I’ve adapted today’s prompt from Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux’s handbook The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry, which I use in my introductory poetry class to teach important craft concepts such as image, metaphor, and description. It’s a fairly simple exercise–more of a starting point, really, from which to begin exploring deeper notions of presence, absence, and the manner in which memory “ghosts” poetic vision. Feel free to respond to the prompt as is, or elaborate upon/disregard its restrictions as you see fit.
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Think of a pair of old shoes. Describe them in a way that will make the reader think of death, but do not refer to death explicitly in the poem. If you wish, you may think of a specific pair of shoes that belongs to a specific person, but do not mention the person by name or indicate your relationship with them.
Image from Kristine Uyeda's postcard poem, "Red Riding Hood" (published in Issue 1 of LR)
This week’s prompt was largely inspired by the beautiful Kundiman postcard poems that we had the privilege of publishing in our first issue. Writing postcard poems can be a lovely exercise in multiple respects. They are, by nature, short, which is a challenge in and of itself. Furthermore, they are handwritten, and in some cases, hand-illustrated, too. The detail and attention that drafting them requires can add a dimension of intimacy to the finished product. Additionally, the fact that they are necessarily one-of-a-kind means that each postcard poem becomes a little one-off publication unto itself, and the card’s fragility and vulnerability to things like fingers and rain as it travels through the mail means that the piece that is received on the other end is always inscribed with a physical history of travel and transfer from hand-to-hand-to-hand. The exchange of postcard poems , furthermore, can be an excellent way to build community, inviting collaboration, response, and the incorporation of poetry on a micro-scale into the everyday correspondence of those who participate.
Experienced poets may find it satisfying enough to challenge themselves with the tiny spatial confines of a postcard, but I have also included a variation below that I’ve tried in the community/classroom setting with some success.
Prompt:
Create or find a postcard whose subject interests you (non-geographically specific subjects tend to work quite well). Decide upon a persona, or voice, and an addressee. From what space, place, or position is that postcard being written? How might this sense of positionality affect the speaker’s attitude towards the addressee, and thereby, the tone of his or her address? Write an epistolary poem on the back of the postcard, using the small rectangular writing space to shape your poem’s form.
Classroom Variation (“Wish You Were Here”):
Write a poem in the form of a postcard from an unusual location. When I’ve done this exercise with small groups in the past, I’ve come prepared with a handful of blank notecards on which strange, mundane, wacky , and/or otherwise non-geographical ‘locations’ have been pre-written (e.g. “The Bridge of George Washington’s Nose,” “The Back of the Refrigerator,” “The Library Dumpster,” “The Bee’s Knees,” “Inside Harry Potter’s Shoe,” “The Kitchen Table,” etc.). On the back side of each card, I’ll draw or print a “postcard” template (complete with spaces for mailing address and stamp, should the students decide to mail off their completed pieces). After introducing the concept of epistolary poems to the students and giving them a few examples, I allow them to choose a “postcard” featuring a location that interests them. The students are then given the chance to try writing a postcard poem on the back sides of their chosen cards. For younger or more artistically-inclined groups, adding an illustration on the blank front side of the card can also be fun.
Allen Ginsberg, creator of the American Sentences form. Photo courtesy of Stanford University Special Collections.
A colleague recently introduced me to American Sentences, a poetic form developed by Allen Ginsberg in the mid-1980’s as a response to the haiku. If haiku involved seventeen syllables down the page, he reasoned, American Sentences would be seventeen syllables across the page–an attempt to more accurately “Americanize” a form that had previously translated only roughly across the Pacific into the context of American poetry.
Like (rough) English approximations of the haiku, American Sentences work closely with concision of line and sharpness of detail. Unlike its literary predecessor, however, it is compressed into a single line of poetry and included a reference to a month and year (or alternatively, a location) rather than a season.
