How Conflict Avoidant Are You?
Poetry wants you.
This was a problem. Her inability to stick with high-stakes subjects, to take her main character and dangle him (or her) over the precipice like F. Scott Fitzgerald promised to do.
“Pull your chair to the edge of the precipice,” Fitzgerald had written in one of his many notebooks, “and I will tell you a story.”
—from chapter 2 of The Novelist, by L.L. Barkat
While it is possible to tell a story without conflict, many of us writers feel a push to the precipice. And that’s perfectly okay, if you’re in the mood. Or if you’re aiming to be the next George R. R. Martin.
But sometimes, whether we are truly conflict-avoidant or we’ve simply had enough of being in the fray, we need a different writing outlet to help—and heal—our souls.
The good news about poetry?
No precipice required.
Now, every successful poem still has something at stake. The poem either makes it. Or it doesn’t. There’s a promise at the outset. Maybe a lilt, a tone, a measure—something that’s pointing somewhere, in its way, and we readers look forward to the tiniest sense of a tension being resolved. Think of it less like conflict. And more like a gap, a bridge, an opening that the poem begins with—leading you onward until something in your heart feels it keenly… the ahh, the ooo, the mmm.
One simple way to practice poetry’s conflict-avoidant resolution is to play around with Question Poems. Try it today?
Three Fun Ways to Write a Question Poem
Make your title the question. Answer the question with a series of images and very few connecting words.
Make your whole poem the question. Add a title afterward. Or, don’t. Add a question mark. Or, don’t.
Be coy and don’t include the question. You can simply imagine being asked a question—maybe a very hard one (a question that is part of the conflict or distress you’d prefer to avoid)—and make your poem the answer.
Three Sample Poems to Illustrate the Above
1
Who were you in my dreams?
star lily
immortal
bright yellow
tiger lily
the golden color of ripe wheat
ghost flower
lemony
golden ear drops
devil’s claw
fragile prickly pear
—Maureen Doallas
2
Fragments
Do the shells still hear the sea,
though they are in pieces;
how deep does the hearing of the sea
enter into bone.
—L.L. Barkat
3
Valentine’s Chai
Sitting in a sunny cafe, I call my parents
because I can’t stand to hear
bad news at home.
So I call from here, on my cell,
armed with chai.
She’s telling the doctor, No more.
She will leave his office with some pills
that will lengthen her sweet tooth in time
for Valentine’s Day.
I quaff my tea and head to the store
for candy hearts, chocolate hearts,
Reese’s peanut butter hearts, heart-shaped
cookies piled with icing—any
confectionary way to say I love you I love
you I love you I love you I love you.
—Megan Willome
If You Write
If you write a question poem, of whatever style we’ve suggested here, we’d be happy to read it!
Photo by Rebecca Campbell, Creative Commons, via Unsplash.