Freewrite
Make a list of images that represent the previous twelve months of your life.
Resist the urge to interpret these images. Do not explain their significance or write down what they represent. Additionally, resist the urge to use metaphor and simile.
What images arise in your mind when you think of the previous 12 months?
Poem: “Bad Daughter” by Franny Choi
Left church; spilled seed; licked a rock til its skin
sloughed off; ate from the dog’s bowl; stole a ten
at least; fled from the scene; drank; killed time
with fingers; fiended; fell for another
daughter; mixed up the signs; got welded; whined;
wiped back to front; packed at midnight the night
before; bored self to death; pictured it all
wrong; fixated; inverted the colors;
culled a new excuse; called the wrong number;
curled up at a bad man’s feet; puked; fretted
over pennies; petty; turned down the treat;
trailed off; blended in; sore thumb; cords got all
knotted up; frayed; faked own death; kept showing
up in new clothes, new names; then leaving.
Divinations
The constraints of this poem force it to make such interesting connections. Not only is the poem primarily interested in brief, bright images and actions—it is also a sonnet written in blank verse. Blank verse is a metric poem without poem, often in iambic pentameter.
At the core of this poem’s fragmentations and disunities is a question of selfhood. Who is the speaker of this poem? They are a “bad daughter,” of course, as the title tells us, but then the speaker’s identity becomes a topic of the poem itself, particular in those final two lines—they invent a new identity, show up, and disappear again.
Is it possible that every action and image in this poem, cordoned by semicolons, is another instance of an identity showing up and disappearing? The driving animus of this poem is the speaker’s “bad daughterness”—resulting in a series of transformations, transmogrifications, one leap of self into the next.
A few stand out images and moments, for me, include:
- licked a rock til its skin / sloughed off
- got welded; whined;
- fretted / over pennies; petty;
These aren’t, on their own, fantastically memorable. In fact, some actions of this poem are actually hard to picture: when the speaker mixes up the signs, are they talking about road signs or astrology? When they “pictured it all wrong,” what did they picture? There’s also, it seems, some interwoven dog-related imagery: the speaker eats from a dog’s bowl and turns down the treat in different stanzas.
In any case, self-loathing has a powerful gravity in this piece, which almost makes me feel bad for being so entertained by it. Some other observations:
- It’s hard to see how blending in makes the speaker a bad daughter, but “blended in” certainly blends into the poem.
- Ditto “sore thumb,” which, perhaps, juts out for its ambiguity.
- fiended; fixated; frayed—what, exactly, is so sinful in these bits of ambiguous mundanity?
The careful, necessary juxtaposition of actions and images pushes this poem towards hyperbole, but it is all the same very believable. The poem never uses metaphor, simile, or other literary devices; it certainly never tells us what its images mean, which could be frustrating, but always invites us to see ourselves in the speaker—a further complication of identity’s seeming discreteness.
One last note: the sonnet form requires a pivot, or “volta,” somewhere in lines 7-9, and the final two lines are often a form of resolution to the poem’s question. Here, the volta feels like “pictured it all / wrong”—with wrong amplifying the poem’s tension as the speaker starts loving bad men and accepting their abuse, a volta further suggested by “inverted the colors.” It’s pretty abstract here, but deeply felt. The final two lines tell us something about identity: that we have the ability to don many selves, like clothes, or like a planet accruing new moons, each of which are bound to us eternally by the gravity of our lack.
Image-Oriented Poetry Prompt
Write a poem that does not use any literary devices to qualify its images. Do not interpret or your explain your images to the reader, either. Simply focus on the curation and juxtaposition of image and action and see what arises.
Related Prompts
Imagery is always a great source of inspiration for poetry, so we have a few other related prompts if you’d like to try them out:
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