Writing Prompts: Art Imitates Life (TV & Movies)

Writing Prompt #1

• Write a poem about a TV show that reflects your life, where “those characters were me."  Or free write about a TV show that informed your life in some way.
• Write a poem where you ask questions of the characters in a TV show.  What do you want to know?

 

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Writing Prompt #2

Scary Movies
by Kim Addonizio

Today the cloud shapes are terrifying,   
and I keep expecting some enormous   
black-and-white B-movie Cyclops   
to appear at the edge of the horizon,

to come striding over the ocean   
and drag me from my kitchen   
to the deep cave that flickered   
into my young brain one Saturday

at the Baronet Theater where I sat helpless   
between my older brothers, pumped up   
on candy and horror—that cave,
the litter of human bones

gnawed on and flung toward the entrance,   
I can smell their stench as clearly
as the bacon fat from breakfast. This   
is how it feels to lose it--

not sanity, I mean, but whatever it is   
that helps you get up in the morning
and actually leave the house
on those days when it seems like death

in his brown uniform
is cruising his panel truck
of packages through your neighborhood.   
I think of a friend’s voice

on her answering machine--
Hi, I’m not here--
the morning of her funeral,   
the calls filling up the tape

and the mail still arriving,
and I feel as afraid as I was
after all those vampire movies   
when I’d come home and lie awake

all night, rigid in my bed,
unable to get up
even to pee because the undead   
were waiting underneath it;

if I so much as stuck a bare
foot out there in the unprotected air   
they’d grab me by the ankle and pull me   
under. And my parents said there was

nothing there, when I was older   
I would know better, and now   
they’re dead, and I’m older,   
and I know better.

Kim Addonizio, “Scary Movies” from What Is This Thing Called Love. Copyright © 2004 by Kim Addonizio. 

• Write a poem where a movie or the monster is a metaphor for a real fear, a real thing in your life.  Use the language of the movie in your poem.
• Write an ode poem to a scary movie that really did you in.

Hear Kim Addonizio read her poem "Scary Movies" here.

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Stephen Asma is a professor of philosophy at Columbia College, Chicago

For more on monsters as metaphors listen to this interview with Stephen Asma on the radio show "Eight Forty-Eight." Asma is the author of the book On Monsters:  An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears. In under 15 minutes, he touches on xenophobia and the blemmyae, St Augstine's compassionate view of monsters, abhorrent human behavior, and the classic demon, devils, and witches.  

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Something Extra

On the occasion of receiving the Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry, Patrick Phillips talks about his children's writing, why he doesn't call himself  a poet,  and he then reads the poem "Matinee."