Snapshot poetry.

no it's ok, she said
with a cigarette
hanging
on the edge of her mouth
through the curls of smoke
i thought i saw her eyes turn downwards,
thinking of nothing

Our memories play like a series of snapshots - scene after scene after scene. When we remember something, we remember the little snippets of conversation, the occasional swear-word, isolated actions that we can't seem to erase from our minds, and the seemingly trivial visual details that stand out at a particularly difficult moment. They say that literature is about life, and certainly must writing also be about life. Poetry is a particularly effective method of captivating these little snapshots of life: with poetry, we can deconstruct a scene and break it down into the parts that really do matter at that point in time. It's much like a jigsaw puzzle: though some of the pieces may seem to feature nothing interesting, or look almost exactly like any other piece, without them, we can't finish the picture.

The next time you write a poem, think about this: which piece of the puzzle, no matter how uninteresting, has been forgotten by your poem?