I suppose I should post this thread under 12/29, as that’s when I received the poetry prompts. But the writing marathon began 12/15. Either way, that’s not much time to respond, but here goes as I am a few poems short of 52 for the year. I will post them here for now and move them later when I've had a chance to revise them. —MH
Prompt # 1 (for December 15th):
Greetings, Poets, and Welcome to NYPC 13! Okay, here we go…For your first poem--and in keeping with what passes for NYPC tradition--write a haiku about some longterm relief or short-term respite that has happened to you during 2021. Feel free to create a haiku series of hopes and joys if it’s difficult to choose just one. If you need a reminder or refresher about the haiku form, here's something from the Academy of American Poets:
https://poets.org/glossary/haiku
(Please note: You need not email/send in your individual poems to the prompts yet! Near the end of our 30 days, I’ll let you know when to send in a poem for this year’s NYPC chapbook, if you choose to do so!)
Ready…steady…go!
BEGIN AGAIN AFTER THE STORM
A deluge of rain,
lost salmon return to streams,
nosing natal beds.
Creeks roil and churn, froth
a muddy milkshake of foam
and new beginnings.
Fish traverse rapids,
seek natal pools they build redds.
Storm scours them clean.
12/30/21
Maureen Hurley
NYPC 13 Prompt #2 (for December 16th)
Welcome back! I hope your yesterday-haiku(s) [yesterku(s)?] is/are to your liking, and you’re ready for today’s prompt: Realia. The basic definition of realia would be objects and materials from everyday life, especially when used as teaching aids. For a more expanded definition, here’s this from Merriam-Webster: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/realia
Write a poem in which you reveal to your reader(s) something historical, ethical, moral, utilitarian, profound, mystical, spiritual, and/or political using an everyday object—or objects. For example, you could instruct someone about your personal heritage by referring to objects common in your childhood or youth (e. g., a long-playing record, a crosscut saw, ballpeen hammer, Ticonderoga #2 pencil, gyroscope…)—OR how objects in your life now (e. g., a blood pressure monitor, home Covid test, summer vacation souvenirs, alternative proteins) reveal something related to your character or concerns at the moment or for the past year.—AND/OR use whatever this is—to explain something vital about living a human life in such times as these. (I’ll tell you about this object in a couple of days, but use your imagination to describe it now.)
Ready? Steady… Go!
NYPC 13 Prompt #3 (for December 17th):
Now You Say This is Home: I live in California’s Great Central Valley. Some people who don’t live here—and quite a few that do—are unimpressed with, well, its flatness, as they see it. Having lived here for VII+ decades, I am well aware of the lack of seashore, snowcapped peaks, and the multiple enticements of large metropolises (unless you include Fresno.) However, I consider it home, with all its subtle, particular beauties (snow geese chattering on the marshy ground in January, shimmering orange or blue dragonflies in July, the aroma of fresh peaches all summer, the sound of children learning to memorize or create a poem) as well the harsh lives of so many who live along the asphalt corridor and conduit known as Highway 99. But that’s my home. Time to write about yours.
Write a poem of celebration, despair, or straight description of whatever/wherever you consider your home. It might be a county, town, neighborhood, house, apartment, specific room… Show-don’t-tell what the idea of “home” is to you. What makes a home? Finally, see if your poem can say what it needs to say without the word home. Feel free to be inspired or by this poem by the great Fresno poet Philip Levine:
Our Valley
We don't see the ocean, not ever, but in July and August
when the worst heat seems to rise from the hard clay
of this valley, you could be walking through a fig orchard
when suddenly the wind cools and for a moment
you get a whiff of salt, and in that moment you can almost
believe something is waiting beyond the Pacheco Pass,
something massive, irrational, and so powerful even
the mountains that rise east of here have no word for it.
You probably think I'm nuts saying the mountains
have no word for ocean, but if you live here
you begin to believe they know everything.
They maintain that huge silence we think of as divine,
a silence that grows in autumn when snow falls
slowly between the pines and the wind dies
to less than a whisper and you can barely catch
your breath because you're thrilled and terrified.
You have to remember this isn't your land.
It belongs to no one, like the sea you once lived beside
and thought was yours. Remember the small boats
that bobbed out as the waves rode in, and the men
who carved a living from it only to find themselves
carved down to nothing. Now you say this is home,
so go ahead, worship the mountains as they dissolve in dust,
wait on the wind, catch a scent of salt, call it our life.
Philip Levine
From News of the World I, © 2011.
Ready, Steady, Go…
THE IDEA OF HOME
The idea of home is difficult
when it is tied in with your childhood,
and someone else lives in the house
that has fallen down upon itself
like worn out slippers tossed on the garbage heap.
I sleep in my brother’s old room,
my cousin having restored the room,
used for storage for decades,
to a somewhat inhabitable state,
but it is more like an impersonal second class
hotel room than a bedroom.
We restored her room last year, once it was my room.
This house, no longer a home filled with memory.
But her brother, the other cousin,
sleeps on the living room couch in squalor,
you can smell him from 20 feet away.
The house is filled with his rubble,
mostly tools, broken car parts, greasy walls,
the floor is buckling, the tiles breached.
I cannot understand how people live like this.
Or why he won't move into the restored bedroom
so we can get on with fixing the rest of the house.
When I lived in this house, things had their place.
Order was restored, I despair each time I visit,
but in order to teach, in order to do my jobs,
in order to make a living, this is a temporary waystation
where I can hang my head and slug my pillow.
It is not without its problems, my cousin, volatile, depressed,
has no social skills, no filter and so I walk on eggs,
on the floor the creaks and warbles,
because the joists are beginning to fail.
When I sleep in my brother’s old room I fear the wind,
and listen for the sound of the old cypress tree coming down on me,
it died decades ago yet still stands during this deluge of deluges.
We dig ditches to reroute water, to save what is left of the driveway.
I am reminded of my childhood again and again,
how, in winter I would follow my grandmother outside
to deepen the ditches, to move the water down the hill,
and how each year I got bronchitis
because I was chilled to the bone playing in those ditches.
Such a profound melancholia emanates from those days.
I cannot bring it back.
In this way I am reminded nothing belongs to us.
We belong to the earth, and nothing more.
12/30/21
Maureen Hurley
NYPC 13 Prompt #4 (for December 18th):
To start today’s prompt, I offer this plug— In October, I was fortunate to visit the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. There are stunning works there, and I highly recommend it. According to the website, “the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art is the only national museum in the United States dedicated to the collection, exhibition, conservation and study of the arts of Africa. The museum’s collection of more than 9,000 African Art objects represents nearly every area of the continent of Africa and contains a variety of media and art forms—textiles, photography, sculpture, pottery, painting and jewelry and video art—dating from ancient to contemporary times. The museum also has the largest publicly held collection of contemporary African art in the United States.”
This is a 2012 piece by Egyptian artist Ghada Amer that particularly inspired me: It’s titled The Blue Bra Girls; for some background, context, and a description by Ghada Amer, you might wish to go to the website below. However, if you’d prefer to write to today’s prompt without reading the info from the site, that’s a perfectly fine choice. Anyway…
Write a poem about the sculpture. Possibilities: What do you make of it? What speaks to you (to use an overused phrase)? What do its shape and specific details have to say about how we relate to other humans?
Ready, Steady, Go…
P. S. As promised, here’s some information from the Museum about Rainbow Serpent—the 2007 sculpture by Benin artist Romuald Hazoumé included in Prompt #2 (also from the National Museum of African Art): “Romuald Hazoumè is perhaps best known for transforming jerry cans used to carry gasoline into mask-like forms. As he says, "People expect Africans to make masks. So, I make masks."
"In Rainbow Serpent (Dan-Ayido-Houedo), however, Hazoumè employs these same jerry cans to fashion the monumental form of a rainbow serpent swallowing its tail, a powerful symbol connected to fertility, prosperity, and the eternal cycle of life for the Fon and Yoruba peoples of Benin and Nigeria. By subverting expectations with his materials and subject matter, Hazoumè seeks to draw attention to the consequences of oil extraction, the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, and the continued abuses found in unequal global trade relations.”
NYPC 13 Prompt #5 (for December 19th):
All of Me: In this case, I’m referring to the 1931 jazz standard, not the 2013 John Legend song… A few weeks ago, a longtime friend sent me a YouTube video of four young musicians in a band called Django Legacy Band* performing the song as an instrumental in the style of Django Reinhardt at The Charm City Django Fest in Baltimore, February 2018. I’ve not been able to shake those sounds and images ever since—though I must admit I’ve not tried very hard to do so.
and today’s prompt: Write a poem incorporating one or more of these possibilities…
a meditation, romance, or rant about the phrase “all of me;”
an ode-like piece about youth, musicianship, that song, virtuosity, loss, or Django Reinhardt himself (who, by the way, played guitar with the ring finger and little finger of his left hand having been badly burned in a Romani caravan fire;)
a series of fast-paced (or leisurely lyrical) stanzas as you listen to the performance without the visual;
a “concert review” of the film clip in which, somehow, snow appears as someone offstage sings the last line of the song:
You took the part that once was my heart,
So why not take all of me?
something entirely different…
[Band members: Chris Jenkins, guitar (left); Henry Acker, guitar (center); Samuel Farthing, guitar (right); Grant Flick, Violin; Eduardo Belo, double bass.]
[Wikipedia article on Django Reinhardt:
Ready…Steady…wait for it…Go!
