| Fifty of Fifty These poems are from a 1997 project called "Fifty of Fifty." It started as an exercise proposed by Van Baldwin of the Ann Arbor Guild House writer's group. He gave us fifty first lines and challenged us to write poems that "unrolled from them down the page," free-writing and drafting quickly. I kept changing the first lines to things that made sense to me, and I wrote slowly. It took me a year to finish the project. Of the full set of fifty, these are the twelve poems that stand up best and that I'm proudest to have written. Seven Twelve Eighteen Nineteen Twenty-five Twenty-seven Thirty-three Thirty-nine Forty Forty-one Forty-four Fifty The Train I haven't written any poetry since starting my memoir. I did do some poetry adaptations of the book, but they aren't equal to the poems that began life as poems. The poems I wrote between 1998 and 2003 are fairly dark. Here's one. The Train Still Life With Bride I'm happy about this poem. I wrote it after seeing the traveling Monet exhibit in 1997, which included the portrait that Monet painted of his wife Camille in the minutes after her death. Still Life With Bride |
| The Sun Room |
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Poems from Ann Pai