Notebook Navigation: What we see when we stare long enough into nothing

Let's hit the (note)books and do some writing. Notebook Navigation is a series of creativity prompts and exercises to spark the writing process

In this installment of Notebook Navigation, we'll take a look at the connection of memory and poetry (and a great poem by Ada Limón).

---

A few weeks ago, I checked out Bright Dead Things from the public library. It’s Ada Limón’s 2015 collection, and it was one of the few books on the poetry shelf that looked appealing that day! Ada Limón is amazing (not really a newsflash there), and I hadn’t read this collection before. Plus the stakes of checking a book out of the public library are pretty low.

The Notebook Navigation series is intended to be a little reminder to write something in your notebook today, a quick refresh for your creative writing process. For this post, I will refer to a poem from Bright Dead Things that made me stop and think.

First, I thought, “Wow, what a great poem, how true, and sad, and poignant, and real.” I felt the immediacy of emotional impact even though a central scene of the poem is a childhood memory, something distant temporally yet so present emotionally.

Second, I thought, “This would be a good poem to use for a writing prompt!”