Who’s OK Here?
“The nail that sticks
out gets hammered in.” –Japanese saying
Soft-spoken
with sleepy eyes
slurping noodles and soup
talking movies and music for a miserable year.
Cooped up inside their rooms and inside their heads—
heads as thick as an astronaut’s helmet.
Three holes in the wall—the size of fists.
“To hell with it. I don’t like it and I don’t do well,”
he said with the intensity of a hungry college freshman.
(From “Shutting Themselves In” by Maggie Jones, The New York Times, January 15, 2006)
Wow! i love reading this and would love to know more about your process.
ReplyDeleteThanks Lacy! The idea/ subject for the poem came out of the Murray cards activity and I was reminded of an article I had read about Japanese shut-ins. I first tried freely writing what came to mind but didn't like the result. I am reading through this book, "Getting the Knack: 20 Poetry Writing Exercises" by Dunning and Stafford and the first exercise was found and headline poems.
ReplyDeleteI decided to try making a found poem from the article. I went back to the article and found the article online and wrote down about 100 words that really interested me. Then I cut the number of words in half. Then I started rearranging them into a poem-like shape, reading aloud often as I went. It was a lot of fun!