Prompt #6 (for December 20th):
One Remedy for BPS — It’d be my guess that most poets have suffered from BPS (Blank Page Syndrome) every once in a while. (Most times? All the time?) Truth-be-told: I got the inspiration for this prompt from the current edition of the sublime Two Sylvias Press’ Poetry Prompt Advent Calendar. Here’s the adaptation: write a poem in which BPS (aka “writer’s block”) is a feature, however large or small. Do your best to include some, most, or all of these words: cramp, luscious, quandary, grrr (hey, the OSD—Online Slang Dictionary—says it’s a word), persevere, swamp, drought, funnel, vaxxed, glacial…. You might begin your poem with something like It won’t budge… or How do I reboot my brain?...
Ready/Steady/Go
NYPC 13 Prompt #7 (for December 21st):
The Pantone Color Institute’s Color of the Year 2022 is PANTONE 17-3938 Very Peri
Here is Pantone’s own description:
“Displaying a carefree confidence and a daring curiosity that animates our creative spirit, inquisitive and intriguing PANTONE 17-3938 Very Peri helps us to embrace this altered landscape of possibilities, opening us up to a new vision as we rewrite our lives. Rekindling gratitude for some of the qualities that blue represents complemented by a new perspective that resonates today, PANTONE 17-3938 Very Peri places the future ahead in a new light.
We are living in transformative times. PANTONE 17-3938 Very Peri is a symbol of the global zeitgeist of the moment and the transition we are going through. As we emerge from an intense period of isolation, our notions and standards are changing, and our physical and digital lives have merged in new ways. Digital design helps us to stretch the limits of reality, opening the door to a dynamic virtual world where we can explore and create new color possibilities. With trends in gaming, the expanding popularity of the metaverse and rising artistic community in the digital space PANTONE 17-3938 Very Peri illustrates the fusion of modern life and how color trends in the digital world are being manifested in the physical world and vice versa.”
Whew. Of course this could be considered as a consummate example of corporate wish-fulfillment, and perhaps divergent from your own assessment of the attributes of the color described. However, take a close look at “Very Peri” by going to the Pantone site:
or for an alternate description, visit this CNN Style site:
Write a poem in which you free-associate the feelings you get in seeing this blue/violet shade of periwinkle, perhaps as those feelings relate to the events of the past hour, month, year, or quadrennium. Maybe this colors reminds you of a period of your life when your moods were influenced by such a color, or you wore this color exclusively.
Of course, feel free to write your poem including other colors instead of or in addition to this year’s Pantone Color, or about a world without any colors whatsoever. You might write a poem about the flowering plant periwinkle (a type of vinca.) You could choose to write about peri, which Merriam-Webster defines as
one of a large group of beautiful, fairylike beings of Persian mythology, represented as descended from fallen angels and excluded from paradise until their penance is accomplished.
any lovely, graceful person.
Have a Very Peri writing time! Load up your poetry palette, and ReadySteadyGo…
NYPC 13 Prompt #8 (for December 22nd):
You Know, Now; Now What?
What do we know and how do we know it? How fast or slow can “knowing” arrive? What could happen if we were to admit that having so much knowledge available so rapidly with a keystroke may not be near enough? How much of what we know is misremembered—or a lie? For those of you who might remember (and still savor) the satire group The Firesign Theater: they released a 1974 LP titled Everything You Know is Wrong.
Write a poem about the things you’re sure you know, or knew when you were younger and still remember—or have forgotten.
or
Write a poem in response to the assertions and questions in this poem by Joyce Sutphen:
Now That Anything Could Happen
You now know that anything could happen;
things that never happened before, things that
only happened in movies and nightmares
are happening now, as if nothing could
stop them. You know now that you are not safe,
you know you live in fragile skin and bones,
that even steel and concrete can melt away,
and that the earth itself can come unhinged,
shaken from its orbit around the sun.
You know, now that anything can happen,
it’s hard to know what will, and what will you
do now that you know? What words will you say
now that you could say anything? What hands
will you hold? Whose heart will beat inside you?
Joyce Sutphen
from Naming the Stars.
Copyright © 2004 by Joyce Sutphen.
or
Pick a word, phrase, line, or image from the poem and make that the title of your poem about anything that strikes you fancy or stirs your soul.
Ready, Steady, GO—
NYPC 13 Prompt #9 (for December 23rd):
So: Forecasts. Don’t worry; this is not a prompt about what you predict 2022 will be like—unless you’d like it to be…
According to the Merriam-Webster definition of forecast, “FORECAST adds the implication of anticipating eventualities and differs from PREDICT in being usually concerned with probabilities rather than certainties.” It also includes related—but not identical—terms such as foretell, prophesy, and prognosticate.
Write a poem about one or more forms of forecasting related to such “events” as weather, stock market, romance after a first date, marriage after the first (or tenth or twentieth or…) year, falling or frozen leaves, an incident when you heard a voice from someone not present in the space and time you occupy, or something someone else predicted/forecast that turned out to be true or untrue. Remember to include rich sensory details if that will serve your poem.
For an example and/or inspiration, here’s a poem by Wendy Xu:
The Forecast
Distrust this season breeds
in me whole
blue worlds, am second
to leafy nouns,
pinned back darkening lip
of the night,
untrustworthy sidewalk glazed
and sleeping there,
peachy trees, a line drawn from one
brow of a star down
and planted, each pillow
little shimmer, little wilt startled
from out the arranging field
moonlit pale behind
no foxes, in me finding the fragrant
new crisis, not dead still
where I love you in feast
and pledge, worlds rolling first
on crookedly
and on.
Wendy Xu
Source: Poetry (December 2014)
Ready, Steady; Go…
NYPC 13 Prompt #10 (for December 24th):
As I write this—the afternoon of the 20th—my wife and older son are discussing jigsaw puzzles they remember receiving as Christmas gifts. They are also considering ordering a new one for this holiday season, wondering if it could arrive by the 24th and which room would become the “puzzle room” on the 25th. So today’s prompt has something to do with puzzles, holiday traditions, waiting for package delivery, and space utilization. Oh, yeah, and art. You can call today’s prompt Corner Pieces are My Life, Of Course We’re Having Clam Chowder for Christmas Eve, The Postman Rings Eventually, Multipurpose Room, I Don’t Know Much About Art, But…, or something entirely unrelated to any of this.
Or you could explore this 1904-1905 Neo-Impressionist painting by Henri Matisse (whose 152nd birthday is on New Year’s Eve) titled Winter Landscape on the Banks of the Seine:
How do the “puzzle pieces” (shapes, colors, angles, lines, textures, etc.) fit and harmonize together? What sense of anticipation is in play here? Or as I used to ask my students after reading a poem with them, What do you make of this?
Write a poem set in wintertime in which you attend to details of what your senses make of this season—or the aforementioned puzzles, holiday traditions, waiting for package delivery, and space utilization—or the Matisse painting—or any work of art (painting, sculpture, musical composition, theatre, dance, architecture, etc.) as you define or characterize art.
For musical accompaniment as you write, consider listening to Images pour orchestra by Claude Debussy, which he began composing in 1905, the same year that Matisse painted Winter Landscape on the Banks of the Seine. Fair warning: the piece starts very softly, is in three sections, and lasts for a little over 27 minutes. Listen to as much, little, or none as you like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TerWx9fe5yo
or as a very different alternative, try some very aggressive speed metal or a recording of snow falling on a body of water—or s i l e n c e…
Ready? Steady? Go
NYPC 13 Prompt #11 (for December 25th
O Come, Gather in Light— Whatever holiday you’re celebrating—or avoiding—today, I wish you a day with a chance to gather with friends and/or strangers in a space with light enough to remind you that although Tuesday—the Winter Solstice—was the shortest day and longest night of the year, light is present whether we see it or not.
Write a poem in which light is an element and/or you are gathered with someone(s) to celebrate or honor light of some sort, even if the gathering is virtual and the light is invisible.
Please keep in mind that this season is not joyful for everyone, and that amidst all the festivities, noises of merriment, and bright colored lights, darkness is present, too. Loneliness, isolation, tears, weariness, struggle, division, hunger, loss, disease—these do not only appear during holidays, and your poem very well may include these elements as part of your poem’s truth.
If you wish to include images of healing, wholeness, peace, comfort, rest, hope, joy, love, and other more positive facets of the season as a sort of counterbalancing, do, by all means.
I wanted to include a poem that spoke to today’s theme(s), but couldn’t choose, so here are three:
Radiance
Over your gray and white oval marble-top kitchen table,
the meeting of our eyes makes the room grow brighter.
Our faces, layer after layer, become so vibrant
the light appears to crest in waves.
We have become changed by it, nothing can be
the same after it. When I bend down to touch
the shape of deer tracks in the damp sand, it is in
the same way I place my fingers over your body.
When I stand beside a freshet in a meadow
the sun catches the rings of the water's long ripples
in the wind, that is the same glimmer we hold
when our eyes meet in the kitchen over
your gray and white oval marble-top table.
Every day for the rest of my life, yours is the face
I want to see when I awake in the morning.
Wally Swist
from Huang Po and the Dimensons of Love
© Southern Illinois University Press, 2012.
A Candle in the Night
Stone is tender
to lichen.
Lichen is tender
to the earth and its other
inhabitants. What are
you and I tender to?
When a black hole
swallows a star,
it must do so
tenderly, since
a universe hinges
on tenderness.
At midnight
your candle burns
with tenderness,
dreamlike in an amber
votive, its frame
flickering tenderly.
Nathan Spoon
originally published in American Poetry Review.
The Coming of Light
Even this late it happens:
the coming of love, the coming of light.
You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves,
stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows,
sending up warm bouquets of air.
Even this late the bones of the body shine
and tomorrow's dust flares into breath.
Mark Strand
from The Late Hour
Knopf, © 2002.
