After yesterday’s discussion of novelty, the word “ordinary” stood out to me in the Sept/Oct 2019 Poets&Writers Magazine. In The Literary Life section article “Historical Fiction: The Pleasures and Perils of Writing About Other Eras” by Christina Baker Kline and Lisa Gornick. Kline mentions a New Yorker piece in which Jill Lepore writes, “Fiction can do what history doesn’t but should. It can tell the story of ordinary people.” Kline says her book A Piece of the World (assoc link) is about an ordinary woman.
Then in The New Nonfiction 2019 section, I found Jaquira Díaz and her book Ordinary Girls (assoc link) which is described as, “a debut memoir examining the author’s childhood as a runaway juvenile delinquent, and high school dropout who finds love and family; a fierce, unflinching account of ordinary girls leading extraordinary lives. The article quotes Díaz as saying, “Writing nonfiction for me has never been cathartic—quite the opposite. And in the Poetry prompt: Ghost in the Skin, I read, “the narrator recounts her sister’s observations of an unfamiliar holiday: Halloween.”
So much of poetry is just that: observations of the ordinary and comparing them to their opposites, because what one person sees as ordinary (customary, usual, normal, plain, undistinguished, of no special quality or interest) another may find extraordinary. It’s in close observation that we see with fresh eyes and change the ordinary into the extraordinary.
How can you change your ordinary into its opposite today?
The Prompts
NaPoWriMo : Write a poem that is inspired by a piece of music, and that shares its title with that piece of music.
PAD Challenge : Today is a title prompt “Not (blank)”
Poetry Non-Stop : Write a poem about the future. What do you think is going to happen in the future?
Thought Purge Today’s prompt is “Why I Write”
This is one of those great mornings when combining prompts paid off. Combining the NaNoWriMo prompt with the PAD Challenge led me to “Not One of Us” by Peter Gabriel (1980).
Today’s Poem
Not One of Us
I’m writing this today
because I see the future coming
Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh,
It’s only water
And yet it is changing
the shape of the world
and the herds of frightened
are closing ranks and
worshiping the wolves
what matters now is which diseased
herd you’re in,
for the other dies, but
How can we be in
when there is no outside
because though it’s only water
that water continues to rise
Experience Writing 