ENGL 110 UCLA Prose Poems Q&As

1.read A Story About the Body by Robert Hass, then please respond to any or all of the following bullet points (minimum 150 words).

• How would you describe the form of the piece: a poem? a story?
• Why do you think the author chose to construct their work in this way?
• Does the form of the piece help you understand it better, or obscure your understanding of it?
• Does Keats’s “Negative Capability (Links to an external site.)” apply to the poem in any way?

2.write a poem

Read the following examples of text out load and consider:

• how does it sound to your ear?
• would you change the way the text is presented to more accurately represent how it sounds to you (i.e. edit grammar, create line-breaks, and even stanzas)? (Feel free to cut and paste the text below play with it!)

Example 1

Back in the States now, in a college town, I would walk around but it’s really coming down. Mesmerized by double lines: two yellow tightropes. I’m making a good time. I am never anywhere, anywhere I go. When I’m home, I’m never there long enough to know.

Example 2

Back in the days when I was a teenager before I had status and before I had a pager, you could find the Abstract listening to hip hop. My pops used to say it reminded him of bebop. I said, well, daddy don’t you know that things go in cycles, the way that Bobby Brown is just ampin’ like Michael?

Part 2

Here are the songs where the above words come from:

Example 1 (Links to an external site.)

Example 2 (Links to an external site.)

Now that you’ve listened to the music, how would you represent the language on the page? How would you edit it to reflect the flow of the music?

Part 3

In this final part, we’ll start writing a poem. It will take approximately 30 minutes to complete. We will be doing what is called a “free-write,” which means you are responding to prompts in any way you choose. There are no rules: write full sentences, use grammar or don’t use grammar, take notes/bullet points…whatever gets you writing and in a flow 🙂

Below is a link to a video that is approximately 4:30 minutes. Watch the video all the way through for each of the following prompts. (This is why the entire exercise takes about a half-hour.) Be sure to give yourself the entire length of the video for each prompt, even if you are not writing. When we are thinking about writing–or even daydreaming–we are in the process of writing.

Here’s the video: Adrift by Simon Christen (Links to an external site.) (4:34 minutes)

Here are the prompts:

1. Describe what fog looks like.
2. Describe what fog feels like.
3. Describe what fog smells like.
4. Describe what fog tastes like.
5. What does fog sound like? (remember: even the absence of sound can sound like something when our imaginations are at work)
6. Finally, describe a specific memory you have that is related to fog if you have one…or make one up

What to submit?

Now that you have the raw text from your free-write on fog above, edit it into a poem. Do this any way you like, but you may want to create stanzas or line breaks for each sensory experience/memory. As you construct your poem, you also may want to read it out loud and edit it to reflect how you want it to sound to your ear. There are no rules or requirements: maybe you want to talk about just one of the five senses, or dive deeper into one specific memory. It is entirely up to you.