My Journey with “The Raincoat Poem”
Alright, so today I want to talk about this little project I’ve been tinkering with, something I’ve been calling “the raincoat poem.” It wasn’t like some grand plan, you know? It just sort of… started. I was looking out the window the other day, classic grey, drizzly afternoon, and saw this old raincoat hanging on the back of a chair. And boom, an idea sparked.
So, I grabbed my notebook – I’m old school like that, pen and paper first, always. I just started jotting down words, phrases, anything that came to mind when I thought about that raincoat. Honestly, the first few lines were terrible. Really, just a jumble of clichés about rain and being sad. I almost gave up right there.
But then I thought, okay, what’s this specific raincoat about? Not just any raincoat. I remembered who it belonged to, or rather, who I imagined it might belong to. That’s when things started to shift. I started to build a bit of a character, a story around it. I spent a good hour just staring at the darn thing, then back at my page, then back at the raincoat.
- I tried to think about the texture – that slightly stiff, waxy feel.
- I thought about the smell – that faint scent of damp earth and maybe old closets.
- I considered the sounds it might make – a soft crinkle, the snap of a button.
I wrote a few stanzas, then crumpled them up. Did that a few times, actually. It’s part of the process, isn’t it? Getting out the bad stuff to make room for something, well, less bad. I find that walking away for a bit helps too. So I made a cup of tea, stared out the window some more (the rain was still going, good old reliable rain), and then came back to it.
This time, I tried to focus less on rhyming perfectly and more on the feeling. That was a bit of a breakthrough for me. I’ve always been a bit hung up on making things neat and tidy, but poems, they’re not always like that, are they? Sometimes they’re a bit messy, like life. I started thinking about what a raincoat does. It protects. It shields. But it also witnesses things, silently.
I got a decent draft down after that. Not amazing, mind you, but it had something. A core idea. Then came the fiddly bit – tweaking words, changing line breaks, reading it aloud to see how it flowed. My cat probably thinks I’m nuts, muttering to myself in the corner. I probably read it aloud, oh, maybe ten, fifteen times? Each time, I’d catch a clunky phrase or a word that just didn’t sit right.
It’s still not a finished masterpiece, not by a long shot. But the practice itself, the act of sitting down and wrestling with words, trying to pull something coherent out of a vague feeling and a visual – that’s the good stuff. It’s like exercising a muscle I don’t use often enough. And for me, that whole process, from that first glance at an old raincoat to having a few verses on paper, that’s what this “raincoat poem” practice was all about. Just the simple act of trying to make something.
