Writing prompt #64: INCITING THE UNEXPECTED
Hi Everyone,
I’m on a tear with poet Anne Carson lately and just read her most recent book, H of H Playbook, which defies categorization (as does so much of her work). Basically, it’s a crazy visual and poetic riff on the Greek tragedy Herakles.
There’s so much exciting, unexpected, playful, and hilarious language throughout (yes, even amid the tragedy) that it was hard to select just a few lines to serve as starter flames.
Your prompt:
Choose one of Carson’s phrases below as an epigraph to a chapter, or poem, or a segment of memoir—whatever you’re working on. Allow it to radically change what follows, no matter where it leads. You can always rein it in later (and remove the epigraph). But for now, let it rip:
"I’m just saying you call them gods, they call you walking ash.”
“A glacier is silence until it snaps and crashes into the sea.”
“Tyrants don’t know rules.”
“We shared a childhood of programmatic disobedience.”
Have fun with this!
Abrazos,
Cristina
