Excuses
I had my first Free Verse class today. As an excercise to get us going, the professor had us all choose a number, and he assigned us a type of poem to write in a 15 minute block, based on the number we chose. So of course he tells me "Miss Picard, I'd like you to write a poem of excuses." A grad student got the same assignment, and wrote a Playboy version of a Shell Silversteinesque piece about "I couldn't drive my car/ It was much too new/ I couldn't come out at all/ My fingers turned blue. I'm sorry that I just can't go/ Last night I did a lot of blow..." etc... The prof assured us that we didn't HAVE to share necessarily. But the class got quiet and that grad student volunteered his juvenile mockery of the assigment, so then the prof goes: "Who else had the excuses assigment? Anyone do this a little more on the somber side?" And I had to read it. And of course it was about him, and of course I shook the whole time, reading about the last ten months of my life with Nat, in front of total strangers. It was actually really good for something written in fifteen minutes as a warm up. But I almost lost it in class. The professor liked it. He even made me read it again. Yikes - that was rough today. Rougher than being in class from 9:30 in the morning to 8 pm with a one hour break all day long.
So I guess if nothing else, thank you for giving me fuel for my writing this semester. It might be all dark for awhile, but at least I'm turning to it again as an outlet. And how many people walked into that poetry workshop with really raw, painful material to turn into an inpromptu assignment about excuses? Exactly.
So I guess if nothing else, thank you for giving me fuel for my writing this semester. It might be all dark for awhile, but at least I'm turning to it again as an outlet. And how many people walked into that poetry workshop with really raw, painful material to turn into an inpromptu assignment about excuses? Exactly.