned syllabic scheme.
Good. Now we have lots of rules, allowing me to lamely blame the format when it all goes south. 600 seconds starting.... now!
O gulls
We are maple-blind
beneath the eye's sheep, lulled
by the rush of the river-line
- moonshined.
Hrm. Not really a good exercise for the kids, especially with the last-minute requirements, and it didn't end up to do with looking at water (per the title of the exercise), but I think I got everything else in.
Here's a splendid photo of the real Lamoille River. Now if I ever go - and it looks like I should - I can be all, oh yeah, I wrote a little poem about that once.
(Disclosure: I got a extra time because somebody was belting out Lesley Gore songs from the bathroom.)
Update: I see I poked an extra syllable into the second line. Oops.
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