Creative Writing - Assignments 6/6/11 - 6/14

The poems are about the people who lived in the town called Spoon River and what they were able to say once they were dead and in their graves.

Version:

Two Lives at Spoon River

Create a story or a play or a poem of 300 words from these two poems by Edgar Lee Masters with characters, some alliteration, purpose, plot, differing points of view, table talk, imagery, description of a Sunday dinner, some good old fashioned religious back stabbing remarks, and a theme, (or an argument about a theme), a joke (it doesn’t have to be funny), and subplot about a mysterious stranger who returns to the town to pay respects to Mrs. Merritt’s grave, twenty-five years later, at midnight in the rain, and leaves behind him a poem that nobody reads except us, the reader of your original story.  Good Luck! 

Mrs. Merritt

 SILENT before the jury

Returning no word to the judge when he asked me

If I had aught to say against the sentence,

Only shaking my head.

What could I say to people who thought

That a woman of thirty-five was at fault

When her lover of nineteen killed her husband?

Even though she had said to him over and over,

"Go away, Elmer, go far away,

I have maddened your brain with the gift of my body:

You will do some terrible thing."

And just as I feared, he killed my husband;

With which I had nothing to do, before

God Silent for thirty years in prison

And the iron gates of Joliet

Swung as the gray and silent trusties

Carried me out in a coffin.

Minerva Jones

I am Minerva, the village poetess,

Hooted at, jeered at by the Yahoos of the street

For my heavy body, cock-eye, and rolling walk,

And all the more when "Butch" Weldy

Captured me after a brutal hunt.

He left me to my fate with Doctor Meyers;

And I sank into death, growing numb from the feet up,

Like one-stepping deeper and deeper into a stream of ice.

Will some one go to the village newspaper,

And gather into a book the verses I wrote?—

I thirsted so for love!

I hungered so for life!

------------------------------------------ 

Oscar Hummel

  I STAGGERED on through darkness,
  There was a hazy sky, a few stars
  Which I followed as best I could.
  It was nine o'clock, I was trying to get home.
  But somehow I was lost,
  Though really keeping the road.
  Then I reeled through a gate and into a yard,
  And called at the top of my voice:
  "Oh, Fiddler! Oh, Mr. Jones!"
  (I thought it was his house and he would show me the way home. )
  But who should step out but A. D. Blood,
  In his night shirt, waving a stick of wood,
  And roaring about the cursed saloons,
  And the criminals they made?
  "You drunken Oscar Hummel", he said,
  As I stood there weaving to and fro,
  Taking the blows from the stick in his hand
  Till I dropped down dead at his feet.
William Goode
  To all in the village I seemed, no doubt,
  To go this way and that way, aimlessly. .
  But here by the river you can see at twilight
  The soft—winged bats fly zig-zag here and there—
  They must fly so to catch their food.
  And if you have ever lost your way at night,
  In the deep wood near Miller's Ford,
  And dodged this way and now that,
  Wherever the light of the Milky Way shone through,
  Trying to find the path,
  You should understand I sought the way
  With earnest zeal, and all my wanderings
  Were wanderings in the quest.
Mrs. Sibley
  THE secret of the stars—gravitation.
  The secret of the earth—layers of rock.
  The secret of the soil—to receive seed.
  The secret of the seed—the germ.
  The secret of man—the sower.
  The secret of woman—the soil.
  My secret: Under a mound that you shall never find.

Trainor, the Druggist

  Only the chemist can tell, and not always the chemist,
  What will result from compounding
  Fluids or solids.
  And who can tell
  How men and women will interact
  On each other, or what children will result?
  There were Benjamin Pantier and his wife,
  Good in themselves, but evil toward each other;
  He oxygen, she hydrogen,
  Their son, a devastating fire.
  I Trainor, the druggist, a miser of chemicals,
  Killed while making an experiment,
  Lived unwedded.
Tom Merritt
  AT first I suspected something—
  She acted so calm and absent-minded.
  And one day I heard the back door shut
  As I entered the front, and I saw him slink
  Back of the smokehouse into the lot
  And run across the field.
  And I meant to kill him on sight.
  But that day, walking near Fourth Bridge
  Without a stick or a stone at hand,
  All of a sudden I saw him standing
  Scared to death, holding his rabbits,
  And all I could say was, "Don't, Don't, Don't,"
  As he aimed and fired at my heart.
Sam Hookey
  I RAN away from home with the circus,
  Having fallen in love with Mademoiselle Estralada,
  The lion tamer.
  One time, having starved the lions
  For more than a day,
  I entered the cage and began to beat Brutus
  And Leo and Gypsy.
  Whereupon Brutus sprang upon me,
  And killed me.
  On entering these regions
  I met a shadow who cursed me,
  And said it served me right. . . .
  It was Robespierre!
Minerva Jones
  I AM Minerva, the village poetess,
  Hooted at, jeered at by the Yahoos of the street
  For my heavy body, cock-eye, and rolling walk,
  And all the more when "Butch" Weldy
  Captured me after a brutal hunt.
  He left me to my fate with Doctor Meyers;
  And I sank into death, growing numb from the feet up,
  Like one stepping deeper and deeper into a stream of ice.
  Will some one go to the village newspaper,
  And gather into a book the verses I wrote?—
  I thirsted so for love
  I hungered so for life!

