It’s not what you think… if this is what you’re thinking:

Courtesy of Wikipedia (Postcard c. 1900)

…or this:

Courtesy of The Daily Green

Your “holiday postcard” can be written on anything, no Santas, Christmas sweaters or antlers required.  Just find a festive-looking piece of cardstock or a regular postcard, and jot down a few lines of a poetry that you’d like to send to someone as a holiday greeting.  These can be  meditations on what you wish for them in the new year, a set of images informed by the motif of illumination as discussed by Iris in last Friday’s prompt, even a few descriptive lines of verse about family gatherings or spiritual traditions centered around the holidays.

Most people send Christmas cards, family newsletters or photos of their family — but you?  This year, try sending lines of poetry.  (And don’t even get us started on giving poems as gifts!)

Image courtesy of dwellingintheword.wordpress.com

It was about a year ago that I posted this prompt on Allen Ginsberg’s American Sentences, thanks to former classmate Jessica Tyson; this week’s Friday Prompt is courtesy of another recent UW MFA graduate, Talia Shalev.  She’s derived the exercise from a chapter in the anthology Contemporary American Poetry: Behind the Scenes (Longman, 2002), edited by Ryan Van Cleave, and writes:

Spend an hour in an urban setting that’s somewhat foreign to you.  A Laundromat.  A bus terminal.  A French pastry shop.  Record your observations and thoughts.  Spend another hour in a more rural setting, such as a chicken farm, an apple orchard, or a fishing hole.  At the very least, find a garden or park!  Record your observations and thoughts.

Write a poem about the urban setting that uses words, ideas, and images exclusively from your rural setting, and then write a poem about the rural setting that uses words, ideas, and images exclusively from your urban setting.  Does forcing yourself into using unusual vocabulary choices allow you greater freedom?  Does it make intuitive leaps easier?  How might this translate into your other poems?

What I find compelling about this prompt is the way it forces the “translation” or “transmutation” of observational detail from one context to another—a gesture that can be taken in a number of directions.  The same process can be used to navigate not only the in-betweens of rural and urban settings, but also the private and the public, the mainstream and the “minority,” the high and the low.  While I think it’s important that the prompt remain grounded in specific locales (ie. places that can be physically inhabited by the poet), it seems totally possible that a person could make the same linguistic leap from, say, one part of town to another—and in the process, cast light upon new ways of constructing difference, culture and place.

Structure and Surprise, ed. Michael Theune (Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 2007)

This week’s prompt is less of a prompt and more of an invitation to check out this book on poetic structure published by the Teachers & Writers Collaborative.  Structure & Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns is a collection of essays by noteworthy poets like D.A. Powell and Prageeta Sharma, which discusses the use of “the turn” in poetry writing; that is, the energetic leap or shift that occurs as the mind works through form to create dynamic patterns of thought.  In his introduction to the essays, Michael Theune says:

Poetic structure is, simply, the pattern of a poem’s turning.  As such, poetic structure identifies a vital feature of poems: the best poems very often include convincing, surprising turns… [I]n a lecture called “Levels and Opposites: Structure in Poetry,” Randall Jarrell claims that “a successful poem starts from one position and ends at a very different one, often a contradictory or opposite one; yet there has been no break in the unity of the poem.”

One of the structures discussed in Structure & Surprise is the retrospective-prospective structure, a two-part structure that begins with a retrospective discussion of the past and then moves toward a future orientation that shows, as the essay’s author, Mark Yakich, puts it, how “inconstant and dizzying” time really is.  While you’re welcome to browse the list of structures on the book’s extraordinarily helpful website to find one that might work better for whichever writing/revision process you’re currently in, I’d recommend trying this particular approach for starters.

Prompt: write a two-part poem that uses the retrospective-prospective structure to narrate a past event or memory.  Midway through the poem, shift to the present tense to “acknowledge some kind of change” (p. 72) that allows the speaker to either look prospectively into the future, or reconsider the past through a different lens.

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For a list of additional structures and supplemental materials, check out the Structure & Surprise website .

For more writing prompts on structure, take a look at Iris’ Ordering, Reordering, Reversing or last October’s prompt, Complicating Narrative Structure.

Rainbow trout from Silver Lake

Some families hike, some families play board games, some families get together to roll dumplings.  My family goes fishing.  And we always have.  My dad fishes with gear inherited from his dad, whose rod and net have been mended and re-mended so many times I wouldn’t be surprised if they were passed on from his dad’s dad.  Certainly, the rhythm of baiting the hook, casting the line and settling back to wait for a bite is something passed through generations.

