As promised, here is my step-by-step process of how I wrote a particular poem, modeled after a similar post by fellow author and blogger Lynda McKinney Lambert. You can read her post here.
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Step One: Select a song lyric that you like or even one that you don’t like. Use one or two lines from that song as the theme for your new poem.
I used “I want to spend my lifetime loving you” from the song by that name, which was used in The Mask of Zorro. This was one of my late husband Bill’s favorite movies, and after he proposed to me, “I Want to Spend My Lifetime Loving You” became one of our songs. You can read more about that in My Ideal Partner, which is available from Smashwords this month for free. Please see below for details.
Step 2: Select one or two lines from the song as a place to begin your poem.
I used these two sentences. “Take my hand. Dance with me.” They don’t begin the poem because I wanted to describe Zorro before he speaks. After his strokes, Bill couldn’t walk, let alone dance. So, there’s the irony.
Step 3: Choose the format you will use for the poem.
As with most of my poems, I chose free verse because I didn’t want to work with limits imposed by many traditional forms of poetry. This poem appears in My Ideal Partner. Below it, you’ll find a link to where you can hear me read it plus a video of the song that inspired it.
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THE RISE AND FALL OF MY ZORRO
by Abbie Johnson Taylor
With cape, hat, mask, rapier,
he rode out of the darkness.
“Take my hand. Dance with me,” he said,
“I want to spend my lifetime loving you,”
but happily–ever–after was not to be.
My hero fell and rose many times.
I felt the glory
until he fell for the last time.
Where there’s love, life begins again.
When life dies, love goes on.
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If you’re a poet, and there’s a song you like or dislike, why not write a poem, using the three simple steps outlined above. If you have a blog, I suggest you post that poem there, along with your explanation of how you followed the steps, a video of the song, and a link to Lynda’s post. Otherwise, you can leave that information in the comment field here or on Lynda’s blog. In any case, I hope to read your responses.
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And now, I’m pleased to announce that throughout the month of July, My Ideal Partner and The Red Dress are available from Smashwords ABSOLUTELY FREE as part of its annual summer/winter sale. You can visit my Smashwords author page to download these books. Happy reading!
By the way, for those of you who use the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled, The Red Dress is available for download from their site here. No matter how you read it, please be sure to review it wherever you can. That goes for all my books. Thank you for stopping by. Stay safe, happy, and healthy.
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New! The Red Dress
Copyright July 2019 by DLD Books
When Eve went to her high school senior prom, she wore a red dress that her mother had made for her. That night, after dancing with the boy of her dreams, she caught him in the act with her best friend. Months later, Eve, a freshman in college, is bullied into giving the dress to her roommate. After her mother finds out, their relationship is never the same again.
Twenty-five years later, Eve, a bestselling author, is happily married with three children. Although her mother suffers from dementia, she still remembers, and Eve still harbors the guilt for giving the dress away. When she receives a Facebook friend request from her old college roommate and an invitation to her twenty-five-year high school class reunion, then meets her former best friend by chance, she must confront the past in order to face the future.
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My Corner 
Abbie, I remember this poem and I love it. I like how you used this song to create such a beautiful and moving poem about your own life experience. Did you write this in response to a lesson from the Hadley course in poetry? That is what I did – I was taking the course at the time I wrote it. But, typical for me, I never finished the course. I write really slow, and I managed to get about 1/2 way through the course – but never submitted anything on time. I really got a lot of great poems written by doing the course and this was one of them.
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Thank you, Lynda. My local poetry group once used a similar prompt to write a poem inspired by a song, and that’s what inspired this poem. I took the Hadley poetry course several years ago and was able to complete it, despite the fact that I was working with the Dvorkins to publish My Ideal Partner and doing other projects. I don’t remember this assignment, though. We might have been using a different book. But that course also inspired a lot of poems for me as well, and it’s too bad Hadley is no longer offering it.
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I made it to Chapter 11 – out of 14 in the series. I thought this was the best poetry course I’ve ever seen. I am ready to begin Chapter 11 on Genre – Every poem I wrote during this course was published in a poetry journal or anthology – and in my own books. My book – Star Signs_ was inspired by the first poem I wrote in the cours – “Star Signs.” So it certainly is a valuable book and I agree – it is sad that this course was discontinued. I quit after Vicky left as teacher – She was very good.
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