The Shoe Exercise (Part One)

• Write a list of old shoes, boots, sandals and other footwear you have owned in your life, or that you have wished to own.

• While writing this list, you cannot use the words “shoe,” “boot,” “sandal,” “slipper,” etc.; instead, you must simply describe the thing using details and situations. For example, “This pair was beautiful but hurt my feet, so I usually didn’t wear it” Or, “I wanted this one, but could never afford it, but I glanced at it covetously every time I saw it behind glass in the shop window.” Or, “I keep my old ones in a pile at the back of my closet.”

• Variation: Do the same exercise, but substitute old blue jeans, old purses, or old injuries and wounds.

Shoes from those massacred at Auschwitz

The Shoe Exercise: Part Two

• Now give the poem you wrote a new title, “Old Lovers.” • Go through the poem, changing those words necessary to make it

make sense in the new context. For example, you might change For example, “This pair was beautiful but hurt my feet, so I usually didn’t wear it” to “This man was beautiful but hurt me, so I usually didn’t wear him” Or, change “I wanted this one, but could never afford it, but I glanced at it covetously every time I saw it behind glass in the shop window” to “I wanted this man but could never afford him. Still, I glanced at him covetously every time I saw him behind glass in the shop window.”

• Trim out lines that really don’t work, but don’t be afraid of strange and silly lines–sometimes those can be the most powerful ones.

• If you are really not satisfied with how the poem turned out, try coming up with your own title, such as “Old Pets,” or “Old Emotions.” See how the list poem works when you use each new rubric to give it meaning.

• Now let’s have volunteers read the poems out loud.

The language is very old, barnacle-encrusted, dirty, clichéd, used-up, dissipated, desiccated, exhausted. Therefore, we as writers need to seek out backwaters away from the mainstream of language that haven’t been entirely fished out. When writing a poem about a rose, use the language of surgery. When writing about love, use the language of locomotive engineering. Though these discourses may seem utterly unrelated, we are pattern-making organisms, infinitely capable of finding previously unseen relations, and that is the fun of it.

Postscript to The Shoe Exercise