Read the poetry available at the hyperlinks below. Then, after reading the directions that follow, write your own poem.
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“To write a poem like [‘Crazy Jane on the Day of Judgment’], you might start by thinking of some characters (human or not). The characters could be invented by you or by someone else. They could be from the movies, from a fairy tale, from a comic strip or a myth. If you write a dialogue poem, you can, like Yeats, make one character great and powerful and the other rather ordinary or helpless. Your made-up person might talk to the wind or to a mountain or the sky or George Washington or Napoleon. Let the conversation be about something everybody is always wondering about--like beauty, love, friendship, death--but try making it a strange and unlikely conversation. If you like, let the characters bring in impossible and fantastic ideas--the idea that time is gone, that space is gone, that time goes backward, that all people are one person, that animals rule people, that the sun makes it dark, and so on. Remember, you don’t have to understand why your characters say what they say, and you don’t have to agree with them. A refrain, like the repeated lines ‘And that is what Jane said’ and ‘”That’s certainly the case,” said he,’ may be inspiring to use. You might like to include, as Yeats does, one or more of the characters’ names in your title.
“You could also write a fantastic fairy tale-like poem, like ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus.’ Don’t think of making it mean something; rather, think of making it as mysterious as Yeats’ poem is. Put in colorful and strange and impossible details. However strange your poem is, it will probably reflect your feelings and concerns in one way or another, as even your craziest dreams do.”
--from the William Butler Yeats chapter of Kenneth Koch and Kate Farrell’s Sleeping on the Wing (Vintage, 1981).
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