NYPC 13 Prompt #12 (for December 26th):
Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto,
or
Ai-Da, We Hardly Knew Ye—
First, I wish you all a good day full of good poetry to read and write…
A few days ago, a dear friend and fellow poet sent me a CNN article that grabbed my imagination by the throat and made me both smile and shudder a bit:
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/uk-pavilion-expo-2020-dubai-spc-intl/index.html
Then I accessed another article on the same topic:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/27/tech/ai-da-robot-intl-scli-gbr/index.html
What are your reactions to these articles? What words come to mind and/or which words do you want to say out loud right now but don’t because you’re so polite? How do you think you stack up to Ai-Da as a poet? Should there be some sort of legislation as regards Articially Intelligent wordsmiths?
Write a poem using one or more of these approaches:
as if you were Ai-Da or one of her family members; how is the world as you experience it as a writer?
Describe and critique Ai-Da performing her work at a poetry reading of her work. She’s on a double bill with one of your favorite poets; explore their different approaches to poetry.
Use one of more of these words (or their variants) as the keystone or title of your work: artificial, intelligence, humanoid, algorithm, collective, message, maze, robotics, couplets, ethics, divine, comedy, revulsion, apprehension...
Since Ai-Da consumed all of Dante’s La Davina Commedia, what would she make of Emily Dickinson’s “I dwell in Possibility”? (I’m kinda intrigued by what she’d make of the word “Gambrel”—as in a gambled [gabled] roof—when one of its other definitions is “the hock of an animal, especially of a horse” as well as “gambrel stick—a wood or metal device for suspending a slaughtered animal.”) Anyway, here ‘tis
I dwell in Possibility --
I dwell in Possibility—
A fairer House than Prose—
More numerous of Windows—
Superior—for Doors—
Of Chambers as the Cedars—
Impregnable of Eye—
And for an Everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky—
Of Visitors—the fairest—
For Occupation—This—
Emily Dickinson. Public domain.
Write a poem to Ai-Da. Here are a couple of pictures you may wish to use:
Ai-Da & Her Plus-One:
NYPC 13 Prompt #13 (for December 27th):
For a change, a brief(er) prompt—
I Kicked the Blankets on the Floor*
For anyone who’s ever lost sleep, counted sheep, tossed and turned, fretted in bed about the myriad perturbations of the day/week/month/year, hallucinated about apparitions on the roof or doors and windows moving like mouths telling you something vital but garbled:
Write a poem about sleeplessness and/or the yearning for sleep.
Here are two poems to get you sparked to write or put to sleep:
Insomnia
Now you hear what the house has to say.
Pipes clanking, water running in the dark,
the mortgaged walls shifting in discomfort,
and voices mounting in an endless drone
of small complaints like the sounds of a family
that year by year you’ve learned how to ignore.
But now you must listen to the things you own,
all that you’ve worked for these past years,
the murmur of property, of things in disrepair,
the moving parts about to come undone,
and twisting in the sheets remember all
the faces you could not bring yourself to love.
How many voices have escaped you until now,
the venting furnace, the floorboards underfoot,
the steady accusations of the clock
numbering the minutes no one will mark.
The terrible clarity this moment brings,
the useless insight, the unbroken dark.
Dana Gioia
from 99 Poems: New and Selected.
© 2016 Graywolf Press.
The Night House
Every day the body works in the fields of the world
mending a stone wall
or swinging a sickle through the tall grass—
the grass of civics, the grass of money--
and every night the body curls around itself
and listens for the soft bells of sleep.
But the heart is restless and rises
from the body in the middle of the night,
leaves the trapezoidal bedroom
with its thick, pictureless walls
to sit by herself at the kitchen table
and heat some milk in a pan.
And the mind gets up too, puts on a robe
and goes downstairs, lights a cigarette,
and opens a book on engineering.
Even the conscience awakens
and roams from room to room in the dark,
darting away from every mirror like a strange fish.
And the soul is up on the roof
in her nightdress, straddling the ridge,
singing a song about the wildness of the sea
until the first rip of pink appears in the sky.
Then, they will all return to the sleeping body
the way a flock of birds settles back into a tree,
resuming their daily colloquy,
talking to each other or themselves
even through the heat of long afternoons.
Which is why the body--that house of voices—
sometimes puts down its metal tongs, its needle, or its pen
to stare into the distance,
to listen to all its names being called
before bending again to its labor.
Billy Collins
Picnic, Lightning (1998)
Planting a Tree: In the December 23rd edition of The Slowdown with Ada Limón, Erin Rodoni’s poem “Bury Me in the Woods of My Childhood” is featured:
Bury Me in the Woods of My Childhood
As a child I pledged myself to a tree,
a walnut in the backyard I called mine,
my tree, though it wasn’t
as presumptuous as it sounds.
It was just I didn’t know a word
for what I felt for the tree
and there was no word for whatever it felt
for me, the girl who grazed her knees
daily on its silver bark. The girl who hugged
with her whole body, who closed her eyes
and listened to the humming of leaf and limb,
the aura of insect and birdchatter in its crown,
my private galaxy of sound.
Against my cheek, my tree was comfort
to the small muscles in my jaw,
forever smoothing the world
into something I could stomach. Theirs is
a slow time, of creaks and groans and sways,
and when I lived there I was slow too. I remained
a girl, though I grew older, long-
limbed and limber, my weight feline
in its languor. How I loved the leaves where coolness
lingered as sun lit up the veins inside, and I pressed
my palm against one as if it were a hand, as if to say
There is something now between us, my own ancient.
I was alive. I was in time, drifting as I was the afternoon
entire, cradled but not sleeping, rocking but not
a single bough breaking, not a crack. So awfully
tender, so full of sap. I wonder if the tree
remembers me. I wonder if it asks where
I have gone, and the network of fungi beneath
my feet lights up with my footsteps, relaying
with the symmetry of synapse: She is here.
She grows heavy, then light again.
Erin Rodoni
From And If the Woods Carry You
copyright © 2021. Southern Indiana Review Press.
Write a poem in which a particular tree—or two, or grove, orchard, thicket, stand, farm, or forest—plays a prominent role. Perhaps, as in Rodoni’s poem, your poem deals with memory, energy, and emotion. Maybe you’ll want to write about the
A suggestion: don’t forget some or all of the 5 senses (sight/vision, hearing/auditory, smell/olfactory, taste/gustatory, and touch/tactile) and consider including these additional 2 senses (vestibular/movement and proprioception/body position [awareness].)
For example, I grew up with two immense almond trees in my front yard. The sight and sound of ripe almonds cascading onto huge canvas tarps as they were knocked during harvest, the smell of the accompanying dust and sweat, the taste of the nuts just off the tree, and the feel of almond shells if I trod on them in bare feet, all helped shape my perceptions of life. There was, of course, the sensation of losing my balance as I climbed those trees and the education received by finding out which limbs would bear my weight—and which wouldn’t.
Let your poem breathe; give yourself time… In her introduction to Rodoni’s poem, Ada Limón writes about what she included in a long essay about trees: “My love of trees, my memory of trees, the way they feel like family members, ancestors, markers of time, ways of healing, ways of breathing. The only issue with the essay, really, is that I don’t know how to end it. Because if you’re writing about trees, the subject is endless.”
Who knows? Maybe you’ll write about how trees communicate through the mycelial network!
To find out more about Erin Rodoni and her newest book, And If the Woods Carry You, visit her site: http://erinrodonipoet.com/
To visit The Slowdown site and sign up to receive a daily poem selected by Ada Limón, go here: https://www.slowdownshow.org/
Maybe I’m Amazed…
Write a poem in which you consider any personal experiences you’ve had or stories you’ve read involving a maze or labyrinth. Maybe what comes to mind is Daedelus’ creation, with Theseus, the Minotaur, and Ariadne’s thread all part of the myth. Or perhaps you recall finding your way out of a corn maze, or a pen-and-pencil maze you used to kill time on the way to someplace pleasant or dreadful, or a meditation labyrinth winding ever inward toward a center that might not be physical at all.
Consider this classic hedge maze: the Marlborough Maze at Blenheim Palace—two miles in length and made up of hundreds of yew trees in a design inspired by the 1st Duke of Marlborough’s victory at the Battle of Blenheim in 1704.
Now look beyond the maze to the trees, lawns, fields, and horizon. What feeling do you get from them contrasted with the maze?
Possibly your poem isn’t about the physicality of a maze or labyrinth, but relates experiences you or someone you know (or make up) have had or are having with mazelike struggles and anxiety.
Your poem might be in the form of a list of things or experiences that amaze you…
NYPC 13 Prompt #16 (for December 30th, 2021):
Yesterday’s prompt marked the halfway point in NYPC 13. ‘Bout time for a poetry form challenge, yes? Apart from the first prompt in which you wrote a haiku, we’ve not explored the counterintuitive freedom that can come from writing within the framework of a poetic form. So here goes:
Linking Verses: Think of this challenge as a conversation in poetry between you and a fellow poet—or poets–taking the form of a renga (literally, “linked poem.”)
The short-version description: to quote from the Academy of American Poets explanation, “A renga is a form written by multiple collaborating poets. To create a renga, one poet writes the first stanza, which is three lines long with a total of seventeen syllables. The next poet adds the second stanza, a couplet with seven syllables per line. The third stanza repeats the structure of the first and the fourth repeats the second, alternating in this pattern until the poem’s end.”
For those familiar with the line-and-syllable count of haiku (5/7/5) and tanka (5/7/5/7/7), the collaborative creation of a renga could take on the appearance of a series of tanka. Remember that each poet’s stanza should extend—or“leap”—from the preceding stanza your partner(s) wrote. If you’re really game and down for this, one kind of traditional/standard “completed” renga is 100 verses!
