Rocking a Lullaby
A Creative Exercise Inspired by Patti Smith’s “the sheep lady from algiers”
Read Patti Smith’s “the sheep lady from algiers” out loud, several times. A few questions you might consider, either in writing or with others:
- What do you notice about the sounds in this poem?
- Who is this poem about? What do we learn about this person?
- Where spaces or locations appear? How does those spaces/locations relate to the poem’s sounds? Its structure?
- How is a song different from a poem? How are songs and poems the same?
Assignment:
Write a poem that serves as a lullaby for a person, place, or thing that you find fascinating or mysterious. Your poem, like Smith’s, should be three stanzas in length; each stanza should be the same number of lines; repeat images, sounds, words, and whole lines; and the last line of each stanza should end with the same word. As you are composing and revising, sing your poem to yourself softly. How can you compose a song that soothes, that leads you from the world of the waking to sleep, rest, and rejuvenation?
Maggie Queeney (she/her) is the author of In Kind (University of Iowa Press, 2023), winner of the 2022 Iowa Poetry Prize, and settler (Tupelo Press, 2021). She received the 2019 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize, a Ruth Stone Scholarship, and an Individual Artists Program Grant from the City of Chicago in both 2019 and 2022. Her work appears in the Kenyon Review, Guernica, the Missouri Review, and The...