There\u2019s creepy music on the stair\r\ndespite nobody being there\r\nno boom-box on the landing sits\r\nand I am scared out of my wits\r\nbecause I know how this one goes\r\n(and every movie villain knows)\r\n<\/i>the ingenue without a clue\r\n(as ingenues are wont to do)\r\n<\/i>walks slowly up the steps \u2013 so dark \u2013\r\nyou\u2019d think the family dog would bark\r\nat the intruder we\u2019re aware\r\nshould our insoucient damsel dare\r\nascend those steps where he stands ready\r\n(ten knife-sharp fingers has our Freddy)\r\n<\/i>ready to eviscerate\r\nour heroine, but now he\u2019s late\r\nthe curtain falls, relief from dread!\r\nUntil the sequel, when she\u2019s dead.<\/pre>\n<\/p>\n
\nRarely does a prompt yield the best poetry, but it’s good for waking up a sluggish brain. Or, as Richard Hugo<\/a> wrote, “One way of getting into the world of the imagination is to focus on the play rather than the value of words\u2014if you can manage it you might even ignore the meanings for as long as you can, though that won\u2019t be very long.” Not sure how imaginative this is, but the prompt Robert Brewer gave us to work with, today, was to write a “trope poem.”<\/a> How is it that we know the tropes – they are, by definition, clich\u00e9 – and yet, they can still make us feel something like fear or anticipation? It cannot be that we expect something new and surprising. Sequels work precisely because we know what to expect and however bitterly we complain when we get exactly what we knew we’d get, we keep spending money going back for more of the same. Maybe in a world that’s changing so fast, the superficial fantasy isn’t the fantasy at all – the predictability of the storyline is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
How is it that we know the tropes – they are, by definition, clich\u00e9 – and yet, they can still make us feel something like fear or anticipation?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":137990613,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_has_post_settings":[],"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,7],"tags":[2730,2752,2751,2753],"hashtags":[],"class_list":["post-137990612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry","category-writing","tag-poem","tag-prompt","tag-trope","tag-writing-prompt"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-23 19:05:47","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jahangiri.us\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137990612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jahangiri.us\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jahangiri.us\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jahangiri.us\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jahangiri.us\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137990612"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jahangiri.us\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137990612\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":137990615,"href":"https:\/\/jahangiri.us\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137990612\/revisions\/137990615"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jahangiri.us\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/137990613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jahangiri.us\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137990612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jahangiri.us\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137990612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jahangiri.us\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137990612"},{"taxonomy":"hashtags","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jahangiri.us\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/hashtags?post=137990612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}