For an expanded explanation of the form, its history, and its variations and possibilities—
from the Academy’s website:
https://poets.org/glossary/renga
from Britannica:
https://www.britannica.com/art/renga
from the MasterClass staff:
https://www.masterclass.com/articles/renga-guide#4-types-of-renga-poems
For an example of traditional renga from the Collaborative Linked Poetry Project:
https://sites.google.com/site/linkedpoetry/forms/renga/renga-example-01
For an example of contemporary renga from a 2011 NPR article:
https://www.npr.org/2011/04/22/135606210/crossing-state-lines-54-writers-one-american-poem
Variations you might consider:
try a language that isn’t always pastoral; perhaps it’s a voice that deals with politics, social justice, human rights, the planet, viruses and their variations, television, books, fashion or food trends—or some or all of these…
adjust the line length(s) as/if it serves the arc of the renga.
write a 10-line partial renga--or two connected tanka--as exemplified in the NPR article about the book Crossing State Lines: 54 Writers, One American Poem. Then send that to one poet friend, who'll write her/his/their own 10-line piece and forward it to another poet, and so on... OR exchange these 10-liners with just one other poet friend...
For a slightly weirder challenge variation, carry on a poetic conversation with yourself or selves. Split your personality as you "exchange" lines with an alternative--or opposite--personality to form a revelatory renga of dissociative identities. One more thing: I was recently gifted with a wonderful new book titled A Different Distance: A Renga by Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Naïr (Milkweed Editions, 2021.) The two poet friends, who live in Paris, began their renga in March 2020 during a full lockdown in France to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. To paraphrase Milkweed Editions’description: Separated by miles and circumstance, Hacker and Naïr created a work of compassionate, collective wisdom and shared humanity. I recommend it highly, as I do Crossing State Lines…
For me, writing poetry in collaboration has been one of the most enriching experiences of my writing life. I wish you all the best in your renga adventure(s!)
O Come, Gather in Light— Whatever holiday you’re celebrating—or avoiding—today, I wish you a day with a chance to gather with friends and/or strangers in a space with light enough to remind you that although Tuesday—the Winter Solstice—was the shortest day and longest night of the year, light is present whether we see it or not.
Write a poem in which light is an element and/or you are gathered with someone(s) to celebrate or honor light of some sort, even if the gathering is virtual and the light is invisible.
Please keep in mind that this season is not joyful for everyone, and that amidst all the festivities, noises of merriment, and bright colored lights, darkness is present, too. Loneliness, isolation, tears, weariness, struggle, division, hunger, loss, disease—these do not only appear during holidays, and your poem very well may include these elements as part of your poem’s truth.
If you wish to include images of healing, wholeness, peace, comfort, rest, hope, joy, love, and other more positive facets of the season as a sort of counterbalancing, do, by all means.
I wanted to include a poem that spoke to today’s theme(s), but couldn’t choose, so here are three:
Radiance
Over your gray and white oval marble-top kitchen table,
the meeting of our eyes makes the room grow brighter.
Our faces, layer after layer, become so vibrant
the light appears to crest in waves.
We have become changed by it, nothing can be
the same after it. When I bend down to touch
the shape of deer tracks in the damp sand, it is in
the same way I place my fingers over your body.
When I stand beside a freshet in a meadow
the sun catches the rings of the water's long ripples
in the wind, that is the same glimmer we hold
when our eyes meet in the kitchen over
your gray and white oval marble-top table.
Every day for the rest of my life, yours is the face
I want to see when I awake in the morning.
Wally Swist
from Huang Po and the Dimensons of Love
© Southern Illinois University Press, 2012.
A Candle in the Night
Stone is tender
to lichen.
Lichen is tender
to the earth and its other
inhabitants. What are
you and I tender to?
When a black hole
swallows a star,
it must do so
tenderly, since
a universe hinges
on tenderness.
At midnight
your candle burns
with tenderness,
dreamlike in an amber
votive, its frame
flickering tenderly.
Nathan Spoon
originally published in American Poetry Review.
The Coming of Light
Even this late it happens:
the coming of love, the coming of light.
You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves,
stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows,
sending up warm bouquets of air.
Even this late the bones of the body shine
and tomorrow's dust flares into breath.
Mark Strand
from The Late Hour
Knopf, © 2002.
NYPC 13 Prompt #12 (for December 26th):
Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto,
or
Ai-Da, We Hardly Knew Ye—
First, I wish you all a good day full of good poetry to read and write…
A few days ago, a dear friend and fellow poet sent me a CNN article that grabbed my imagination by the throat and made me both smile and shudder a bit:
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/uk-pavilion-expo-2020-dubai-spc-intl/index.html
Then I accessed another article on the same topic:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/27/tech/ai-da-robot-intl-scli-gbr/index.html
What are your reactions to these articles? What words come to mind and/or which words do you want to say out loud right now but don’t because you’re so polite? How do you think you stack up to Ai-Da as a poet? Should there be some sort of legislation as regards Articially Intelligent wordsmiths?
Write a poem using one or more of these approaches:
as if you were Ai-Da or one of her family members; how is the world as you experience it as a writer?
Describe and critique Ai-Da performing her work at a poetry reading of her work. She’s on a double bill with one of your favorite poets; explore their different approaches to poetry.
Use one of more of these words (or their variants) as the keystone or title of your work: artificial, intelligence, humanoid, algorithm, collective, message, maze, robotics, couplets, ethics, divine, comedy, revulsion, apprehension...
Since Ai-Da consumed all of Dante’s La Davina Commedia, what would she make of Emily Dickinson’s “I dwell in Possibility”? (I’m kinda intrigued by what she’d make of the word “Gambrel”—as in a gambled [gabled] roof—when one of its other definitions is “the hock of an animal, especially of a horse” as well as “gambrel stick—a wood or metal device for suspending a slaughtered animal.”) Anyway, here ‘tis
I dwell in Possibility --
I dwell in Possibility—
A fairer House than Prose—
More numerous of Windows—
Superior—for Doors—
Of Chambers as the Cedars—
Impregnable of Eye—
And for an Everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky—
Of Visitors—the fairest—
For Occupation—This—
Emily Dickinson. Public domain.
Write a poem to Ai-Da. Here are a couple of pictures you may wish to use:
Ai-Da & Her Plus-One:
NYPC 13 Prompt #13 (for December 27th):
For a change, a brief(er) prompt—
I Kicked the Blankets on the Floor*
For anyone who’s ever lost sleep, counted sheep, tossed and turned, fretted in bed about the myriad perturbations of the day/week/month/year, hallucinated about apparitions on the roof or doors and windows moving like mouths telling you something vital but garbled:
Write a poem about sleeplessness and/or the yearning for sleep.
Here are two poems to get you sparked to write or put to sleep:
Insomnia
Now you hear what the house has to say.
Pipes clanking, water running in the dark,
the mortgaged walls shifting in discomfort,
and voices mounting in an endless drone
of small complaints like the sounds of a family
that year by year you’ve learned how to ignore.
But now you must listen to the things you own,
all that you’ve worked for these past years,
the murmur of property, of things in disrepair,
the moving parts about to come undone,
and twisting in the sheets remember all
the faces you could not bring yourself to love.
How many voices have escaped you until now,
the venting furnace, the floorboards underfoot,
the steady accusations of the clock
numbering the minutes no one will mark.
The terrible clarity this moment brings,
the useless insight, the unbroken dark.
Dana Gioia
from 99 Poems: New and Selected.
© 2016 Graywolf Press.
The Night House
Every day the body works in the fields of the world
mending a stone wall
or swinging a sickle through the tall grass—
the grass of civics, the grass of money--
and every night the body curls around itself
and listens for the soft bells of sleep.
But the heart is restless and rises
from the body in the middle of the night,
leaves the trapezoidal bedroom
with its thick, pictureless walls
to sit by herself at the kitchen table
and heat some milk in a pan.
And the mind gets up too, puts on a robe
and goes downstairs, lights a cigarette,
and opens a book on engineering.
Even the conscience awakens
and roams from room to room in the dark,
darting away from every mirror like a strange fish.
And the soul is up on the roof
in her nightdress, straddling the ridge,
singing a song about the wildness of the sea
until the first rip of pink appears in the sky.
Then, they will all return to the sleeping body
the way a flock of birds settles back into a tree,
resuming their daily colloquy,
talking to each other or themselves
even through the heat of long afternoons.
Which is why the body--that house of voices—
sometimes puts down its metal tongs, its needle, or its pen
to stare into the distance,
to listen to all its names being called
before bending again to its labor.
Billy Collins
Picnic, Lightning (1998)
Planting a Tree: In the December 23rd edition of The Slowdown with Ada Limón, Erin Rodoni’s poem “Bury Me in the Woods of My Childhood” is featured:
Bury Me in the Woods of My Childhood
As a child I pledged myself to a tree,
a walnut in the backyard I called mine,
my tree, though it wasn’t
as presumptuous as it sounds.
It was just I didn’t know a word
for what I felt for the tree
and there was no word for whatever it felt
for me, the girl who grazed her knees
daily on its silver bark. The girl who hugged
with her whole body, who closed her eyes
and listened to the humming of leaf and limb,
the aura of insect and birdchatter in its crown,
my private galaxy of sound.
Against my cheek, my tree was comfort
to the small muscles in my jaw,
forever smoothing the world
into something I could stomach. Theirs is
a slow time, of creaks and groans and sways,
and when I lived there I was slow too. I remained
a girl, though I grew older, long-
limbed and limber, my weight feline
in its languor. How I loved the leaves where coolness
lingered as sun lit up the veins inside, and I pressed
my palm against one as if it were a hand, as if to say
There is something now between us, my own ancient.
I was alive. I was in time, drifting as I was the afternoon
entire, cradled but not sleeping, rocking but not
a single bough breaking, not a crack. So awfully
tender, so full of sap. I wonder if the tree
remembers me. I wonder if it asks where
I have gone, and the network of fungi beneath
my feet lights up with my footsteps, relaying
with the symmetry of synapse: She is here.
