Reena’s Xploration Challenge #379

Posted on by Reena Saxena
Writing Prompts

Welcome back!

PROMPT #379

Mangus Khan shared T.S. Eliot’s Cold, Snobby Guide to Poetry in response to last week’s prompt. I’m enticed by the following lines.

Kill Your Ego, Save the Poem

Now for Eliot’s hottest take: great poetry isn’t about you. It’s not your diary entry. It’s not your breakup in verse. The poet should be like platinum in a chemical reaction—an invisible catalyst. You cause the emotional explosion, but leave no trace of yourself.

“The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.”

Your angst? Irrelevant. Your personality? A liability. Eliot’s poetic hero is the anti-snowflake: invisible, ego-free, and built like a Greek grammar book.

Let us go beyond poetry and choose any form of art or expression. Let us get beyond ourselves.

What is not me can be so much else that choosing is difficult. Opposites will show you in the shadows. A choice of subject will reveal a part of your personality. Don’t let that bog you down.

Look around and find something that speaks to you. Can you see the world from its perspective and express it with your superpower of words?

Thanks, Mangus Khan, for providing food for thought and inspiration for the prompt in your very first entry in this space!

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    1. You can write a poem or story or non-fiction anything that suits you. Only that it should reflect someone else’s perspective, not your own. It is about stretching imagination. Like what would an alien think on visiting our planet, or someone from another part of the world would think about our culture.

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