Words You Can Chew
Every Thursday, I post a poetry-writing prompt here on the site. This weekly tradition is designed to help you explore new ideas, experiment with different writing techniques, and expand your literary horizons. My aim is to provide you with thought-provoking themes, intriguing images, or captivating wordplay that will stimulate your artistic senses. You are free to interpret the prompt in any way you like and express yourself through poetry or creative writing.
Nearly every poet we've spent time with this season has taught the same lesson from a different angle: say it plainly, and let the plainness carry the weight. This week we're going somewhere else entirely. This week the words themselves are the point — how they sit in your mouth, how they catch in your teeth, how a line can taste like wet dirt or sound like a lid coming down on a jar.
Fall is the right season for this, because fall is the season of work. Not the pretty part — the hauling, digging, scalding, stacking, putting-up part. Seamus Heaney built an entire Nobel-winning body of work out of that labor and the thick, chewy language it deserves.
The Poet Who Dug with a Pen
Seamus Heaney was born in 1939 on a farm in County Derry, Northern Ireland, the eldest of nine children. His father was a cattle dealer and farmer; the house had no electricity in his early years; the work of that place — turf-cutting, plowing, churning, harvesting — went into him before any book did. He went on to become a Harvard professor, to translate Beowulf, and to win the Nobel Prize in 1995, and he never stopped writing about the ground he came from.
The first poem in his first collection is about watching his father dig potatoes and his grandfather cut turf, and ending with the recognition that the only tool he himself has is a pen — which he will have to use the way they used a spade. It's a poem almost everyone has encountered, and most readers remember what it says. Fewer notice what it does: the squelch, the slap, the curt cuts, the gravelly consonants that make your jaw work as you read it aloud. He wrote the sound of the shovel going in.
His other famous early poem follows children gorging on blackberries and hoarding the glut in a bathtub, only to find it furred over with fungus days later, the sweet flesh turned sour — a poem about appetite and rot that refuses to end on the pleasure. That's Heaney's honesty. The harvest is real and so is the spoilage.
He died in 2013. His last message, sent to his wife from the hospital, was two words in Latin: don't be afraid. It was, like his poems, short and physical and exactly enough.
The Heaney Essence
Seamus Heaney's poetry is built on a few recognizable foundations:
Language as texture — he chose words for how they feel in the mouth, favoring thick Anglo-Saxon consonants over smooth Latinate ones; his lines are meant to be chewed
The named tool — never "a shovel" if it was a slane, never "the container" if it was a crock; precision of naming is a form of respect for the work and the people who did it
Labor as inheritance — hands doing a task become a line stretching back through generations, and the poem is how he joins it
Rot at the center — the sweetness always turns; the glut molders, the crop fails, and he reports it without flinching
The dirt made sacred — his reverence runs downward, into mud, bog, and root, never upward into abstraction
The small turn home — his poems often end by quietly connecting the old work to his own hands now, without ever stating the lesson
Notice the structure: he gives you the physical work in language so tactile you can feel it, and the meaning arrives through your body before it reaches your head.
This Week's Prompt: The Work of the Season
Today, I invite you to write a poem you can taste — about the unglamorous autumn labor of the people you came from.
Write a poem about one piece of seasonal fall work you did or watched someone do: canning, digging, hauling wood, shucking corn, cleaning game, pressing cider, raking, butchering. Choose your words for how they sound in the mouth. Name every tool exactly. And somewhere in the poem, let something spoil, break, or be lost.
Getting Started
- Pick the work and the hands. One specific autumn task, and whose hands you watched doing it. A grandmother at the canner. A father splitting wood. Your own younger hands, numb on a bucket handle.
- Collect sounds before you write lines. Say the work out loud. Make a list of twenty words that belong to it — scald, brine, knuckle, grit, rattle, hull, slop, hickory, lid. Pick the ones that make your mouth work. Those are your building blocks.
- Name the tools exactly. Not "a pot" — the pressure canner, the blue speckled enamel one. Not "a knife" — the bone-handled one kept in the drawer by the stove. The specific name is the whole difference between a poem about work and a poem that was written by someone who did it.
- Load the consonants. Aim for at least five words in the poem that are genuinely hard to say — clustered, clipped, blunt. Put them where you want the reader to slow down and feel the line physically.
- Let something go bad. A jar that didn't seal. A bushel left too long. A hand cut on the lid. Heaney never let the harvest stay perfect, and the spoilage is what keeps the poem from becoming a greeting card about simpler times.
- End at your own hands. In the last lines, come forward to now — what you do with your hands today, in a kitchen or an office or on a keyboard. Make the connection and then stop. Do not explain it.
My challenges and prompts are not interactive. You don't have to come back to link up. No comments are required, just your creativity!
A Few Lines to Carry With You
Read your draft out loud. That's not optional this week. If it slides by smoothly, it isn't done — go back and replace the smooth words with blunt ones, the general nouns with the real names. Heaney's gift was treating farm labor with the full weight of the English language, and the people in your own family who did this work deserve the same.
And resist nostalgia. This is the trap of the harvest poem. The work was hard, the hands cracked, the kitchen was too hot, and somebody always lost a batch. Let it be true and the poem will be worth far more than a sweet one.
The jar that didn't seal doesn't know it's an elegy. Your grandmother's knuckles don't know they're a lineage. That recognition is yours to bring.
Learn More About Seamus Heaney
You can read a detailed biography at the Poetry Foundation website, and his 1995 Nobel lecture, Crediting Poetry, is freely available on the Nobel Prize site.
Death of a Naturalist (1966) is where the farm poems begin and the best place to start.
Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966–1996 gathers the essential work, and his translation of Beowulf is a thunderous demonstration of what he could do with sound.
My challenges and prompts are not interactive. You don't have to come back to link up. No comments are required, just your creativity!
Here's my own attempt at writing in Seamus Heaney's style:
Putting Up
The kitchen scalds. October outside, but in here it is August still, steam slicking the windows blind, the big speckled canner knocking its lid like something shut in and wanting out.
She works the jars up out of the bath with the rubber-jawed lifter, sets them clicking on a dishrag — tomatoes skinned and crammed, their slit hides slipping off in the blanch water, seed-slop and grit at the bottom of the pot.
My job is lids. Ring, flat, ring, flat. Her knuckles are split at the creases from the brine and she does not mention it. Hickory going in the stove, a thunk and a settle, and the dog under the table.
All evening the sealing starts — that small dull pop, one and then one, the sound of a thing agreeing to keep.
Two didn't take. By morning the lids gave under her thumb, soft as a bruise, and she carried them out to the fence line and poured them off without a word, glass rinsed and turned mouth-down to dry.
I have her hands now, the same square nails. I type all day in a cold clean room. Nothing I make this year will pop in the dark and hold.