She grows heavy, then light again.
Erin Rodoni
From And If the Woods Carry You
copyright © 2021. Southern Indiana Review Press.
Write a poem in which a particular tree—or two, or grove, orchard, thicket, stand, farm, or forest—plays a prominent role. Perhaps, as in Rodoni’s poem, your poem deals with memory, energy, and emotion. Maybe you’ll want to write about the
A suggestion: don’t forget some or all of the 5 senses (sight/vision, hearing/auditory, smell/olfactory, taste/gustatory, and touch/tactile) and consider including these additional 2 senses (vestibular/movement and proprioception/body position [awareness].)
For example, I grew up with two immense almond trees in my front yard. The sight and sound of ripe almonds cascading onto huge canvas tarps as they were knocked during harvest, the smell of the accompanying dust and sweat, the taste of the nuts just off the tree, and the feel of almond shells if I trod on them in bare feet, all helped shape my perceptions of life. There was, of course, the sensation of losing my balance as I climbed those trees and the education received by finding out which limbs would bear my weight—and which wouldn’t.
Let your poem breathe; give yourself time… In her introduction to Rodoni’s poem, Ada Limón writes about what she included in a long essay about trees: “My love of trees, my memory of trees, the way they feel like family members, ancestors, markers of time, ways of healing, ways of breathing. The only issue with the essay, really, is that I don’t know how to end it. Because if you’re writing about trees, the subject is endless.”
Who knows? Maybe you’ll write about how trees communicate through the mycelial network!
To find out more about Erin Rodoni and her newest book, And If the Woods Carry You, visit her site: http://erinrodonipoet.com/
To visit The Slowdown site and sign up to receive a daily poem selected by Ada Limón, go here: https://www.slowdownshow.org/
Maybe I’m Amazed…
Write a poem in which you consider any personal experiences you’ve had or stories you’ve read involving a maze or labyrinth. Maybe what comes to mind is Daedelus’ creation, with Theseus, the Minotaur, and Ariadne’s thread all part of the myth. Or perhaps you recall finding your way out of a corn maze, or a pen-and-pencil maze you used to kill time on the way to someplace pleasant or dreadful, or a meditation labyrinth winding ever inward toward a center that might not be physical at all.
Consider this classic hedge maze: the Marlborough Maze at Blenheim Palace—two miles in length and made up of hundreds of yew trees in a design inspired by the 1st Duke of Marlborough’s victory at the Battle of Blenheim in 1704.
Now look beyond the maze to the trees, lawns, fields, and horizon. What feeling do you get from them contrasted with the maze?
Possibly your poem isn’t about the physicality of a maze or labyrinth, but relates experiences you or someone you know (or make up) have had or are having with mazelike struggles and anxiety.
Your poem might be in the form of a list of things or experiences that amaze you…
NYPC 13 Prompt #16 (for December 30th, 2021):
Yesterday’s prompt marked the halfway point in NYPC 13. ‘Bout time for a poetry form challenge, yes? Apart from the first prompt in which you wrote a haiku, we’ve not explored the counterintuitive freedom that can come from writing within the framework of a poetic form. So here goes:
Linking Verses: Think of this challenge as a conversation in poetry between you and a fellow poet—or poets–taking the form of a renga (literally, “linked poem.”)
The short-version description: to quote from the Academy of American Poets explanation, “A renga is a form written by multiple collaborating poets. To create a renga, one poet writes the first stanza, which is three lines long with a total of seventeen syllables. The next poet adds the second stanza, a couplet with seven syllables per line. The third stanza repeats the structure of the first and the fourth repeats the second, alternating in this pattern until the poem’s end.”
For those familiar with the line-and-syllable count of haiku (5/7/5) and tanka (5/7/5/7/7), the collaborative creation of a renga could take on the appearance of a series of tanka. Remember that each poet’s stanza should extend—or“leap”—from the preceding stanza your partner(s) wrote. If you’re really game and down for this, one kind of traditional/standard “completed” renga is 100 verses!
For an expanded explanation of the form, its history, and its variations and possibilities—
from the Academy’s website:
https://poets.org/glossary/renga
from Britannica:
https://www.britannica.com/art/renga
from the MasterClass staff:
https://www.masterclass.com/articles/renga-guide#4-types-of-renga-poems
For an example of traditional renga from the Collaborative Linked Poetry Project:
https://sites.google.com/site/linkedpoetry/forms/renga/renga-example-01
For an example of contemporary renga from a 2011 NPR article:
https://www.npr.org/2011/04/22/135606210/crossing-state-lines-54-writers-one-american-poem
Variations you might consider:
try a language that isn’t always pastoral; perhaps it’s a voice that deals with politics, social justice, human rights, the planet, viruses and their variations, television, books, fashion or food trends—or some or all of these…
adjust the line length(s) as/if it serves the arc of the renga.
write a 10-line partial renga--or two connected tanka--as exemplified in the NPR article about the book Crossing State Lines: 54 Writers, One American Poem. Then send that to one poet friend, who'll write her/his/their own 10-line piece and forward it to another poet, and so on... OR exchange these 10-liners with just one other poet friend...
For a slightly weirder challenge variation, carry on a poetic conversation with yourself or selves. Split your personality as you "exchange" lines with an alternative--or opposite--personality to form a revelatory renga of dissociative identities. One more thing: I was recently gifted with a wonderful new book titled A Different Distance: A Renga by Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Naïr (Milkweed Editions, 2021.) The two poet friends, who live in Paris, began their renga in March 2020 during a full lockdown in France to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. To paraphrase Milkweed Editions’description: Separated by miles and circumstance, Hacker and Naïr created a work of compassionate, collective wisdom and shared humanity. I recommend it highly, as I do Crossing State Lines…
For me, writing poetry in collaboration has been one of the most enriching experiences of my writing life. I wish you all the best in your renga adventure(s!)
NYPC 13 Prompt #17 (for December 31st, 2021):
Although you’re receiving this the evening of December 30, I wish you a Happy New Year’s Eve (!) in advance. During this time of balloons, noisemakers, confetti, overdrinking and overtoasting, counting down, the Times Square ball drop, Auld Lang Syne-ing and general mania, midnight kissing, and, for some of you, polar bear plunging, I’d bet there are some secrets that might be revealed, hidden, or disguised.
Flashing back to Prompt #12 in which I referred to the 1983 synthpop hit “Mr. Roboto” by Styx, the opening lines are in Japanese, the last of which, Himitsu wo shiritai, can be translated as “I want to know the secret.”
So our New Year’s Eve prompt is I Want to Know the Secret. Write your poem wandering among such clandestine motifs as:
What are some secrets you’d like to discover—or have revealed to you?
What’s a secret that should stay secret?
Write your poem in which a secret is—or secrets are—revealed, hidden, or disguised as universal truths.
Perhaps your poem is written as a secret placed in a time capsule, to be opened and read only after the poet’s demise.
Maybe the secret isn’t at all, and everyone except its originator knows. Somehow I’m thinking of the Paul Simon line “When something goes wrong / I'm the first to admit it / I'm the first to admit it / But the last one to know.”
Finally-for-now, here’s this sparkling poem by Denise Levertov. (I may have used it in a previous year’s challenge, but I’m too lazy to double-check.):
The Secret
Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.
I who don't know the
secret wrote
the line. They
told me
(through a third person)
they had found it
but not what it was,
not even
what line it was. No doubt
by now, more than a week
later, they have forgotten
the secret,
the line, the name of
the poem. I love them
for finding what
I can't find,
and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that
a thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
lines
in other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
for
assuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all.
Denise Levertov
O Taste and See: New Poems
New Directions Publishing Company, 1964.
Hope
I hope this day is as good a beginning to 2022 as we could’ve desired way back in ’21… Let’s start the day with a quotation by writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit:
“Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.”
Hope in the Dark (2004)
However you define or experience hope—or its many opposites—write a narrative or lyrical poem in which hope is a central character. If you’d prefer to write an ode to the hope(s) you hold for this new year, or an elegy for the hope(s) we’ve lost, go ahead on…
One possible variant of hope in your poem: your fellow humans. Given the appalling choices, hideous actions, and good-hearted generosity of human beings in 2021 or any year, you should find numerous examples—and stories—of hope and/or despair with which to work. For potential inspiration, here’s this poem by Dorianne Laux:
IN ANY EVENT
If we are fractured
we are fractured
like stars
bred to shine
in every direction,
through any dimension,
billions of years
since and hence.
I shall not lament
the human, not yet.
There is something
more to come, our hearts
a gold mine
not yet plumbed,
an uncharted sea.
Nothing is gone forever.
If we came from dust
and will return to dust
then we can find our way
into anything.
What we are capable of
is not yet known,
and I praise us now,
in advance.
Dorianne Laux
from Salt, 2020.
For musical accompaniment as you write, consider these:
this interpretation of the fifth movement of Edvard Grieg’s Holberg Suite (Op. 40, Rigaudon) played by the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGAVDqel2hQ&t=185s
or this song, “I Lived,” by One Republic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KINfQbfZwik
or this piece, “Song of Hope,” by bassist Avishai Cohen (who plays piano here) performed live at Jazz in Marciac 2017:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tB5dfbhOAlY
Of course, feel free to listen without the accompanying video elements, or to not listen to any of these compositions, or to listen to any other music you like, or none at all…
This Is How… How do you explain to another person how to do something you know well, but is completely unfamiliar to that person? How do you explain the importance of an event, a year, a decade, a lifetime, to someone who wasn’t there when it happened? How do you make sense of something that has baffled, angered, disappointed, amazed you?
Write a poem that is titled, begins with, or ends with This Is How. It could be a variation on a list poem using anaphora (repetition of the same word or phrase at the beginning of each line), an epistolary poem*, a didactic poem (one that instructs) with some irony—or something else entirely.
