The Self-Destructing Poem
A Creative Exercise Inspired by the work of Sandra Cisneros
Sandra Cisneros, when speaking about her poetry-writing practice during a long pause between published collections, describes the liberation in writing for the self: “Poems were to be written as if they could not be published in my lifetime. They come from such a personal place. It was the only way I could free myself to write/think with absolute freedom, without censorship.” Inspired by Cisneros’ approach to drafting, this exercise explores what it means to write a poem that will be read by no one else.
Your mission: to write the poem that you are afraid to write. After you write the poem you are afraid to write, destroy the poem.
After you have written and destroyed the poem you are afraid to write, take 8-10 minutes to reflect on the experience in a freewrite:
- What did you learn?
- What did you think it would be like to write the poem? What was it actually like?
- How did knowing the poem would be destroyed change what you were able to write, or your experience of writing?
- How would your poetry-writing practice be impacted if you wrote only for yourself?
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...