On Monday we featured three poems by Aneesa Davenport, “A Prayer Toward Sleep,” “Application for Remembrance,” and “Lover’s Complaint.” Here Aneesa talks about how she made them:

These poems came from a prompt given to me in school (either by Gabrielle Calvocoressi or Brian Teare) to write a poem reclaiming or repurposing language from your past, be it from church services, playground taunts, or a parent’s foreign tongue. Certain words, particularly in the first poem, such as “worrywart,” “backbiter,” and “watchword,” are terms I closely associate with my upbringing (in my family, two of the worst things you could do were worry needlessly and talk behind others’ backs), as is “sustainer,” which is from the grace we said nightly before dinner. Others, such as “tincture,” “toddy,” and “simple syrup,” remind me of the Southern influence my mother brought with her when she moved to California, where I was born.

I coupled the original prompt with two others: Write a prayer and Write a direct address, and from this combination a form naturally emerged which informed the other two poems. Self-imposed constraints like these—and those which arise simply by writing in series, or which are based on meter or rhyme or sound—are incredibly generative, because they force your imagination to solve problems and make choices it never would have before—usually concocting uncommonly accurate metaphors.

I make up (or shall I say reclaim?) prompts and chronicle my responses regularly at http://paragraphed.wordpress.com/.