My brother and I remarked on our last fishing trip that, when waiting behind a cast line on the side of a lake somewhere, it’s as if we sit waiting not only with each other and our dad, but with his dad as well—who passed on many years ago.  There’s a kind of comfort in this ritual, as if when gathering to bait and lure our lines, we gather to join the family members–both passed on and present—who have practiced these same steps through time.

And so our prompt for this week, taken from Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux’s The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry (Norton, 1997), is:

Use a family anecdote, or a family ritual, as a leaping-off point for saying something about how your family or the world works.

If it helps, think first about the material reality of the ritual you intend to write about.  If it’s fishing you’re thinking of, research the anatomy of the fish.  Find out how its breathing apparatus works, what it is exactly that lines those “frightening gills.”  Learn the jargon of fisherfolk: the brand names of the bait, the particularities of lures and bobbers and lines.  Think of this as an opportunity not only to, as Laux and Addonizio put it, “sa[y] something about how your family or the world works,” but also to say something about how the ritual itself works.

Don’t enter the poem planning to say something earth-shattering (about your family, or anything).  Enter the poem with respect for the ritual in question, those who have conducted it in the past and the materiality of its “steps” as they unfold.  More often than not, it’s by examining the mechanisms of our lives that we reach fresh insight—but let this come to you through the writing.

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Note: Also see Iris’ February prompt about the family rituals we engage in when “turning the year.”  Though we’re still a ways off from New Year’s, many of us still feel the seasonal “turn” of fall (especially with Daylight Savings approaching!), and have our own private rituals built around welcoming this time of year.

Sea Stones: Ordered, Reordered, Reversed

As I’ve been working on coding, laying out, and putting together Issue 3 (which in many ways has proven to be a much more technically challenging endeavor than our previous two issues), the question of order/ordering has continually been at the forefront of my mind. How important decisions about order are when presenting a group of poems, or images! Juxtaposition means everything: placing even one small poem strategically can entirely change and elevate the overall energy of an issue, an anthology, a collection. And (to apply this thought to the level of craft) how much more so with regards to the arrangement of lines, images, stanzas, within each poem itself! At this year’s Kundiman retreat, Oliver de la Paz showed me how the placement of a single poem within a manuscript would affect the impact with which certain images in it would be perceived by a reader—and that revising with attention to order, both on a inter-poem and intra-poem level, was therefore very necessary. And during workshop, Kimiko Hahn suggested that one of the Fellows try reversing the order of the lines in her poem, a simple change that which—when applied, completely reshaped its arc, and brought the whole piece alive in a new and fascinating way.

Of course, reversing the order of a poem’s lines does not work the same magic in every case—it worked on the poem that we were discussing because it allowed the strange linguistic impulses of the final lines to speak better and thus made the arc of the new version much less tidy and more texturally interesting. But the results of this simple revision exercise got me thinking about how to apply it to my own writing. How many times have I shuffled and reordered stanzas in a poem that feels stuck, only to find that the arc of the poem was still either falling flat? Oftentimes, my last thoughts as I draft a poem may be some of the most complex, the most evocative, and so reversing a poem, image by image, or even line by line, could be a very useful way to at least read the images in the draft from a different angle, and thus to reenter the revision process on a fresh foot.

Today’s prompt is an example of more shameless, deliberate “stealing” from the advice of teachers whom I admire.

Prompt: Take a poem whose arc or movement feels “stuck” and reverse the order of the images or lines as way to re-envision the “map” of the poem.  Alternately, if you are working on a manuscript, try reversing or changing the order of poems, or experimenting with reversing lines within the opening and closing poems to see whether the impact of this reordering reveals anything new and luminous.

At Gasworks Park in Seattle

This week’s prompt is inspired by two things — which happen to be closely related.  First, the group of beginning poetry students I had the pleasure of teaching this spring.  Second, the end of the school year, which, for those of us tied to the academic calendar, signals a shift in many things: schedule, work pace, travel & place, life rhythm…

Midway through spring quarter, a group of my students developed a writing prompt, or “pitch,” in which they asked their classmates to write a poem that paid particular attention to sound.  In class, we’d been discussing Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide to Understanding and Writing Poetry (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1994), in which she introduces the concept of “sound families”: vowel and consonant sounds divided further into mutes, liquids, etc.  I’d asked the class to develop their own families of sound, based not only on Oliver’s taxonomy of vowels and consonants, but on their intuitive sense of language as well — what sounded “spiky,” what sounded “smooth;” what sounded “purple” versus “yellow,” and so forth.

What emerged from this class session was the following prompt: write a poem whose use of sound dramatizes a change, or shift, in mood and circumstance.  I found this to be a brilliant way of getting the class to explore the use of dynamic structures in their work, as well as to think about the possibilities of sound in enacting meaning.

