James Tate

James Tate is a poet we studied in my poetry class last week. As an exercise, we used Tate's The Wrong Way Home as inspiration for a five minute writing exercise.

The fruits of my five minute labor:

All morning a kite flew toward the sun.
It tried to forget the stillness waiting below,
the basements and backseats in which it was stuck
passing time 'til others brought it to life,
whooping & hollering, unraveling its lines
running and whooping & hollering 'til the
wind ran out of their sails,
the kite barely hovering above the land
it would inevitably be dragged across,
bedraggled.
The kite was a frame of idealized images
that fade
with time,
a frame of reference
set free
to burn.

Amazing how much can be accomplished in five minutes. Let me know what you might accomplish in five minutes! So much possibility...