Abstraction Exercise

In class last week, we had to do an exercise which we were given words representing an abstract concept and then had three minutes to write down the images that came to mind. It was a fun and insightful exercise, to say the least. For example, the word "rage" was given and somehow I got from "rage" to a "commercial depicting a brightly colored tossed salad." It could have been that I hadn't eaten dinner before class, but it was weird knowing that my mind went drastically off on a tangent. This exercise is certainly one I will be using for any future poems I write; I will sometimes get stuck on an abstract concept and it is hard to get around all of the cliches. In the past, whenever I used a concrete image to describe an abstraction, it was usually by accident.

Stay tuned for the next posting, a poem created by using the abstraction exercise....