After all, why not use sound to signal change?  When frightened, it’s our ears that prick up first — sounds acquire sharper, more jagged edges; loud noises reverberate in a clanging, dizzying cacophony.  The change of a season, the death of a loved one — these are dramatic moments that shift the ways in which we understand our surroundings and, thus, alter our sense perception of the world.

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Prompt:

Write a poem that dramatizes a shift or change, not simply in its narrative or rhetorical structure, but in its sonic textures as well.  Think about the relationship between sound, speaker, and tone; ask yourself how your piece’s aural qualities can become a dynamic force that alters the mood or circumstance of your poem.

Stephen Hong Sohn

This May, as part of our celebration of APIA Heritage Month, we have been asking teachers and writers of Asian American poetry to share favorite writing exercises with us.  This week, in acknowledgement of the fact that the work of reading and theorizing Asian American poetry is as important as the work of writing it, we’re changing things up a bit by adding a perspective from the world of literary criticism to the mix.  For today’s Curated Prompt, we have the privilege of collaborating with one of our regular guest contributors—Asian American Literature scholar and Stanford professor Stephen Hong Sohn—as he writes about one of his aesthetic interests and shares, for the very first time, a sample of his own (hitherto secret!) creative work.

Alexis Kienlen’s She Dreams in Red begins with my favorite kind of poem: the “food pornography” poem, which immediately problematizes issues of authenticity and Asian American identity. The lyric speaker often contemplates ethnic heritage as routed through her mixed-race background. What does it mean to so unabashedly crave ethnic foods, the lyric speaker seems to ask?  What can one claim ownership over, and what can one not?

Here is an excerpt from the opening poem, entitled “Chinese Café”:

“i want to savour pork dumplings,
dribble hoisin, garlic and black bean sauce over rice,
want to twist and drip noodles into my mouth,
lick my lips” (11).

The ending of the poem leaves us with this line: “this Chinese café stays open all night,” and we, as voracious readers, couldn’t really be happier.

Marking ethnicity is always a challenge within poems, but many Asian American poets such as Li-Young Lee and Aimee Nezhukumatathil have been able to explore gastronomic tropes with much complexity, and often with much humor.  At once, we understand that food can mark ethnicity, but that it can also be deconstructed or employed to complicate superficial consumptive habits. Food also provides a particularly rich terrain of vocabulary. As someone who can’t cook myself, I find cookbooks endlessly fascinating and endlessly ethnic. Frank Chin once made a scathing critique of writers who employ food pornography as a way to mark themselves as native informants, but it’s difficult to know when excess is intended or not. For the purposes of this exercise, we’ll intend to push this excess, as Kienlen does when craving those “wontons” and “custard tarts” (11). Here is a food pornography poem I’d like to share:

Vietnamese food pornography poem #2: the sacred and profane

on this misted early morning
the haze ever so beta-particulate
japan’s nuclear crisis compared to Chernobyl
but culinary erotics distract me
the sensuous curve of the baked egg tart from Kang Lac
hand pressed pork puffs and steaming pork buns
so coy under the dim lights of Asian Garden Mall
Yum Cha Café boasts the understated elegance
of coconut crusted mochi balls with taro curd filling
flirtatious with such pliant, feathered skins
next door, Bánh Mi Saigon delivers me
into succulent hybridities: liver pâté, cold cut meats,
pickled carrots and turnips, all on French baguettes
postcolonial oriental cosmic

can i be so apolitically gastronomic
in these electromagnetic times
what intersections do i allow at Bolsa and Magnolia?
vendors at food stalls gesture in Vietnamese
frown, furrowed brows, shrugged shoulders
i profess that i am purely Korean
retreat into a bustling noodle shop
where my psychic sukiyaki emits a spectral glow,
brains scrambled in sinewy ramen, measured in sieverts
tripe floats on radioactive, soupy currents
bulgogi strips infesting this curry-flavored broth
as i later salt my phở with iodine and wasabi

Now, let’s see your version of a “food pornography” poem.

Prompt: write a poem that engages greedily, lasciviously—even pornographically—with the sensual pleasures of consuming “home” or “ethnic” foods in order to challenge, reimagine, or push familiar culinary markers of ethnicity into the realm of playful excess.

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Stephen Hong Sohn is an Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University.

Angel Island Immigration Station

Last May, the LR Blog featured the Angel Island poems in our APIA Heritage Month “Poetry in History” series.  In the post, Iris explains:

Often called the “Ellis Island of the West,” Angel Island served as the site for processing as many as 175,000 Chinese immigrants from 1910-1940.

