It can be captivating to write a poem based on something that really happened, then add your own personal stamp to it. To write “My Mother Made a Meat Loaf,” I started with the memory of my mother’s ruined meat loaf and used that as my premise. At the time I was living in New Mexico in an adobe house, and the adobe bricks reminded me of the meat loaf. Now I knew, more or less, how I would end the poem. I would compare her meat loaf with a brick. Once again, I took out my trusty notebook and made a list. I listed all the ways that I could try to cut a meat loaf that was as hard as a brick. Making a list is one of the best ways to make sure that you have enough material for your poem. Many of my poems begin with a list, and so can yours. As the poem progressed, I found that it worked best if I kept exaggerating more and more. At first the meat loaf can’t be cut with a knife, then it’s impervious to an ax, and finally even a hippopotamus can’t trample it. This is another great technique. Keep making things weirder and weirder or sillier and sillier or more and more impossible.
Here’s another idea. Look at a poem you’ve written, and ask yourself, “Can I write a poem that’s the opposite of this one?” Very often you can. In this case I’d just written a poem about the world’s hardest food, my mother’s indestructible meat loaf. Now I decided to turn the idea upside down and write one about the world’s softest food. I thought about lots of soft foods, things like applesauce and mashed potatoes. Though I tried and tried, I couldn’t think of a funny idea for a poem. Yet I didn’t give up.
Eventually I had a brainstorm. I’d write a poem about food that had exploded–that’s how it would get soft. Now I had to think of what food to choose and how to make it explode. I thought and thought and settled on the notion of an exploding turkey, and I had a really silly way to make that turkey explode. Sometimes you just have to keep thinking. Remember, one idea leads to another. Here’s the poem: