Have you ever stood in line at a supermarket or department store and heard bits of conversation around you? Have you ever been in a library, museum, or art gallery where fragments of hushed dialogue reached across the silence to you? "Talk" is all around us: a sentence or phrase in a stairwell, a muted voice in another room, words echoed from the far end of a hallway. Restaurants, malls, train stations, airports are all filled with words, and some of them may be used to prompt our poems this week.
1. To begin, be aware of voices around you, especially when you're in public places.
2. Jot down a few things that you hear people say.
3. When you're ready to write, look at your notes and focus on a snippet of dialogue (sentence, phrase) that you've heard, and use it as the opening thought of a poem (an epigraph or the first line).
4. Think in terms of what the overheard words suggest to you, where they take you. Move beyond the words' literal meaning and look for the unspoken words they suggest. Don't just tell the story of where you were and what you heard. Create layers of meaning.