Detainees were separated by gender [and ethnicity!] and locked up in crowded barracks while they awaited questioning, for weeks or months — sometimes, for years — at a time. To pass the time, many immigrants wrote or carved poems into the soft wood of the barrack walls.

The poems vary in theme, form, and in level of polish, and serve as a testimony to the experience of detention, chronicling everything from hope to anger to loneliness, to a sense of adventure.

At the time, I had never visited Angel Island or read any of the poems inscribed on the walls of the immigration station, but last week I made the pilgrimage: flew to San Francisco, drove to Tiburon, took the ferry, made the hike, etc.  It was an odd experience—I arrived at the dock at the same time as two groups of fifth grade history students, meaning that I toured the immigration station with them and heard all sorts of hilarious comments: “Who fought who during the Civil War?  China and America?” as well as some not-so hilarious ones: “Chinese, Japanese, itchy knees, money please…” a sing-song chant I remember hearing about from the mid-twentieth century, around the time the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed.  Amazing, really, what little impact four decades of activism have had on prevailing attitudes about who is/n’t included in “America” and why.

Swatches of paint removed to show the many layers accumulated below

Touring the immigration station barracks, however, was phenomenal.  The ghosted voices inscribed on the walls—some carved deep into the wood, some scrawled in pencil, some inked in pen or merely scratched on the surface—were everywhere, which, along with the milling crowds of fifth-graders, gave an acute sense of claustrophobia.  The air was heavy with history, the weight of all that had transpired within the close quarters of the barracks.

The photo on the left shows a corner of the men’s lodgings where sections of lead paint have been removed to reveal layers of ink below.  A park ranger informed us that at some point they decided not to strip the walls for fear of destroying the layers of poetry below.  Fascinating, the question of how to preserve these delicate poems, covered by layers of putty that have since sunk into the carvings, drawn in by the soft wood.

Bunks in the Immigration Station barracks

In considering how to best respond to these poems in my own work, however, I have found myself caught in the conundrum discussed in Josephine Park’s Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics (Oxford University Press).  Taking up classical Chinese (or Japanese) forms and responding to these voices in kind can be a risky or at least complicated venture for the Asian American poet whose work can be subjected to criticism for its clumsy importation of Asian forms into an American context.  Work like this, Park points out, can (sometime inadvertently) become aligned with the modernist tradition of American Orientalism, in which Japanese and Chinese forms are first conflated, and then appropriated by Western poets seeking a more authentically American voice.  In short: how to respond to these poems without sounding like a voice lifted out of Pound’s Cathay?

This is an issue taken up not only by Asian American poets and literary critics, but by our counterparts working in other realms of the creative arts as well.  How to respond to Asian heritages and cultural forms which constitute (at least a part of) our artistic lineage, while sidestepping the somewhat uncomfortable legacy of American Orientalism?  A possible model for consideration is the following piece of music composed in response to Poem #38:

Being idle in the wooden building, I opened a window.
The morning breeze and bright moon lingered together.
I reminisce the native village far away, cut off by clouds and mountains.
On the little island the wailing of cold, wild geese can be faintly heard.
The hero who has lost his way can talk meaninglessly of the sword.
The poet at the end of the road can only ascend a tower.
One should know that when the country is weak, the people’s spirit dies.
Why else do we come to this place to be imprisoned?

(as translated in Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island 1919-1940, University of Washington Press)

The song, written by Paul Sakai and performed by DuckDuckGoose (keyboardist Brian Woolford, guitarist John Broback, and Sakai on drums), is called “Angel Island“—click the link to hear the MP3.  It was featured by the Chinese Expulsion Remembrance Project in Seattle earlier this year, and is of particular interest to me because rather than responding to Poem #38 in a way one might expect, it reaches beyond the conventions of “Asian fusion” for a wholly new form of expression.  In talking about the piece—and his work as an Asian American musician in general–Sakai often expresses the desire to move away from clumsy attempts to “meld” cultures or too overtly juxtapose “Asian” chord progressions against “American” or Western strands.

Prompt:

Listen to “Angel Island” by DuckDuckGoose and respond to Poem #38 (or any of the Angel Island poems, for that matter).  In your drafting process, be aware of how you navigate your engagement with the classical and/or potentially “American Orientalist” sensibility of the poems’ translation.

Allow the spirit of the musical composition to inform your work; consider this a response to a response, yet another contribution to the rich creative conversation first instigated by these historic protest poems.

Four wild daisies. (Not just flowers).

