Writing Prompts: Hazy Memory

Free Write Prompt

Tell me about a hazy memory—one that is foggy and obscure (for whatever reason) and may have the opportunity for self-deception.  Write for 10 minutes. Ready? Go.

Poem Prompt

Write a poem that explores your topic/event in the tangential, dovetailed way that memory works.  

Kazuo Ishiguro said in a CNN interview, “I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.”  Write this poem for 15 minutes.

Example Poem

• "Blades" by C.K. Williams 

​There is not an online version of this poem in its accurate form.  Williams has included specific line breaks, lines with single words, and lines with provocative phrases, that a reader should presume significant.  So I have reproduced it above in the same format it was published in  C.K. Williams Selected Poems. Copyright © 1994 by C. K. Williams. First published in 1994 by Farrar, Straus ad Giroux. This edition first published in 1995 by The Noonday Press.

•  C.K. Williams bio and Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry

Reflections

• How is "hazy memory" portrayed in the poem?
• How is the speaker characterized throughout the poem?
• Where are the shifts in the poem? How do they happen?

Many readers don't go back to reconsider the title. In "Blades,"  multiple denotations and connotations of the title add layers of meaning to the poem, even hinting at more information about the narrator.  Readers already know a blade is the cutting part of a knife or other tools or weapon, and understand quite quickly that in this case the speaker "stabbed" the girl with a broken off car antenna--the first "blade" in the poem. 

But a blade is also a literary reference to a sword and to a cavalier, dashing young man.  Can we see the speaker as such in his youthful carelessness?  If he did indeed wield a sword of sorts against the girl, could the act be seen as a childhood version of sword fighting forced upon another neighborhood kid not ready for the game? How many times have I seen pool noodles, paper towel tubes, and indeed any "blade"-like item being brandished as a sword? Can each be speaking to the "innocence" of the stabbing as a sword-fighting game perpetrated by a cavalier young boy in the neighborhood? 

The blade of the tongue is the portion directly behind the tip of the tongue. Is this a reference to the speaker as an older version of the character in the poem, attempting to make sense of the day's events and its profound impact on him through the work of words, albeit written and not spoken, in the poem itself?  As a blade cuts through something, the speaker seems to be cutting through past memories to "get the straight again."

Additionally, the shoulder blades are presumably where a wing would be positioned -- a "blazing wing of holiness" that blots out everything else. The title itself encompasses the many layers of intention in the poem.

I am also struck by the speaker's profound sense of loneliness and the function of or need to attach himself to the person who actually did the stabbing, attach himself to the mother character, and by the end, presumably attach himself to the girl, in kissing her.  How/why does the speaker believe he did the stabbing yet later pronounces it wasn't him at all but another kid who was  "black" striking another little girl, who incidentally was "black," as well?  What is his true connection to the action, that he substitutes himself for the perpetrator in his memory?  I contend he is characterized as the lonely kid on the edge of the crowd and of all the action. As his retelling is populated with exact details: from facial expressions to the pulling up of the shirt to the "cold circle of  faces" in the crowd to the cops driving the boy around the corner and releasing him--it seems he has been moving along with the action, observing and reporting (years later) what he had seen. Playing with a broken off car antenna--is that debris he has picked up as a toy or a willful destructive act previously committed? Because he said he carried it around with him in his pocket, something to use, his picking it up and brandishing it feels like he may have acquired it out of incidental boredom.

His desire to be included in the horror of the mother's expression at what happened, in the mother's potentially sweeping up the children in  the incident and pulling them to hold against her, and in being lifted by the mother as a giant blazing wing of holiness that blocks out the light, point to something lonely and excluded in the boy/speaker.  The point of view of the speaker moves from the inside of the action to the outside by the end of the poem -- from the kid who did the stabbing, to someone who observed, to someone who wants to be swept up and redeemed, to someone who finally retells the story from the farthest distance.  The storytelling in the poem moves from the central conflict, radiating out and out and out to involve multiple bystanders, and the distance of time, and indeed, us, the readers.  As he includes himself, he is including us, as well.

That desire to be lifted, though.  What of it?  To be transported, lifted up and out of...what? his loneliness? his guilt? his innocence?  After all, the poem does end with an assertion of innocence -- not as brandishing a car antenna as a sword in a game, but at touching, kissing, at "silently knelling in the mouth of death."  That chasm, that continuum from then to now, from the incident to the telling of it, to the attempt to make sense of it, maybe at the precipice of a life's end?  That may be what the blade of storytelling and time has cut through to.

Something Extra

• Read the interview transcript with Kazuo Ishiguro and CNN books segment, wherein he discusses his view of memory as a structural tool in writing that allows for a purposefully hazy and juxtaposed tangential storytelling style.
  
• British writer Kazuo Ishiguro was also the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature award winner. An honor that seemed to have taken him by surprise.