Writing Prompts about NUMBERS (part 2)

Introduction

At the intersection of numbers and words, I always held the belief I was bad with numbers, even transposing double and triple digit numbers and phone numbers.  (My financial advisor claims i'm doing fine with numbers, so I will choose to believe him!) Where some have dyslexia with letters and others transpose sounds in words, I never did -- always considered language my strong suit.  Yet, when I took the high school placement tests, I was recommended for advanced maths and advanced science but regular level English classes.  "Do you think we got the right results?" my dad with the schedule card in his hand.  And, in grad school, a language and rhetoric professor asked students to raise their hands if their analytical score was higher than their verbal score on the GREs--apparently, it was a thing for language people!  Language is an equation, too.

All this to say, I love thinking about numbers and how we use them all the time in passwords and user names, in explanations and on the GPS.  I am surprised that thinking in terms of numbers makes my brain work in a different way, accessing my stories in a different way.  How about you?

After this week's writing challenges with numbers, try NUMBERS Part 1, here!    

Warm-Up Write

Song titles with numbers in them--choose some prompts and write for 15 min.  Or play the music and write about whatever surfaces; see if it structures your writing into stanzas and refrains.

“Seven Bridges Road” (Eagles): 

• Write a poem about a specific location, an epic location, a place whose feel you can’t forget
• Write about a place and include the address--they're descriptive and specific, and therefore, interesting.

“Seven Nation Army”
​(White Stripes): 

• In the song Jack White sings “seven nation army couldn't hold me back.” What couldn’t hold you back? From what? Write the poem
• Tell me about 7 of anything, and turn it into a poem.

“Take 5”
(Dave Brubeck)

• When do you need to take 5? How do you take 5? Write that poem.

Mentor Poem

"Sixty-four now . . ."
AGNES NEMES NAGY
Translated from Hungarian by George Szirtes
 
Sixty-four now. Summer. No use acting
as if this were what I was quite expecting.
Still there's a thaw, a soft appeasement,
a gentle waking up and easement,
this summer of my sixty-fourth commencing.

Writing Prompt 

• Write a poem about how old you are now; follow the style of Nagy's poem (or let  your own organic structure take place).
• The Beatles sing, "Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm sixty-four?"  What do you hope someone will still do when you're _____?  Tell me about it in a poem.  Write for 10 minutes.

For Discussion

​Numbers
MARY CORNISH
 
I like the generosity of numbers.
The way, for example,
they are willing to count
anything or anyone:
two pickles, one door to the room,
eight dancers dressed as swans.
 
I like the domesticity of addition--
add two cups of milk and stir--
the sense of plenty: six plums
on the ground, three more
falling from the tree.
 
And multiplication's school
of fish times fish,
whose silver bodies breed
beneath the shadow
of a boat.
 
Even subtraction is never loss,
just addition somewhere else:
five sparrows take away two,
the two in someone else's
garden now.
 
There's an amplitude to long division,
as it opens Chinese take-out
box by paper box,
inside every folded cookie
a new fortune.
 
And I never fail to be surprised
by the gift of an odd remainder,
footloose at the end:
forty-seven divided by eleven equals four,
with three remaining.
 
Three boys beyond their mothers' call,
two Italians off to the sea,
one sock that isn't anywhere you look
​
Mary Cornish, “Numbers” from Red Studio. Copyright © 2007 by Mary Cornish
Source: Poetry Foundation