Seattle-based poet John Olson observes:
[American Sentences are] extremely vivid & detail-oriented, a la the haiku. Emphasis is on the image, rather than rhetoric, or lyricism. Unlike the haiku, however, which is a highly bastardized form in English, they’re more suited to the American idiom & so allow a greater range of natural expression. They don’t have the aesthetic stiffness of the haiku as they are practiced in English.
A few examples by Ginsberg:
Nov 1991 N.Y.
Put my tie on in a taxi, short of breath, rushing to meditate Tompkins Square Lower East Side N.Y.
Four skinheads stand in the streetlight rain chatting under an umbrella.
Prompt:
Write an American Sentence–or a series of American Sentences. Focus not only on features characteristic of the haiku, like precision of detail and careful use of word, but also on the cadence and rhythm of “American vernacular,” however you understand it.
If you want, play with dialect and/or accent, challenging the boundaries of what constitutes the “American” Sentence and contextualizing the form to linguistic realities specific to your experience or understanding of the “englishes” of America.
For more information on the origin and possibilities of this form, check out Paul Nelson’s website on American Sentences, which includes an extensive archive of examples, interviews, and other helpful resources.
I have been discussing some of Susan Sontag’s thoughts on photography with the students in my First Year Composition classes lately, and her comments about the way that photographic images fragment our modern sense of reality have made me think about how the same ideas might apply to poetry. Though our sense of the “real” in reading a poem is more diffused than the expectation of strict verisimilitude that we have in looking at photographs, a poem can, in some way, still be thought of as a lens or a frame through which we are given a curated glimpse into an event, thought, or world.
Draft a traditional narrative poem that describes an event or experience from real life. This doesn’t need to be derived from your own life—something from the news, or a book you’ve read is fine. Focus on using detail and description to tell a story, accurately and with as much emotional clarity as possible. Feel free to experiment with sound, image, and/or metaphor if it helps you better access the “truth” of the experience.
Return to your draft, taking into consideration how you might structure your narrative in a way that adds layers of meaning. You may need to experiment with several options, but some ideas to consider are:
locate a companion text (or write another piece) that you can weave into the narrative of your draft in such a way that generates and complicates meaning
develop a second poem that describe a corollary event to the first, then weave the two together
break the poem into sections, each narrated from a different point of view
extract a few lyrical details from your draft and develop a refrain, to be repeated throughout the poem as a force of both unity and change
Spend some time working and reworking your poem, but give it the freedom to become an entirely different piece. Also keep in mind that the objective of complicating structure is to deepen/layer meaning, and that these new meanings may not emerge until midway through the (re)structuring process.
The recent passing of a loved one and the swiftness with which summer weather has taken leave of South Bend has had my mind turning over the idea of departures recently.
When we are the ones who depart from a place, we simultaneously take part in entering into someplace, or something, else. But when we are the ones from whom someone or something departs, we mourn by collecting fragments: wisps of things which we try to stitch together to preserve some approximation of that which we have lost.
Today’s prompt is short, and simple.
Prompt: Write a poem about a departure. OR, alternately, write a poem about the experience of being left behind by someone or something else who has departed from you.
Using Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish” as a model, write at least 20 lines of detailed, concrete observation that describes a single object. Move past the obvious and think instead how you can describe the thing as if seeing it for the first time. Using tools like sensory detail, metaphor, and simile, defamiliarize the object to the extent that it becomes an object of wonder—terror, even. Hone your powers of observation by delving into the fantastical, allowing your subconscious to reveal what’s most strange or troubling about your subject of scrutiny.
Work with all of the senses (including the imagination) to allow your reader to really see the object—and then to see it again, even more closely. Avoid abstractions and “I” statements, communicating instead a sense of the “I” through the types of concrete detail included in the poem.
After finishing your initial draft, return to the piece and think how you can invest specific details with greater emotional resonance (ie. in describing the worn laces of a man’s boot, how can you actually address the nature of his relationship with his father?) through word choice, tone, and pacing. Expand on one (or two) of your most promising details and develop an original, full-fledged image (for example, the severed ears in Carolyn Forche’s “The Colonel,” or the lantern-heads in Victoria Chang’s “Lantern Festival”), one that functions as objective correlative to the subject matter of the poem.