*https://poets.org/glossary/epistolary-poem
In case your poem goes to a darker place, I got the inspiration for this prompt from a favorite song by Jason Isbell titled “24 Frames.” Here are the lyrics:
24 Frames
This is how you make yourself vanish into nothing
And this is how you make yourself worthy of the love
that she Gave to you back when you didn't own a beautiful thing
This is how you make yourself call your mother
And this is how you make yourself closer to your brother
Remember him back when he was small enough to help you sing
You thought God was an architect, now you know
He's something like a pipe bomb ready to blow
And everything you built that's all for show goes up in flames
In twenty-four frames
This is how you see yourself floating on the ceiling
And this is how you help her when her heart stops beating
What happened to the part of you that noticed every changing wind
This is how you talk to her when no one else is listening
And this is how you help her when the muse goes missing
You vanish so she can go drowning in a dream again
You thought God was an architect, now you know
He's something like a pipe bomb ready to blow
And everything you built that's all for show goes up in flames
In twenty- four frames
(In case you were wondering about the song’s title, 24 frames per second is the speed at which film or video is captured or played back. It’s
how our brains are tricked into perceiving 24 still images as a second of smooth motion.)
Today’s prompt is an adaptation of one I received as part of the Two Sylvias Press Online Poetry Retreat this past October…
Consider the many associations we have with the word flight: birds, air travel, escape, flights of fancy and/or imagination…
For this challenge, write a poem about a particular flight you’ve taken or would like to take—or avoid. Perhaps you’ll be writing about a flight to or from home, or both. The “home” may be your ancestral homeland. Maybe this is the flight of a lifetime to/from an exotic locale, or to visit relatives (maybe they’re exotic.) Think of including your (or your narrator’s, if the poem is in third person) thoughts and feelings before/during/after the flight. Don’t forget descriptive phrases and images so readers feel as if they are on the flight with you. Does your poem include a question (i. e., someone asks you about your destination, or wonders, Why am I even on this flight? )
For an additional challenge, write in a style that places you outside your “comfort zone,” as air travel itself often does these days. If you usually write in short stanzas, consider a prose poem or a poem with very long lines. If you’re a stickler for standard capitalization and punctuation, imagine your poem with neither…
Here are a couple of “flight” poems for some inspiration or “take off”:
The Race
When I got to the airport I rushed up to the desk,
bought a ticket, ten minutes later
they told me the flight was cancelled, the doctors
had said my father would not live through the night
and the flight was cancelled. A young man
with a dark brown moustache told me
another airline had a nonstop
leaving in seven minutes. See that
elevator over there, well go
down to the first floor, make a right, you'll
see a yellow bus, get off at the
second Pan Am terminal, I
ran, I who have no sense of direction
raced exactly where he'd told me, a fish
slipping upstream deftly against
the flow of the river. I jumped off that bus with those
bags I had thrown everything into
in five minutes, and ran, the bags
wagged me from side to side as if
to prove I was under the claims of the material,
I ran up to a man with a flower on his breast,
I who always go to the end of the line, I said
Help me. He looked at my ticket, he said
Make a left and then a right, go up the moving stairs and then
run. I lumbered up the moving stairs,
at the top I saw the corridor,
and then I took a deep breath, I said
goodbye to my body, goodbye to comfort,
I used my legs and heart as if I would
gladly use them up for this,
to touch him again in this life. I ran, and the
bags banged against me, wheeled and coursed
in skewed orbits, I have seen pictures of
women running, their belongings tied
in scarves grasped in their fists, I blessed my
long legs he gave me, my strong
heart I abandoned to its own purpose,
I ran to Gate 17 and they were
just lifting the thick white
lozenge of the door to fit it into
the socket of the plane. Like the one who is not
too rich, I turned sideways and
slipped through the needle's eye, and then
I walked down the aisle toward my father. The jet
was full, and people's hair was shining, they were
smiling, the interior of the plane was filled with a
mist of gold endorphin light,
I wept as people weep when they enter heaven,
in massive relief. We lifted up
gently from one tip of the continent
and did not stop until we set down lightly on the
other edge, I walked into his room
and watched his chest rise slowly
and sink again, all night
I watched him breathe.
Sharon Olds
from The Father (Knopf, 1992)
Nothing to Declare
There is no name for what rises in you
as you enter the dim world of the taxi
and wheel through the night, escorted
by smooth jazz and a battalion of streetlights.
At the airport, you heave the bags
you have stuffed to the limits of carriage
and check them in. You have no trouble
knowing what to do with your empty
hands. At security, the usual stripping.
You surrender your body to the scan,
the searching sweep, as if what is dangerous
is not what cannot be so easily detected.
You comply. At the gate, grateful to be
early, you sit with your books, plug in
devices that tether you to this place
you’re meant to be leaving, that crowd
out thoughts of arrival and its bittersweet
complications. Yuh going home or just visiting,
someone will ask, and you never know
how you will answer. You know the bones
of your mother’s brown arms will wind
around you, her breath against your neck
will baptize you again in names you have
no one to call you in the other place
you belong to. You know the waiting
untended in you will surge toward her,
and you know something else will sink,
sulk itself into a familiar, necessary sleep.
You know yourself now only as the ocean
knows this island—always pulling away,
always, always, returning.
Lauren K. Alleyne
© 2021. Originally published in Poem-a-Day
on February 12, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.Today’s prompt is an adaptation of one I received as part of the Two Sylvias Press Online Poetry Retreat this past October…
Consider the many associations we have with the word flight: birds, air travel, escape, flights of fancy and/or imagination…
For this challenge, write a poem about a particular flight you’ve taken or would like to take—or avoid. Perhaps you’ll be writing about a flight to or from home, or both. The “home” may be your ancestral homeland. Maybe this is the flight of a lifetime to/from an exotic locale, or to visit relatives (maybe they’re exotic.) Think of including your (or your narrator’s, if the poem is in third person) thoughts and feelings before/during/after the flight. Don’t forget descriptive phrases and images so readers feel as if they are on the flight with you. Does your poem include a question (i. e., someone asks you about your destination, or wonders, Why am I even on this flight? )
For an additional challenge, write in a style that places you outside your “comfort zone,” as air travel itself often does these days. If you usually write in short stanzas, consider a prose poem or a poem with very long lines. If you’re a stickler for standard capitalization and punctuation, imagine your poem with neither…
Here are a couple of “flight” poems for some inspiration or “take off”:
The Race
When I got to the airport I rushed up to the desk,
bought a ticket, ten minutes later
they told me the flight was cancelled, the doctors
had said my father would not live through the night
and the flight was cancelled. A young man
with a dark brown moustache told me
another airline had a nonstop
leaving in seven minutes. See that
elevator over there, well go
down to the first floor, make a right, you'll
see a yellow bus, get off at the
second Pan Am terminal, I
ran, I who have no sense of direction
raced exactly where he'd told me, a fish
slipping upstream deftly against
the flow of the river. I jumped off that bus with those
bags I had thrown everything into
in five minutes, and ran, the bags
wagged me from side to side as if
to prove I was under the claims of the material,
I ran up to a man with a flower on his breast,
I who always go to the end of the line, I said
Help me. He looked at my ticket, he said
Make a left and then a right, go up the moving stairs and then
run. I lumbered up the moving stairs,
at the top I saw the corridor,
and then I took a deep breath, I said
goodbye to my body, goodbye to comfort,
I used my legs and heart as if I would
gladly use them up for this,
to touch him again in this life. I ran, and the
bags banged against me, wheeled and coursed
in skewed orbits, I have seen pictures of
women running, their belongings tied
in scarves grasped in their fists, I blessed my
long legs he gave me, my strong
heart I abandoned to its own purpose,
I ran to Gate 17 and they were
just lifting the thick white
lozenge of the door to fit it into
the socket of the plane. Like the one who is not
too rich, I turned sideways and
slipped through the needle's eye, and then
I walked down the aisle toward my father. The jet
was full, and people's hair was shining, they were
smiling, the interior of the plane was filled with a
mist of gold endorphin light,
I wept as people weep when they enter heaven,
in massive relief. We lifted up
gently from one tip of the continent
and did not stop until we set down lightly on the
other edge, I walked into his room
and watched his chest rise slowly
and sink again, all night
I watched him breathe.
Sharon Olds
from The Father (Knopf, 1992)
Nothing to Declare
There is no name for what rises in you
as you enter the dim world of the taxi
and wheel through the night, escorted
by smooth jazz and a battalion of streetlights.
At the airport, you heave the bags
you have stuffed to the limits of carriage
and check them in. You have no trouble
knowing what to do with your empty
hands. At security, the usual stripping.
You surrender your body to the scan,
the searching sweep, as if what is dangerous
is not what cannot be so easily detected.
You comply. At the gate, grateful to be
early, you sit with your books, plug in
devices that tether you to this place
you’re meant to be leaving, that crowd
out thoughts of arrival and its bittersweet
complications. Yuh going home or just visiting,
someone will ask, and you never know
how you will answer. You know the bones
of your mother’s brown arms will wind
around you, her breath against your neck
will baptize you again in names you have
no one to call you in the other place
you belong to. You know the waiting
untended in you will surge toward her,
and you know something else will sink,
sulk itself into a familiar, necessary sleep.
You know yourself now only as the ocean
knows this island—always pulling away,
always, always, returning.
Lauren K. Alleyne
© 2021. Originally published in Poem-a-Day
on February 12, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
Number 9, Number 9, Number 9… Counting this prompt, there are now 9 prompts remaining in NYPC 13. In honor—if that is the word I mean—of that, here are some choices of challenges to consider:
Write a nonet—a 9-line poem of descending syllable counts. The first line contains 9 syllables, the second line has 8 syllables, and so on. The last line contains 1 syllable. For more information and an example:
https://www.masterclass.com/articles/how-to-write-a-nonet
You can also Google the term for other explanations and examples.
