Writing Prompt #1: Music Obsessive / Playlist Poems

To get you started, here are two related writing prompts: feel free to write to both, but be sure to write at least one poem in this mode and post it to the appropriate forum on Blackboard no later than 9am next Tuesday:

1. Music Obsessive: Ever since I was young, I've been a rabid music fan and it filters into seemingly every facet of my daily existence.  While my listening habits change from time to time, one constant is my propensity to latch onto one particular song, deriving great pleasure from listening to it over and over and over again, and even years after this brief swoon, I still feel a special connection to that song.

For this prompt, I'd like you to replicate that process: choose a song that you've had a similar reaction to (or that you're currently having a similar reaction to) and listen to it over and over again — ten times, twenty times, a hundred times, keeping your notebook or a blank Word document open as you do so.  Jot down emotions, images, free associations and connections that spring to mind when you hear this song; let snippets of lyrics filter into the poem.  Can you capture qualities of the song's tone, its mood, the characteristics of different sections or instruments, in your poem?  Then go back and listen again — what can you add? what needs to be taken out?  Let your entire composition of the poem be contained by that song —if you want to return to this poem to edit it, then you need to put the song on as you do so.  Can you make a poem that effectively translates what you love about this song?  That captures the space it puts you in?  Can you construct it so that someone else who reads it is able to identify it in an instant, or would you prefer it to be more oblique? 


2. Playlist Poems: a currently popular meme asks you to answer a series of personal questions by cutting and pasting the titles of songs selected by your iTunes' random shuffle mode.  For this prompt you'll do something similar: compose a poem that consists entirely of song titles.  There's no formal restraint here, other than the source of poetic raw materials, though this sort of pastiche of borrowed language is technically a cento, a form we'll probably look at in greater depth later in the term.  You'll have to decide whether to brainstorm titles from scratch, search through your music collection for certain keywords or let the shuffle mode make the decisions for you.  Can you limit your title choices to just one band, or settle a long-standing musical rivalry (ex. the Beatles vs. the Stones)?  Do you want to tell a story or create an image?  What sort of detritus lurking in your iTunes library can you use to deconstruct this form?