NaPoWriMo Day 6: Competing Desires

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Table of Contents

• Freewrite

• Poem: “Want” by Joan Larkin

• Prompt

Freewrite

With this freewrite, as well as all freewrites, do not put any pressure on yourself to be good. You are simply getting thoughts on the page. You can write in poetry or in prose, but feel free to write poorly, sloppily, redundantly, and with cliches. Now is the time for ideas—we will eventually sculpt those ideas into art.

First, generate a list of unmet wants or needs. Anything that seems absent in your life right now, or that you aspire towards.

Generate that list for 3-5 minutes.

Second, make a list of people, systems, or concepts you’re in conflict with. Anything with agency whose wants are different from yours. General examples could be family members, partners, your community, the place you live in, or even something more abstract, like the idea of Nihilism.

Generate that list for 3-5 minutes.

Finally, pick one of those items you're in conflict with, and generate a list of what that person or idea wants.

Generate that list for 3-5 minutes.

There’s a method to my madness here, but before we get to the prompt, let’s study a poem together first.

Poem: “Want” by Joan Larkin

She wants a house full of cups and the ghosts
of last century’s lesbians; I want a spotless
apartment, a fast computer. She wants a woodstove,
three cords of ash, an axe; I want
a clean gas flame. She wants a row of jars:
oats, coriander, thick green oil;
I want nothing to store. She wants pomanders,
linens, baby quilts, scrapbooks. She wants Wellesley
reunions. I want gleaming floorboards, the river’s
reflection. She wants shrimp and sweat and salt;
she wants chocolate. I want a raku bowl,
steam rising from rice. She wants goats,
chickens, children. Feeding and weeping. I want
wind from the river freshening cleared rooms.
She wants birthdays, theaters, flags, peonies.
I want words like lasers. She wants a mother’s
tenderness. Touch ancient as the river.
I want a woman’s wit swift as a fox.
She’s in her city, meeting
her deadline; I’m in my mill village out late
with the dog, listening to the pinging wind bells, thinking
of the twelve years of wanting, apart and together.
We’ve kissed all weekend; we want
to drive the hundred miles and try it again.

Poetry’s physical shape helps intensify strange or powerful juxtaposition, because those juxtapositions can occupy the same line or opposing lines, can bleed into different lines or stay self-contained. This is a poem of juxtaposition, and it wields that device to great success—the speaker’s wants are in conflict with the object of her desire, and that conflict drives the poem’s tension forward in such delicious ways.

Here are a few examples of competing wants, wonderfully juxtaposed:

• The rural and urban (house vs apartment, city vs mill village)

• The past and the present (computer vs woodstove, ancient touch vs deadlines)

• The simple life vs the complicated life (house full of cups vs nothing to store)

By assigning these needs to each person in the poem, two conflicting portraits arise: the woman in the city, longing for rural maximalism, and the woman in the countryside, longing for urban minimalism. These women rest on their own lines and spill into each others’, existing “apart and together.”

It’s a delightful tension, imbued with an unnamed eroticism, the kind that brings bodies together and apart, the kind that shapes a whole relationship. There’s also a sense of mimetic desire, of each woman craving the other’s life, perhaps living vicariously through each other, intensifying the sweetness of their haphazard union.

In any case, I think this a skillfully composed poem, subtle in its seeming simplicity, revealing itself not through what it says, but through what it juxtaposes: a poem strung along and composed by its own tension, never quite resolved of its wanting, beautifully unfinished.

Prompt

Write a poem that juxtaposes and examines your competing interests with someone or something. Play around with how you structure the piece.

Additionally, you don’t have to focus on “wants,”—they can be needs, desires, desperations, etc., and they can compete with a concept, structure, institution, or higher power.

The point is to let competing interests drive forward the tension, and to let that tension reveal something deeper about your relationship with the poem’s other subject.