It is a good way to get comfortable with yourself and writing, get a little bit of feedback/support, and just practice using your imagination. And it is usually fun and delightful to hear what hilariously bad or surprisingly good thing you and others can come up with.
Anyways, I wanted to share one of the more promising things I've produced during writing group so far. I sometimes feel silly at the group because tonally and stylistically my stuff can be a little weird, especially when compared with the very normal, narrative-oriented, novel-esque scenes, dialogue, and prose the other writers came up with. I often feel like I cheat on the prompt because I feel like I don't really do what it asks.
The last time I was at the group, I think the prompt was something like "Describe a color to someone who has never seen it before." For some reason I started thinking about the colors of yellow and yellows in nature. There are so many different colors that fall into the category of yellow. And all those colors exist in millions of places all over the world, meaning different and the same thing in all those millions of places and contexts and experiences. And even as those colors exist in those places and context, things change and those colors bleed into and become other colors, and even become inseparable from the other senses like smell, heat, movement etc. . . . . so on that subject, this is what I wrote on color.
Lions in sunshine, and grass, can always lead to streaks of movement and lines upon lines in darker and lighter and younger shades. These lines contain an infinite quality, leading to those silences filled with noises or wet pools that rub off under furs and between nails and teeth.
The same lines under suns elsewhere chase the same whispers but under the weight of different airs and different passing hopes as mankind passes between the insect vibrations. There, new latitudes hold separate tones, where sometimes vibrances take on lives of their own. They take up unnatural spaces that don't belong to them and become shapes outside geometry, swallowing those universal lines of nature and turning them into ash and chocking.
And so the sunshine turns into all shades of all flesh and skins of all kings, yet returns always to night, and therefore day again.
I don't really know what to do with stuff like that. It doesn't really seem like poetry, but it is very weird prose. And that is what I wrote.
I remember getting into an argument with my creative writing teacher about whether "prose poetry" counts as poetry because they seemed (to me) to be mutually exclusive concepts. She more or less said it's like any art: if the creator says it's art (or poetry, or music, or whatever), then that's what it is. If you want it to be, then this totally counts as poetry! Either way, it's lovely.
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