This week in my intro comp class, my students read a chapter from Natalie Goldberg’s book Writing Down the Bones, in which she urges aspiring writers to use specific language in their descriptions, arguing that, just as a person deserves the dignity of being called by the name that is unique to them, an object, an idea, or whatever it is that becomes the subject of one’s writings, also deserves the dignity of specificity (77).

I like this idea—that to write specifically is not only to render a subject more vividly, but it is to render that subject with an ethical hand: truthfully, respectfully, with acknowledgment of its dignity.  There is much talk in the arts of how to create ethically, with genuine concern for the dignity and humanity of the subjects that we handle in our work.  I like the idea that to write ethically involves more than paying attention to the greater political implications of our words; that such concerns are extremely important, but that as writers, in order to render these themes well, we also have a responsibility to pay close scrutiny to the elements of craft—if we are not paying careful attention to the colors and tonalities of our words, to the very palette with which we wield our art, then we are not honoring the subjects of our writing, either.  How that attention to detail pans out, of course, will be very different in every case (there is, in my opinion, no monolithically “correct” definition of, or approach to, solid craft).  But the idea that the attention and respect which a writer pays to his or her subject will be conveyed in the detailed inflections of his or her work seems very wise to me, indeed.

This week, my students worked on inversions in class in order to help them better understand the concept of “tone” in close reading.  One of the poems that, when inverted, produced the most striking results, was Naomi Shihab Nye’s “San Antonio.”  I am struck by the way that, in this poem, the sudden specificity that appears in line 10, when “the highways slide out of my hands,” renders the turn luminous, surprising, and opens up the whole piece to a flood of strikingly vivid remembrances (from highways to “old men / in the west side cafe,” to the “dominoes” that they deal “like magical charms”), before returning again to the more muted gestures of the poem’s opening.  That burst of specific color and shape, the naming that occurs in the middle of the poem, acts like a magical rip, a tiny mouth in the fabric of the poem’s surface that Nye, like a magician, lets spill out and roll around like little jewels for a moment, illuminating and deepening the scene and the relationship between the I and you for a tantalizingly evocative moment, before deftly hiding them away again.  The memory of that scene, with the old men and their dominoes, and the highways slipping away from the speaker’s hands like ribbons or fish, lingers with the reader, and it casts its spell on the final few lines, strengthening, emboldening, making the speaker more dimensional to us, bestowing upon her the dignity of our remembrance.

Prompt: Write a poem whose primary device relies on the power of naming particular objects, or whose craft strategically focuses the reader’s attention on a collection of small, but piercingly specific, details.

Workshop

The inspiration for this prompt comes from a lesson I taught recently in my Intro to Poetry class: “How to Workshop a Poem.”  From an instructor’s perspective, it was a lesson on workshop protocol, giving constructive feedback, etc.  As a creative writer, however, one who has sat through (and participated in, don’t get me wrong!) countless undergraduate workshops, graduate workshops, informal workshops, community workshops, middle school workshops, etc. etc. etc., the sense I got while delivering my mini-lecture was that my students were being inducted into some secret society, one with oddball rules (“The person whose work is being workshopped must never speak.”  ”If one wishes to refer to the ‘I’ in a poem one must always say ‘THE SPEAKER’ and never ‘YOU.’ “) and traditions not immediately intuitive but terribly, terribly important nonetheless.

Since the proliferation of university-housed creative writing programs, a process that began in the 1930s with the establishment of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (just called “The Workshop” on the department webpage) and has caused the number of programs to skyrocket to unprecedented numbers (the current program count is somewhere around 800), we’ve entered an era in which most—if not all—of us have at some point encountered the Workshop beast.  Most of us have been trained in an institutional context and as such, have grown accustomed to specific patterns of speech and behavior in the classroom.  Which can be a bit weird.

[T]hat gives me a very strong feeling,
a very powerful sense of something.
But I don’t know if anyone else was feeling that.
Maybe that was just me.
Maybe that’s just the way I read it.

(“Workshop,” Billy Collins)

All the same, we know workshop, both love and hate it, think it’s vital, useless, irrelevant, etc.  So why not write about it?

Two well-known examples of “workshop” poems:

“Workshop” by Billy Collins

“For a Student Sleeping in a Poetry Workshop” by David Wagoner

Prompt:

Write a poem about workshop, set in workshop, or against workshop.  Take your cue (or not!) from Collins and use the peculiar language and syntactical constructions we’re trained to use in the creative writing classroom.

Play with perspective and speak, like David Wagoner, from the instructor’s point of view, or if you’re more familiar with the student experience, from the shoulder of the participant.  Have fun with voice and persona, and don’t be afraid to take a few jabs at what we all know as the Workshop beast.