Write the nonet in reverse order (first line is 1 syllable, second line is 2 two syllables, etc.
Write a 9-line poem in which the syllable count is 9 per line.
Write a 9-line poem in iambic pentameter.
Write a 9-line poem of 3 stanzas, each of which consists of 3 lines.
Write a 9-line “concrete” or “visual” poem. If you need a reminder of how the form could work:
https://poets.org/text/brief-guide-concrete-poetry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_poetry
Write a poem that’s a reflection on 9 as a number, an inning, a circle of hell, a ring, an hour, a virtue, a symbol of completeness…
Write a 9-word poem.
For some additional fun—if you have a very broad definition of “fun”—as you write, listen to the Beatles’ “Revolution 9” from their 1968 double album commonly referred to as the “White Album” Fair warning: this experimental piece has variously been described as
"a pretentious piece of old codswallop ... a piece of idiot immaturity and a blotch on their own unquestioned talent as well as the album, "beautifully organized," and "one of the most significant acts the Beatles ever perpetrated", as well as "the world's most widely distributed avant-garde artifact.” Anyway, for those who dare:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNdcFPjGsm8
Enduring Idiocy— Perhaps it is only coincidental that this is the prompt for January 6th. Surely there have been other incidents of endurance and/or idiocy before and since January 6, 2021.
According to Merriam-Webster (in addition to its many definitions,) “endure implies continuing firm or resolute through trials and difficulties.”
The primary Merriam-Webster definition of idiocy is “utterly senseless or foolish behavior; a stupid or foolish act, statement, etc.” Paraphrasing an article in Wikipedia, “the term ‘idiot’ was once a technical term in legal and psychiatric contexts for some kinds of profound intellectual disability; its use to describe people with mental disabilities is considered archaic and offensive.
Write a poem exploring an incident or example(s) of endurance and/or idiocy you or someone you know has experienced or is experiencing. This might include a fictional “someone,” if you like.” Of course, your poem might focus on something that happened on January 6, 2021, or today, or any other time.
Today is also Twelfth Night/Epiphany. If you’d like to write about an epiphany (a moment in which you suddenly see or understand something in a new or very clear way), please do! Maybe your poem is set on the twelfth night of something you or your “voice” have gone through (e. g., isolation/quarantine, a stint in jail, a vacation, rehearsal for a play, etc.)
If you’d like your poem to focus on the opposite of endurance or idiocy (say, gratitude and hope) or work those opposites into a poem about endurance, idiocy, or enduring idiocy (which is a phrase with multiple connotations), go ahead on!
I leave you with Feste’s final song from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night:
Song: “When that I was and a little tiny boy
(With hey, ho, the wind and the rain)”
When that I was and a little tiny boy,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.
But when I came to man’s estate,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
’Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate,
For the rain it raineth every day.
But when I came, alas! to wive,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
By swaggering could I never thrive,
For the rain it raineth every day.
But when I came unto my beds,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
With toss-pots still had drunken heads,
For the rain it raineth every day.
A great while ago the world begun,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
But that’s all one, our play is done,
And we’ll strive to please you every day.
William Shakespeare
(from Twelfth Night)
In her wonderful 2020 collection, Storage Unit for the Spirit House, Maw Shein Win explores the theme of containment, as well as “an illumination of the everyday beauty found in things both tangible and numinous,” as Denise Sullivan wrote in the October 19, 2020 Datebook section of the San Francisco Chronicle.
Containers and vessels of all kinds—storage units, vases, prison cells, cinemas, theaters, reliquaries, tombs, halls, MRI machines, bottles, hospitals, huts, phone booths, factories, restaurants, parlors, offices, caves, cellars—as places of storage, refuge, isolation, shelter, and reflection—appear in Win’s poems.
She also enlarges our understanding of spirit houses—little houses or altars with small offerings to appease the spirits such as nats (spirits venerated in Myanmar and neighboring countries in conjunction with Buddhism.)
By the way(s), the poems were written before the first coronavirus lockdowns and quarantines. Storage Unit for the Spirit House is published by Omnidawn Publishing.
Here’s the title poem of the book:
Storage Unit for the Spirit House
the father at dining room table shades drawn, wobbly throne
the daughters with their brown shaky hands
a forest nat haunts the master closet among
the clothes moths, felt wolverines
daughter #1 hiding behind a juniper bush, bright longyis
wooden handgun in metal case
daughter #2 sleeps with a long broom next to her bed
mint chocolates under pillow
5am the father drops a cold wet towel on her face
storage unit filled with boxes of LPs, Joni, Dylan, Carly
back cover of Jimi Hendrix Experience, on two hits of acid
this will blow your brains out
dusty military jackets, punishment belt, piles of lockboxes
missing keys, jars of Nescafé, VHS tapes of Burmese pop singers
daughter #3 listens to father’s records in the den
altered music room
sits on the piano bench near the door, the father in armchair
Joni singing A Case of You
forest nat flutters above in air smoky from Kent 100s
Maw Shein Win
Storage Unit for the Spirit House, 2020.
Write a poem about containment, or about containers or vessels that have been important to you. Feel free to use one or some of the containers mentioned above, or one or some of any “containers” that have touched your life. Maybe your poem will be about removing items from the container in which you live, such as moving from one house to another. I am thinking, too, of things like records or books that contained and revealed truths and energies to you.
If you like, write your poem about anything associated with spirit or spirits. Perhaps a particular place, enclosed or not, has evinced evidence or a presence of an energy you needed to sustain or nurture you. Maybe a particular small object (a piece of beach glass, a snow goose feather, a theater ticket) contains a memory of a vitality experienced while you were “in the moment.”
(By the way [again], a longyi is a sheet of cloth widely worn in Myanmar—formerly Burma—often sewn into a cylindrical shape. It is worn around the waist, running to the feet, and held in place by folding fabric over without a knot.)
NYPC 13 Prompt #25 (for January 8th, 2022):
It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie / Truth Be Told—
Keats “Ode on a Grecian Urn concludes with
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
Some of us are not quite such adherents to aestheticism, but would still like to figure out this truth thing, even in—as some have declared— a “post-truth” world. Oh, yeah, and how do we tell truth from lies?
Write a poem including either or both truth (whether you deal with a truth or The Truth) or lies (aka falsehoods, deceptions, distortions, or even mendacities)–as you define these terms.
Consider visual art (painting, sculpture, photography, etc.) as truth or lies. Art has been called the lie that tells the truth.
Reflect on/Google classic or contempory paintings (e. g., Mona Lisa, Guernica, Nighthawks, Campbell's Soup Cans, anything by Pollack or Basquiat, Banksy........) or sculptures like those of Rodin, Donatello, Brancusi, Moore, Louise Bourgeois, and sure-why-not, Michaelangelo and Jeff Koons.
Photography by Adams, Lange, Avedon, Cunningham, Leibovitz, Arbus, Evans, and Mapplethorpe comes to mind as well.
(Apologies here: the "Upload" feature on Mailchimp isn't currently working, or I'd've included specific images by now...)
or there's this painting by Greek artist Nicholas Ghika (aka Nicos Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas) whose title is a quotation by Emile Zola: “When truth is buried underground it grows, it chokes, it gathers such an explosive force that on the day it bursts out, it blows up everything with it.” From the series Great Ideas of Western Man., 1964, watercolor heightened with white and gouache on paperboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum. (You may have to copy-&-paste this into your browser.)
https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/when-truth-buried-underground-it-grows-it-chokes-it-gathers-such-explosive-force-day-it
Of course, feel free to reflect on any other art you know well, such as paintings, sculptures, photographs, or any other visual art in your home--or that you have created.
How do any, some, or all of these images relate to truth, lies, and/or art?
Perhaps your poem will describe a occasion when you or someone else told the truth or crafted a lie. What was the reaction and consequence?
(Just maybe, the phrase “alternative facts” will make its way into your poem.)
What about truth and history? Philosopher George Santayana, whose most famous quotation was “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” also said, “History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there.” How can history be used to reveal truths or misused to gin up lies?
I’ll close with this YouTube video of a portion of a 1984 concert in which Steve Goodman sings and plays “It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie.” Perhaps something here will add something to your poem:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlPw8KNPLg0
A Man Walks Into a Bar… / The Joke’s on Them
Write a poem using the word joke in the title or body of the poem. Perhaps your poem features a joke being told and the consequences. The joke might be subliminal, sophisticated, cruel (aka “practical”) or cringeworthy. Perhaps the poem is a joke (I mean this in the best possible way!) Maybe the joke is a riddle or just a punchline without the set-up. Mayhap your poem is about a stand-up comic or your favorite comedy film or TV series.
For another perspective on “joke,” here are two versions of the inimitable Brandi Carlile’s 2018 song, “The Joke:”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5r6A2NexF88
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON0yCLjr9nw
NYPC 13 Prompt #27 (for January 10th, 2022):
What’s to Do?—
Some mornings—or noons or nights—we may be absolutely uncertain about what we could do to stay alive, help “make things better”—whatever that means in the moment—or accomplish something that feels meaningful. Other times we can see what needs doing, but can’t suss out how to do that.
Write a poem about achieving or attempting something vital, or taking part in something that matters to you, even if you fail. Perhaps this will involve a question like What have I done lately? What could I do today? This challenge may take you to an uncomfortable place, or a revelatory one. Maybe both or neither.
You might start with a “to-do list” of things you’d like to do, or a “have-done” list of things that have given you a sense of purpose, or a “half-done” list of things you started but haven’t finished (yet) or needed to abandon.
