First Lines/Last Lines:
Work your way into a poem by choosing a FIRST LINE from those below, one that appeals to you. Once you get going, choose a LAST LINE to work toward. As a writer I often will hear a line and build an entire poem around that line. The line around which the example below was written is underlined.
Feel free to change, or leave out entirely, this scaffolding of FIRST and LAST LINES, once they have served their purpose of getting your poem started and bringing it to a conclusion.
FIRST LINES
1. Housewives, as the nights, came in
2. We did it in front of the mirror
3. In the corner of the living room was an album of unbearable photos
4. My mother once told me
5. Before I go
6. The woman stood in front of the table, her sad hands
7. In a small town in Scotland they sell books with one blank page
8. She was born in the midst of the black frock coats
LAST LINES
1. which she tore with her teeth
2. and broke from those pages
3. I take back everything I've said
4. like the earth of the summer beneath
5. their evening broth
6. women's stockings
7. clinging
8. and then a small song, a little smile, and then nothing
Example:
shops
closed
long ago --
residues of workers
bend uphill
against squalls --
early diners scuttle
and dodge
falling droplets --
cries of a sax --
riffs in the wet night
echo up walls
melt into low-hanging mists
---Marsha Rogers © 1998
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This page was
last updated on
04/19/2003
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