Prompt Week Day Three: Write an Original Love Poem
Added 2024-09-18 05:11:07 +0000 UTCMy mentor taught me that universality is the highest goal of literature. If there were such a thing as the perfect piece of writing, it would touch everyone—every age group, demographic, and sex. Of course, such a piece does not exist, but some writers have come eerily close to it.
This is why love poems are their own genre: Most of us have loved. This is a universal theme, but it’s also been done a million times before in songs, plays, poems, and prose. The more universal the theme, the harder originality becomes.
That's one of the reasons we have a workshop--so writers can find out whether their writing is evocative by seeing how many people were affected by it and how profoundly--in other words, to figure out how universal their work is.
We’re learning tools that make literature more universal. We’re learning what kind of writing works better by finding out how much it touches people. No matter what kind of literary study you might do, from punctuation to style, rhythm, form, structure, and history, it talks primarily about how it makes readers feel.
Today’s prompt is to write a love poem. It can be sad, angry, happy, or silly. Whatever you choose, it must be original. That’s the hard part. I’ll leave you with perhaps the most beautiful love song ever written.
