The New Name of My Memoir is: The Cat From Outer Space

March 25, 2008

So I gave my Creative Writing class some more poetry prompts (for the 2nd leg of the poetry section) today. One of the prompts is a “list poem.”

I’m really a big fan of lists in writing–no matter the genre– the cataloging of things– Aaron Hamburger uses lists in creative ways in his book Faith For Beginners.

The prompt goes like this:

List Poems

Some poems are organized around a central idea: things of the same a color, about which you have the same feeling, or things that go under the same label. Here are some examples for you to copy. Think of things in your favorite color, things which scare you or which you love, or humorous groupings like excuses you have heard or annoying things about little brothers.

One of the most famous examples being Rupert Brooke’s poem, “The Great Lover” (here’s an excerpt):

These I have loved:
White plates and cups, clean-gleaming,
Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust;
Wet roofs, beneath the lamp-light; the strong crust
Of friendly bread; and many-tasting food;
Rainbows; and the blue bitter smoke of wood;
And radiant raindrops couching in cool flowers;
And flowers themselves, that sway through sunny hours,
Dreaming of moths that drink them under the moon;
Then, the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon
Smooth away trouble; and the rough male kiss
Of blankets; grainy wood; live hair that is
Shining and free; blue-massing clouds; the keen
Unpassioned beauty of a great machine;
The benison of hot water; furs to touch;
The good smell of old clothes; and other such –
The comfortable smell of friendly fingers,
Hair’s fragrance, and the musty reek that lingers
About dead leaves and last year’s ferns….
Dear names,
And thousand other throng to me! Royal flames;
Sweet water’s dimpling laugh from tap or spring;
Holes in the ground; and voices that do sing;
Voices in laughter, too; and body’s pain,
Soon turned to peace; and the deep-panting train;
Firm sands; the little dulling edge of foam
That browns and dwindles as the wave goes home;
And washen stones, gay for an hour; the cold
Graveness of iron; moist black earthen mould;
Sleep; and high places; footprints in the dew;
And oaks; and brown horse-chestnuts, glossy-new;
And new-peeled sticks; and shining pools on grass; –
All these have been my loves. And these shall pass,
Whatever passes not, in the great hour,
Nor all my passion, all my prayers, have power
To hold them with me through the gate of Death.
They’ll play deserter, turn with the traitor breath,
Break the high bond we made, and sell Love’s trust
And sacramented covenant to the dust.
—- Oh, never a doubt but, somewhere, I shall wake,
And give what’s left of love again, and make
New friends, now strangers….
But the best I’ve known,
Stays here, and changes, breaks, grows old, is blown
About the winds of the world, and fades from brains
Of living men, and dies.
Nothing remains.
O dear my loves, O faithless, once again
This one last gift I give: that after men
Shall know, and later lovers, far-removed,
Praise you, “All these were lovely”; say, “He loved.”

Rupert Brooke, Mataiea, 1914

Lists, though, can be daunting, so I tried to get them to have some fun with it at first.

I put up on the board: write a list of thing– books, movies, songs, video games, foods, that are your favorite– that you love.

Then I put on the board just a few of mine:

The Cat From Outer Space

Escape From Witch Mountain

The Poseidon Adventure

The Breakfast Club

–I only put those 4 up (we didn’t have a lot of time), though I certainly could have put up about 500 more. But I asked the students to take a look at their own list, what they had so far. What does it say about them? What themes/motifs run through the list?

What themes/motifs run through MY list?

We came up with these:

The Cat From Outer Space — alien, out of place, looking for home (not that anyone knew this movie–so I said it was kind of like E.T. and then they got it).
Escape From Witch Mountain– outsider, out of place, feeling different, having magical powers (only a few more had heard of this movie)
The Poseidon Adventure– chaos, world turned upside down, disaster (ditto for this one, very few had heard of it, except for the crappy remake from a year or so ago)

The Breakfast Club– (I always related to the geek character; everyone in the class had heard of or seen this movie) geeky, out of place, outsider, high school.

So basically my short list reflects my feelings of being different, an outsider, my fish out of water childhood, the chaos of my early years, and that I was pretty much a geek.

Nice. It would make for a pretty angsty poem…