Writing Prompt For January - By Jonathan Edwards

Writing Prompt: New Year’s Poem

January is grim! The weather’s foul, there’s nothing to look forward to, the joys of Christmas are over and the bills asking you to pay for it are in the post. The skies often threaten but usually never quite bring the joys of snow, and it feels like eleven months or a hundred years until anything fun will happen again. But January is also a time that brings opportunities: a time to reflect, to look forward and back, to think about what really matters in life, to be grateful, to find where you want to go and head there. And this is where poems can happen. Or, if you’re like me, can’t face the higher human qualities of reflection at all, and just walk round in a funk, occasionally wailing Ah! January! Woe!, you might find that poems come then too, as consolation and escape, as attempt to turn all that’s annoying into wonder. Here are some ideas to get you writing. Take that, January!

1 Poem for Looking Back

If you’re fool enough to make new year’s resolutions, select one and write a poem about a history of your experiences with it. So, if your resolution is to stop eating cake, pick three incidents from your life when you ate cake, and build the poem around these memories. Where were you when this happened? Who were you with? What was going on in your life? Why was this memory significant enough to be selected? And more importantly, tell us about the cake! The taste, the look, the smell. You can call the poem ‘A Brief History of Eating Cake.’ And of course, you can insert any other resolutions there: ‘A Brief History of Being Late for Things,’ ‘A Brief History of Staying Out All Night,’ ‘A Brief History of Phoning People Who Don’t Want Me To…’ The poem may help you keep the resolution or, to be honest, it may help you break it. But you’ll have a poem!

2 Poem for Looking Forward

Take one of your resolutions which is about doing something, and envisage yourself doing it across the next year. But, imagine yourself doing it to excess – push it to the edge of absurdity, then over. So, if you’ve resolved to go running more, imagine yourself in the Forrest Gump position where it takes over your life and you’re unable to stop. If you’ve resolved to go to dance class once a week, imagine yourself dancing all day, in the office, down the street, in church… If you’ve resolved to read more, let books fill your house so they spill from the windows and jam the door… You can title your poem ‘The Girl Who Couldn’t Stop Running,’ ‘The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Dancing’ etc. See where this idea takes you. Third person can work quite well for this exercise.

3 Poem for Going to a Party

If you just can’t stand the grimness of January, indulge yourself by writing a poem about a dream new year’s eve party. Go as bacchanalian as you want to: goldfish in the punchbowl, a glass piano, folks swinging from chandeliers, dream guests, entertainment programme, hell, even vol au vents… It’s your party and you can have anything you want to, so enjoy describing it. And hopefully, along the way, you’ll discover the poem’s second subject, the real reason you’re writing this…

4 Poem for Going for a Walk

The new year break has always been a good time to go for a walk: the ground is crisp, the world is gorgeous, and it’s a perfect opportunity to wear a bobble hat. So write a poem about going for a walk, and let the structure of the walk guide you as to what to write next. What do you see? Who are you with? How does it change you? Your walk could be in nature, and allow you to see hillsides, rivers, landscapes, beasties… Or it could be in the city. In 1900, there was even less on TV than there is now, which was the main reason Thomas Hardy went for a walk on new year’s eve. The result was his poem ‘The Darkling Thrush’ which, at present count, has lasted for 124 years. It’s a glorious celebration of how the joy and beauty of birdsong can smash through the despair of this time of year. You can read it here, then head out into the world and find your own darkling thrush! The Darkling Thrush | The Poetry Foundation

5 Poem for Writing a Letter

Write a letter from here and now, to another new year’s day: to yourself in the past, or yourself in the future. What would you say if you could? What would you advise or remember or imagine or miss or see, from this perspective? Or of course, you can flip this: write a letter to now from the past or the future.

6 Poem for Writing a Poem

The best resolutions are writing resolutions. Each day, I’ll do some automatic writing for ten minutes. Each month, I’ll complete one poem. Each month, I’ll read one poetry book by a writer I don’t know. One of my favourite poems about writing is Frank O’Hara’s ‘A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island,’ available here. Frank O'Hara.org - PoemsHave a look at it, then write a poem about a conversation with your writing spirit. Your writing spirit could be anything, drawn from the natural or animal or human world: a star, a hippo, a giraffe, Elvis Presley, Dorothy Parker… It’s your writing self and writing friend, the presence that shows up and breathes goosebumps down your neck when writing is going well, when it feels like something else has taken over. So write a poem which is a conversation with this spirit. Where are you when it appears? How does it get your attention? What does it say? How do you get on? Use the conversation to guide the poem, and include in it one writing promise to yourself, one resolution – whatever it is that you want to do with your writing. Making the resolution is the easy part. The next job is to keep it!