The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff. — Carl Sagan, Cosmos
The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff. — Carl Sagan, Cosmos
Creativity Prompt #16: Shining and Persisting | 30-Day Creativity Challenge
Some of you know that I teach creative writing in correctional facilities. Currently, I’m teaching to a class of male writers at Stillwater Prison in Minnesota, and, during our last class session, we read and analyzed Larry Levis’s beautiful poem, “Winter Stars” (I’ve mentioned this Levis poem a few times already in Writing in the Dark, but if you haven’t read it yet, it’s a stunner).
As we walked through the poem together, line by line, identifying what struck us, where we felt something, and what took our breath away (in other words, what popped at the line level), the students in my class were expert and skilled at identifying particularly potent juxtapositions of incongruity (the desk clerk applying lacquer to her nails in the hotel that is really a metaphor for the mind, for example!), and, as a result, we were able to have an incredibly rich discussion about the ways in which the language of this poem contributes to a profound emotional experience for its readers.
However, I am also interested in the structure of this poem—in particular, the way it opens with a gripping, vivid vignette rich with exterior sensory detail and scant in explanation or interiority (save for the line: I never understood how anyone could risk his life/Then listen to Vivaldi), followed by an exploration of the speaker of the poem’s broken relationship with his father and how his father’s current condition of “losing his mind” to what we presume is something like Alzheimer’s presses upon their estrangement.
What I wanted my students also to notice is that even as Levis is unpacking this narrative in the poem, he is organizing it all around a central image, which, as the poem progresses, gets repeated, transformed, and amplified. I asked my students what that central image was, and I expected that at least one person would quickly identify the answer as “stars.” Instead, the first person who spoke said exactly the thing that I myself had been feeling and noticing in this poem—that the central image is more than stars, and importantly so. “I think it is stars, and light,” my student said. And that changes everything, really. Because it expands that central image to include so many more moments in the poem than just those handful of instances where the speaker points to the sky. There is so much genius in Levis’s poem.
This, the idea of a central image “shining and persisting” through our work, is what we’ll play with in today’s creativity prompt—and the four detailed, structured steps below will guide you through the exercise of finding a central image and then combining it with a narrative to see how the one might echo against the other. This one is on the more complex side, but you can always break it into parts. I have faith in you!