A favorite childhood superhero (via Muppet Wiki)

It’s been a superhero kind of week.  Inspired simultaneously by this song, this NPR story, and by an article (I think from Teachers & Writers’ Collaborative magazine)  in which a writing teacher asked her tentative students to write about their secret superpowers, I developed a prompt about superheroes to use with a group of adult residents at the South Bend Center for the Homeless, where my M.F.A. classmates and I lead a workshop on Wednesday nights.

After opening with an icebreaker about flight vs. invisibility, I shared two poems (“The Flash Reverses Time” by A. Van Jordan, and “Superhero Pregnant Woman” by Jessy Randall) written from the perspectives of different kinds of superheroes with the group, and asked them to choose between three options: 1) to write about an unusual superpower of their own, 2) to write about what their life might be like (how it might be the same or different) as an undercover superhero or villain, and 3) to write from the perspective of a “real” superhero (fictional or living).  The intent was to draw out the class’s imaginations, away from the everyday perspectives of self, and to have them enter into the fantastic realm of the alternative desire – the “what if,” so to speak.  The class responded with a wide range of interpretations – two people wrote about the ability to stop pain, several people inhabited their favorite comic book and movie characters, one young man who says that he normally writes “on the dark side” wrote a very sweet poem about his ‘superhero’ of a mother, and a young woman who was at first hesitant to share her work wrote a hilarious piece about a superhero who could, among other abilities, toast pieces of bread with her built-in laser beams.

I hesitated about sharing the exercise for this week’s blog prompt (since the last prompt I shared was also on the more lighthearted side), but then, yesterday night, I attended a classmate’s reading in which he presented a series of short shorts about unusual superpowers (for example, “the power of bad luck”).  That clinched it for me.  Superhero week it is.  I present LR’s very own variation on the superhero prompt:

Prompt: Write a persona poem from the perspective of an unlikely or unusual superhero.

A few ideas for switching it up or challenging yourself:

• Add a form (e.g. a superhero sonnet or sestina)
• Depict a superhero in unusual circumstances: perhaps he/she has lost his/her power.  Perhaps the power has been reversed or mirrored. Or perhaps he/she has turned away from a life of crime fighting.
• Try juxtaposing two intercutting sub-voices within the poem: the superhero vs. his/her internal nemesis.
• Imagine the superhero in an anachronistic setting (e.g. Superman in Medieval France).
• Write about an inanimate object or a natural phenomenon, personifying it as if it were a superhero.

For further inspiration, I suggest reading A. Van Jordan’s excellent book Quantum Lyrics, in which he writes about a number of D.C. Comics heroes in juxtaposition with principles of quantum physics.

Here’s an excerpt of one of my own attempts from Wednesday:

Superpower

I’ll change you
with a flip of my tongue,
suck in my stomach
so rapidly you’ll wonder
why your nose begins
to twitch, your brain
goes numb, brickwalling
the words falling from
my mouth until I am nothing
but a pair of lips, and maybe
some gums flapping
like castanets.

As usual, if you attempt this exercise, please do consider sharing an excerpt of what you’ve written in the comments.  We’d love to see where you’ve taken it!  Happy weekend, and happy writing — don’t forget to look out for  meteors and speeding bullets.