Urban Color Challenge
Speaking of color, there’s a great article on color in Poetry by Dorothea Lasky. Here’s an excerpt:
“Color is not simply a decorative element in a poem. Color creates an expanse; a field, a shared formal field, with which to plant more shared components of the material imagination, a poem. Color makes this space bigger, this imaginative space more specific and bigger, gives it weight, makes it solid.”
And here's a prompt I came up with!
Urban Color Challenge
1. List three or four of your favorite colors
2. Chose two of those colors and list as many shades of that color you can think of (Google search also permitted). Navy blue, sky blue, cornflower, etc.
3. End up with at least 8 colors total (for instance shades of blue, five of yellow, however it shakes out)
4. Choose 1-2 of those colors to describe in detail – write at least 3-4 sentences about each color. You can be as metaphorical or concrete as you want.
5. Now you have 8 shades of color, two described in detail. This is your palette!
6. Use this palette to write a paragraph, or a poem or a fragment of a poem, or a diary entry by a 19th century soldier – the choice is yours!
7. Your writing can NOT refer to birds, flowers, any plants, animals, planets, or dirt.
Let me know how it goes.
In other news, I’ve been memorizing the poem Evening by Dorianne Laux. The newsletter I subscribe to (and highly recommend) Two Sylvias Weekly Muse had a story a while back about choosing a poem for the month, to read every day. In February I chose “Evening”. I read it every day for about three weeks and then stopped. I recently returned to it and there is so much to unwrap and love in this poem. Here’s the beginning:
Evening
Moonlight pours down
without mercy, no matter
how many lives have perished
beneath the trees.
It’s not just my poem for the month of February, it’s my poem for 2023. Thank you Dorianne.