Yesterday the second video for How Writers Write Poetry was posted. Kate Greenstreet talked about collecting lines. She called it her epic as she writes down interesting lines/tidbits from her day in one doc file. Then she culls from it individual ones to create poems. Lucy Ives talked about letting poems sit for one, two, ten years or even a lifetime. This gave me the idea to look at an old poem and try to rewrite it. I chose my first attempt at rondelet.
First written August 2012
Feet in the sand
Exploring where water meets turf
Feet in the sand
Experience an endless surf
Finding a treasure trove is grand
Seashells collected have great worth
Feet in the sand
I chose this one because I did not get the rhyme scheme correct. It should be A,B,A,A,B,B,A.
I rewrote it and a friend suggested changing, “Seashells collected have great worth ” to Seashells collected gather worth, because great and worth are too similar. The rewritten version:
Feet in the sand
Exploring where water meets turf
Feet in the sand
Finding hidden treasure is grand
Seashells collected gather worth
As little ones wade in the surf
Feet in the sand
Then I got a couple suggestions on the class forum page. 1) to get rid of ing verbs doesn’t really progress poem or image. True, but I find I fall back on ing to get the needed syllable count for a rondelet. 2) get away from the water. Hmmm… interesting. Since the repeated line, Feet in the sand, evokes the beach image, the other lines don’t have to follow suit. I thought I could work on this one. The third version:
Feet in the sand
Keep me rooted to who I am
Feet in the sand
My world flipped upside down unplanned
Reality rolled out to slam
Me against what was: my heart swam
Feet in the sand
What do you think? I know it is still a work in progress. It certainly is now repurposed since the first version and rewrite were created from a picture of my girls at Woodlawn Beach July 2012. The third version reflects how my world changed two years later.
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