If you’re looking for a spark or some inspiration, here’s this poem by Jane Hirshfield:
Today, When I Could Do Nothing
Today, when I could do nothing,
I saved an ant.
It must have come in with the morning paper,
still being delivered
to those who shelter in place.
A morning paper is still an essential service.
I am not an essential service.
I have coffee and books,
time,
a garden,
silence enough to fill cisterns.
It must have first walked
the morning paper, as if loosened ink
taking the shape of an ant.
Then across the laptop computer—warm—
then onto the back of a cushion.
Small black ant, alone,
crossing a navy cushion,
moving steadily because that is what it could do.
Set outside in the sun,
it could not have found again its nest.
What then did I save?
It did not move as if it was frightened,
even while walking my hand,
which moved it through swiftness and air.
Ant, alone, without companions,
whose ant-heart I could not fathom—
how is your life, I wanted to ask.
I lifted it, took it outside.
This first day when I could do nothing,
contribute nothing
beyond staying distant from my own kind,
I did this.
Jane Hirshfield
from How to Love the World
edited by James Crews, © 2021.
NYPC 13 Prompt #28
(for January 11th, 2022):
Sight Unseen / Never Seen, Never Will—
The inspiration for today’s challenge comes from the August 26, 2021 edition of The Anthropocene Reviewed podcast by John Green, entitled “Orbital Sunrise”:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-anthropocene-reviewed/id1342003491?i=1000533191994
I highly recommend listening to this particular podcast at some point during your writing process; it covers far more inspirational ground than today’s prompt could include—and could quite possibly give you some ideas for other/future poems. It’s 22 minutes well spent, in my opinion…
Anyway, try this: Write a poem about something you’ve never seen and probably never will—like an orbital sunrise, a concept such as ethics, or a planet that will be discovered in 2302.
Imagine creating a work of word art from just a written or oral description. Consider the 1515 etching by Albrecht Dürer, The Rhinoceros:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b9/D%C3%BCrer_-_Rhinoceros.jpg
Dürer had never seen an actual rhinoceros—and never would—but had read a description of one that had been brought to Portugal. You’ll notice that his etching depicts the rhinoceros as having plates of armor—with rivets—but does look much like a real rhinoceros. How to account for his rendering of the rhino? His imagination and unique genius? The sensibilities of the 16th Century? Neither? Both? Something else?
We in the year 2022 know a lot, but according to Green, “we don’t know almost everything.” As for art and why we make it, Green says, “…it may be that art is a kind of tool for us, a way in to giving form for all the stuff that doesn’t easily lend itself to form.” Later in the podcast, he refers to Sarah Urist Green, art curator and creator of the PBS Digital Studios program The Art Assignment—and Green’s wife—who has written a book titled You Are an Artist: Assignments to Spark Creation, released in 2020. One of the assignments is “Never Seen, Never Will” which reminds John Green that “…we don’t know everything, and that I have never seen and will never see almost everything.”
For example, unless we are astronauts or billionaires, we are unlikely to see an orbital sunrise. Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, who may be best known for being the first human to take a space walk in March 1965, also made the first space art with a drawing pad and some colored pencils, after an arduous reentering of his tiny spacecraft on that same voyage:
https://www.xiaomist.com/2021/09/disarmed-first-drawing-made-in-space.html
Of course, today any of us could just do a Google or Google Image search for “rhinoceros” or “orbital sunrise,” but it would still be someone else’s image and/or description. However, Leonov’s almost childlike sketch “precisely because it is not photorealistic, captures the awe of that moment of seeing the sun rise over a very different horizon,” as Green puts it.
Your poem, because it would never exist until you write it, could help your readers see what they never have seen or never would without you. For those of you who create visual as well as written art, perhaps your poem as it is finally realized may also include a visual revelation—however representational or abstract—of the unseen. Of course, due to my own lack of skill, I couldn’t include the visual art in the chapbook if you submit a poem sprung from this prompt, but I could surely “see” it side-by-side with, or inside, your poem in a gallery!
Again, please consider listening to the whole podcast sometime; there’s a wealth of sparks for your imagination and your poetry…
Ready…Steady…Go with your vision
NYPC 13 Prompt #29
(for January 12th, 2022):
Dancing with Strawberries in Four Stanzas—
Here’s one final poetic form challenge for NYPC 13: a fun little form with which I was unfamiliar until just recently. Created by Dr. Charles A. Stone, a trimeric (rhymes with limerick) is a four-stanza poem. The first stanza has four lines. The remaining three stanzas have three lines each; the first line of each stanza repeats its respective line of the first stanzas (so the 2nd stanza starts with the second line, the third stanza starts with the third line, etc.). In other words, the line sequence is:
abcd
b***
c***
d***
There are no other rules on theme, line length, meter, or rhyme, so there are several approaches to this form. For examples and to find out a little more about Charles Stone, try this site:
https://writingsbystone.wordpress.com/trimerics/
In case you’re interested, there is a book of collected trimerics by Dr. Stone titled Dancing with Strawberries (Learning Tree Adventures, Inc., 2015)
Ready, Steady, Go write a 4-stanza poem
NYPC 13 Prompt #30
(for January 13th, 2022):
This Particular Light—
I’d like to thank you all for putting up with my peculiar approach to these NYPC prompts, and I hope you’ve had some fun along with some challenges to your writing routine. I wish you the best of broken legs (or poetic feet?) as you shape and polish--and perhaps publish—your poems! Thanks for playing! I will send out all 30 prompts in a separate email in a few minutes, but for now:
How many things ya got on your plate or plates? Are they spinning? (Sorry; old Ed Sullivan reference…) Perhaps your personal to-do list is overstacked with things you need to pick up or accomplish, as well as matters over which you have no ultimate control. Is there light at the end of that tunnel we’ve heard so much about? Is it an oncoming bullet train or just plain ol’ sunshine?
Here are some ideas for your final poem of this series of challenges:
Write a poem about what sustains you or gives you some peace in overstackedmoments or months.
Write a poem about—or set in— sunlight, moonlight, starlight, candlelight, and/or some internal light of your own.
Write a poem about a word—or THE word—that inspires you to keep on writing, painting, sculpting, dancing, singing, acting, sewing, quilting capturing instants in a photograph or video, etc.—anything that feels like art or creativity to you. Of course, “the word” might be a phrase, motto, maxim, mantra, prayer, or series of sounds that keep you keeping on…
Write a poem of witness, gratitude, and/or hope.
Here are a couple of poems for examples or inspiration: “When Life Seems Like a To-Do List” by Marjorie Saiser and “The Word” but Tony Hoagland. Both of these poems are anthologized in the latest compilation edited by James Crews, How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope, with a foreward by Ross Gay. This collection has sustained me since last March when I needed something that wasn’t about the current times’ wreckages and repulsions. My own copy is tabbed, dogeared, and coffee-stained. Perhaps you have books like this. Anyway, I recommend the book, and here are those poems:
When Life Seems a To-Do List
When the squares of the week fill
with musts and should,
when I seim tin the heaviness of it,
the headlines, the fear and hate,
then with luck, something like a slice of moon
will arrive clean as a bone
and beside it on that dark slate
a star will lodge near the cusp
and with luck I will have you
to see it with, the two of us,
fools stepping out the backdoor
in our pajamas.
Is that Venus?—I think so—Let’s
call it Venus, cuddling up to the moon
and there are stars further away
sending out rays that will not
reach us in our lifetimes
but we are choosing, before the chaos
starts up again,
to stand in this particular light.
Marjorie Saiser
from The Woman in the Moon.
Backwaters Press, 2018.
The Word
Down near the bottom
of the crossed-out list
of things you have to do today,
between "green thread"
and "broccoli," you find
that you have penciled "sunlight."
Resting on the page, the word
is beautiful. It touches you
as if you had a friend
and sunlight were a present
he had sent from someplace distant
as this morning—to cheer you up,
and to remind you that,
among your duties, pleasure
is a thing
that also needs accomplishing.
Do you remember?
that time and light are kinds
of love, and love
is no less practical
than a coffee grinder
or a safe spare tire?
Tomorrow you may be utterly
without a clue,
but today you get a telegram
from the heart in exile,
proclaiming that the kingdom
still exists,
the king and queen alive,
still speaking to their children,
—to any one among them
who can find the time
to sit out in the sun and listen.
Tony Hoagland
from Sweet Ruin.
University of Wisconsin Press, 1992.
Ready, Steady, Keep Writing…
But-Wait-There’s-More Bonus Prompt #31:
Write a poem entitled—or using the phrase “Word of the Year.
Good evening!
Three more prompts to go, counting the one that’ll arrive about 15 minutes after this email…
Regarding submitting a poem to the NYPC 13 chapbook, I’ve received 3 submissions thus far, and am certainly looking forward to more! So you don’t have to go digging back through an email thread, here are the guidelines for submission again, if you’d like to submit a poem based on/sprung from any of the NYPC 13 prompts:
Submit any one poem as a Word doc or pdf. (or in the body of your email, if you need to) to gthomas@mostpoetry.org.
In the Subject line, please write NYPC 13 Submission. (Your poem may be from any prompt from this year's Challenges.) When you submit, please indicate how many copies of the chapbook you would like to order. This year, each chapbook will cost $3.00, just enough to cover printing costs.
This year’s deadline is Saturday, January 15th(two days after Prompt #30.) I'll notify you when I’ve received your submission.
Please remember to include a poem title at the top and your name at the bottom of the poem.) Also, in the body of your email, indicate your mailing address so I can send you your copy or copies of the chapbook as soon as possible.
As for payment for the chapbook: please mail a check for your copy or copies to:Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center
P. O. Box 578940
Modesto, CA. 95357
If you have any questions about this process, feel free to contact me at gthomas@mostpoetry.org
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