Starting from Scratch

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Table of Contents

• Freewrite

• Poem: Creation Myth by Rongfei Mu

• Divinations

• Prompt

• Archive

Freewrite

The point of freewriting is to simply get your thoughts on the page. So do not try to be “good” or write “poetically.” Just write your thoughts as they come, keep your pen moving, and allow yourself to be imperfect, sloppy, redundant, or cliché if you need to be. Now is the time for ideas—we will turn those ideas into a first draft once we’re done freewriting.

Freewrite for 8-10 minutes. What is an event—either in your life or in world history—that you wish you could go back to and restart from scratch? Write about this event, its history, its pain, the different outcome you hope for.

Poem: Creation Myth by Rongfei Mu

Retrieved from The Shore. 

Divinations

This poem achieves a certain startling aesthetic unity—all of its images working as symbols for a relationship that the speaker doesn't know how to repair. It's so heartfelt and brilliant and impossible not to feel. I want to showcase how those images are working, before tying things back to what your own poem can accomplish.

The title alone is doing a lot of brilliant work here—repurposing the idea of a creation myth to that of the speaker's own relationship with their father. But when I read the first few lines, I admittedly wondered if this myth involved the creation of a toaster:

Hilarious if true. But the introduction of the father—a simple 3 word sentence—shifts the poem's energy starkly.

Already, the poem's images are doing incredible work here. "Sugar packets / scattered against the tablecloth / like tiny white flags" both offers an accessible image and repurposes that image to symbolize a sense of persistent surrender, like those flags rising on the masts of sinking ships. It's an elegant simile. The image stands in opposition to those pigeons "trading breadcrumbs until / there is nothing left to hold", but both images strike me as true at the same time: father and child trading breadcrumbed words until there is nothing left to speak.

I also find myself revisiting the opening image of the toaster. I understand now: this is not about deconstructing technology, though I don't yet know where this is going. I also wonder if that sizzled and half-burnt piece of toast isn't also the speaker—if the toaster isn't also a symbol for the father.

Here, then, is where that creation myth becomes relevant, and the word "myth" here becomes so much more painful: a story told over and over, willing what can't be known into existence.

First, I'll note the elegant line break at "living room / table"—as though the act of flipping over the table flips over the whole dining room. (This feels only slightly like hyperbole. The intensity is all too real.) And then that line, "wondering / if it was all love had to offer." A gutting line for a child to think, something felt all too deeply by anyone whose first introductions to love were from parents who didn't know how to.

I have nothing to say here that the poem hasn't said, but I'll draw your attention to something structural: the interweaving of story/image and insight. Poems aren't necessarily argumentative (though we have a prompt for that here)—but they can use the strategies of rhetoric the same way essays can. Here, the poem's "evidence" is its stark images, woven into a struggle against estrangement, then resulting in little epiphanies that wow the reader. "danger / remains the only language we share." I can feel those lines as surprises, and know that they surprised the poet when she wrote it.

Now we return to the toaster, and it is less about constructing something useful, but more an apt symbol for what the speaker experiences: the difficulty in building something from scratch with only a handful of working parts. How does anyone do it, build a relationship, when the foundation for it was never laid and the work of rebuilding hurts?

I also notice that the poem is entirely in lowercase. Sometimes poets do this simply for aesthetic purposes, but in this poem, it makes the speaker feel smaller, as though they have shrunk because of the father's anger.

This is such a smart, aching poem, one whose use of imagery is always symbolic, whose tensions pull the reader into unexpected insights. It is exactly what a successful poem does.

In your own work, think about how an image can be more than image, how a line break can signify something deeper in the story you tell.

Prompt

Write a poem that images a different past.

There are many ways to go about this. You might, as Rongfei Mu does, look at the past and yearn for a new creation myth; or, you might write a poem that more directly imagines a different past and, thus, a different future. There's no one way to accomplish this, but lean into the tool of poetry, and allow yourself to be surprised.

Archive

Check out our full archive of prompts at the Poemancer website!