Julia Miller

  WE quarreled that morning,
  For he was sixty—five, and I was thirty,
  And I was nervous and heavy with the child
  Whose birth I dreaded.
  I thought over the last letter written me
  By that estranged young soul
  Whose betrayal of me I had concealed
  By marrying the old man.
  Then I took morphine and sat down to read.
  Across the blackness that came over my eyes
  I see the flickering light of these words even now:
  "And Jesus said unto him, Verily
  I say unto thee, To-day thou shalt
  Be with me in paradise."
Editor Whedon
  To be able to see every side of every question;
  To be on every side, to be everything, to be nothing long;
  To pervert truth, to ride it for a purpose,
  To use great feelings and passions of the human family
  For base designs, for cunning ends,
  To wear a mask like the Greek actors—
  Your eight-page paper—behind which you huddle,
  Bawling through the megaphone of big type:
  "This is I, the giant."
  Thereby also living the life of a sneak-thief,
  Poisoned with the anonymous words
  Of your clandestine soul.
  To scratch dirt over scandal for money,
  And exhume it to the winds for revenge,
  Or to sell papers,
  Crushing reputations, or bodies, if need be,
  To win at any cost, save your own life.
  To glory in demoniac power, ditching civilization,
  As a paranoiac boy puts a log on the track
  And derails the express train.
  To be an editor, as I was.
  Then to lie here close by the river over the place
  Where the sewage flows from the village,
  And the empty cans and garbage are dumped,
  And abortions are hidden.

Yee Bow

  THEY got me into the Sunday-school
  In Spoon River And tried to get me to drop
  Confucius for Jesus. I could have been no worse off
  If I had tried to get them to drop Jesus for Confucius.
  For, without any warning, as if it were a prank,
  And sneaking up behind me, Harry Wiley,
  The minister's son, caved my ribs into my lungs,
  With a blow of his fist.
  Now I shall never sleep with my ancestors in Pekin,
  And no children shall worship at my grave

"Ace" Shaw

  I NEVER saw any difference
  Between playing cards for money
  And selling real estate,
  Practicing law, banking, or anything else.
  For everything is chance.
  Nevertheless
  Seest thou a man diligent in business?
  He shall stand before Kings!

Margaret Fuller Slack

  I WOULD have been as great as George Eliot
  But for an untoward fate.
  For look at the photograph of me made by Penniwit,
  Chin resting on hand, and deep—set eyes—
  Gray, too, and far-searching.
  But there was the old, old problem:
  Should it be celibacy, matrimony or unchastity?
  Then John Slack, the rich druggist, wooed me,
  Luring me with the promise of leisure for my novel,
  And I married him, giving birth to eight children,
  And had no time to write.
  It was all over with me, anyway,
  When I ran the needle in my hand
  While washing the baby's things,
  And died from lock—jaw, an ironical death.
  Hear me, ambitious souls,
  Sex is the curse of life.
Mrs. Merritt
  SILENT before the jury
  Returning no word to the judge when he asked me
  If I had aught to say against the sentence,
  Only shaking my head.
  What could I say to people who thought
  That a woman of thirty-five was at fault
  When her lover of nineteen killed her husband?
  Even though she had said to him over and over,
  "Go away, Elmer, go far away,
  I have maddened your brain with the gift of my body:
  You will do some terrible thing."
  And just as I feared, he killed my husband;
  With which I had nothing to do, before
  God Silent for thirty years in prison
  And the iron gates of Joliet
  Swung as the gray and silent trusties
  Carried me out in a coffin.