Exercise #3: Supposing   

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1. Pass out 35 blank cards to each "player."

 

2. Have each person put "concrete nouns" on the first ten, each word with a strong B, D, G, K, P, or T sound (called the mutes, and said by many people, including Mary Oliver, to be the strongest sounds in the language, especially for poetry).

 

3. Shuffle these cards and deal out four to yourself, leaving the blank cards aside.

 

4. For each of these four words, come up with three words that "alliterate" with it, either for the first letter or for other strong letters (for "strum," for instance, one might add three cards with "middle," "song" and "strike"). The only hint here would be to keep the words as physically or concrete based as possible. At this point, you will have 22 cards.

 

5. Now, add five active, interesting verbs from your blank cards. You will then have 27 word cards.

 

6. Shuffle all the cards-with-words on them again, and draw out four more, adding two "half-rhymes" for each (half-rhymes being words that almost rhyme, but not quite--such as "leaf" having some of the sound of "life," but not all; they can add a subtle new texture to poems, without the reader being so blatantly made aware of it, as with full rhyme).

 

This should give you a deck of 35 words, each with at least a certain amount of sound potential in relationship to the other words.

 

 

Model poem for working with “supposing” and playful language:

 

 SUPPOSE YOUR FATHER WAS A REDBIRD

 

Suppose his body was the meticulous layering

Of graduated down which you studied early,

Rows of feathers increasing in size to the hard-splayed

Wine-gloss tips of his outer edges.

 

Suppose, before you could speak, you watched

The slow spread of his wing over and over,

The appearance of that invisible appendage,

The unfolding transformation of his body to the airborne.

And you followed his departure again and again,

Learning to distinguish the red microbe of his being

Far into the line of the horizon.

Then today you might be the only one able to see

The breast of a single red bloom

Five miles away across an open field.

The modification of your eye might have enabled you

To spot a red moth hanging on an oak branch

In the exact center of the Aurorean Forest.

And you could define for us, "hearing red in the air,"

As you predict the day pollen from the poppy

Will blow in from the valley.

 

Naturally you would picture your faith arranged

In filamented principles moving from pink

To crimson at the final quill. And the red tremble

Of your dream you might explain as the shimmer

Of his back lost over the sea at dawn.

Your sudden visions you might interpret as the uncreasing

Of heaven, the bones of the sky spread,

The conceptualized wing of the mind untangling.

 

Imagine the intensity of your revelation

The night the entire body of a star turns red

And you watch it as it rushes in flames

Across the black, down into the hills.

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If your father was a redbird,

Then you would be obligated to try to understand

What it is you recognize in the sun

As you study it again this evening

 

Pulling itself and the sky in dark red

Over the edge of the earth.                

-Pattiann Rogers, from FIRE KEEPER

 

 

STUDENT EXAMPLES—from Jill Grubb’s 10th grade English/Mt. Gilead, Ohio:

                       

Suppose sleepy sunsets were sheets of silk

Suppose gallantly green gardens were swallowed

in darkness   (Amber)

                                     

Suppose Christmas presents hung from pillows

Suppose the pinnacle of the beaming lamp ran away

Suppose the laugh of water could be heard all over    (Bethany)

                                     

Suppose stampedes were clumsy

Suppose laughter had a temper    (Nate)

                                     

Suppose a distant daylight dawned inside your brain    (Brian)

                                     

Suppose you were a catdog and romped in the grass

You looking dark and flubbery   (Heather)

                                     

Suppose all the stones were trees and all the trees

  were stone as the water is cement and the bus is a camel

Turn fur into dogs or a dock into a giant bomb exploding

  with a boom and a laugh, and every lock in the world was free   (Corky)

                                     

Suppose everything you say rhymes with shoelace and whim

Suppose kings opened doors for others    (Brenna)

                                     

Suppose you could look through the dark

and see the dog making its dreadful journey

Suppose you couldn't laugh or see beauty     (Rachel)

                              

Suppose your goal was to become a board    (Shelby)

                                   

Suppose making was in the midst     (Ben V)

                                     

Suppose the ground sizzled the damp of the room    (Jenny)

                                   

Suppose a sweater poked like a nail

Suppose flubber    (Lauren)