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Comfort Sounds: Prompt

"The Saturday Afternoon Blues" is one of my favorite (maybe even my favorite) Wanda Coleman poems, in large part because of the sounds in the poem: rhyme and repetition add a strong musical quality. Read it here.


For this prompt, I would like you to think about sound in a different way. Of course, you are free to emulate (if you are writing a poem) Coleman's expert sound play.


The main point of this prompt is to think of a sound that, whenever you hear it, immediately takes you back to the past in a comforting way.


An example: whenever I hear a power tool being used in whatever neighborhood I am living in, I am transported back to my childhood. More specifically, it is summer, it is a Saturday, and the noise of my father, a neighbor, or more than one person working in his yard makes me feel happy and calm and safe. I never have to make these connections--the sound itself puts me there without any nudging on my part. (The smell of freshly mown summer grass does the same for me, but the sound works no matter what the season, the time of day, the weather, or my location. Mown grass, especially the specific smell of the lawn grass I grew up with, is much more limited.)


You don't need to write (or paint or sew, etc.) about that sound and its affect on you, but that sound should be a part of your piece. More important is the feeling it evokes.


As always, have fun!







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