The Color of Poetry

In What Is Color in Poetry, Dorothea Lasky writes, “Color creates an expanse; a field, a shared formal field, with which to plant more shared components of the material imagination, a poem. Color makes this space bigger, this imaginative space more specific and bigger, gives it weight, makes it solid.”

Walk through your home and find a color that strikes you, that you want to spend some time with. The color can be inside or outside, a color you love or loathe or that unsettles you. Sit in front of this color, just looking, for 2-3 minutes. Then take a piece of paper and fill the whole sheet with language evoked by the color. There is no right or wrong way to do this, but try not to overthink. Just write your thoughts down as they come.

Set this writing aside for a bit.

Select and read a few of the following poems out loud. If there are people with you, take turns reading a poem out loud. After each a poem is read out loud, close your eyes and write down what you remember about the colors in each poem.

Poems to Read:

• Nothing But Color, Ai
• Red Ghazal, Aimee Nezhukumatathil
• Yellow Glove, Naomi Shihab Nye
• The Enkindled Spring, D.H. Lawrence
• Blue, Carl Phillips
• Colors passing through us, Marge Piercy

Assignment:

Return to what you wrote in the beginning of this session. Circle any words that surprise you, or strike you as especially evocative. Take a new page of paper, and divide it into three columns. Title one column “Nouns,” one “Verbs,” and the last “Adjectives.” Transfer the words you circled to the appropriate columns. What is your longest column? Your shortest?

Fill all of the columns with 15-20 words that relate or evoke the color.

Write a poem that explores your feelings and associations with color, and expresses color through nouns and verbs.