This week’s prompt is inspired by the story behind Elizabeth Bishop’s famous poem “The Man-moth,” whose concept (and title) were derived from a newspaper’s misspelling of the word “mammoth.” While reflecting on the poem in a 1962 piece, Bishop mused,
“I’ve forgotten what it was that was supposed to be “mammoth.” But the misprint seemed meant for me. An oracle spoke from the page of the New York Times, kindly explaining New York City to me, at least for a moment.”
In “The Man-moth,” Bishop allows the content of the newspaper’s article to be subsumed by the wonderful strangeness of the misprint’s language. She excavates the question of what a man-moth might be, and builds an alternative universe around the idea. We are given a portrait of a subway-dwelling creature that is all eyes and all secrets, to whom the bustle of the surface world is threatening, but who finds comfort in the racing and lurching of the subway trains:
“Then he returns
to the pale subways of cement he calls his home. He flits,
he flutters, and cannot get aboard the silent trains
fast enough to suit him. The doors close swiftly.
The Man-Moth always seats himself facing the wrong way
and the train starts at once at its full, terrible speed,
without a shift in gears or a gradation of any sort.
He cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards.”
I am interested in the idea of what might be done with borrowed and revivified language of this sort. The newspaper-based exercise that I’ve delineated below is only one place to start, but I imagine that one could also get equally interesting results with another type of source: copy from internet advertisements, perhaps? the names of dishes on menus? informational text from a museum, zoo, or aquarium exhibit? The possibilities are pretty well endless.
Prompt: write a poem that takes, as its title, a headline or article title that has been borrowed from a newspaper. What fresh or alternative meanings might be excavated or derived from the headline’s syntax? Feel free to tweak (splice, loop, embellish) or even completely ignore the article’s actual contents.
If you’re looking for a place to start out, here are some titles of New York Times articles that I recently came across, which I thought might make for interesting titles of poems:
If you’ve been following the Lantern Review Blog for a while, you’re already familiar with the ekphrastic poem, that is, a poem written in response to a work of art. This prompt is a variation on the idea of ekphrasis and, like this prompt from two weeks ago, gives you an opportunity to play with perspective (except with higher stakes).
Pick a photograph of a meaningful occasion in your family’s history. A wedding, for example, or a baby shower. Maybe even a funeral; just choose an image that tells a story and features more than one member of your family. Look carefully at the people in the photo and think about their personalities, voices, idiosyncrasies. What family folklore comes to mind when you look at each individual? Now think about who’s not in the photo. Someone who passed away recently, or who has been deceased for decades. Someone who missed the occasion because they had something else to attend to, or forgot to show up.
Now write from the point of view of the absent party. Proceed in whatever way feels most natural to the voice of the person whose absence you’ve identified — this may mean you’re working mostly with direct address, description, narrative, or a combination of modes. You may find yourself experimenting with the voice of the dead, the voice of a divorced parent, or that of an uncle who cut himself off from the family. The idea is to forge a new perspective from which to consider your family’s history, one that would otherwise go unaddressed by more normative modes of “telling” family lore.
Part of an architectural plan for a library (via Wikipedia)
This week’s prompt has a shorter explanation than usual. I was simply very intrigued by Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge’s use of a particular building’s architecture to shape her poem “Permanent Home.” As Berssenbrugge engages with structural forms and technical language, the walls and beams of the house she’s describing become transparent, windows through which we can peek in at the speaker’s interior life while she peeks at us.
“The water tank sits on a frame of used wood, like a packing crate.
I look through it to an extinct volcano.
The panorama is true figuratively as space, and literally in a glass wall, where clouds appear like flowers, and the back-lit silhouette of a horse passes by.
A file of evergreens secures the cliff amid debris from a crew bilding, as at the edge of the sea.
Oranges, dumplings, boiled eggs take on the opaque energy of a stranger.
Knowledge as lintel, bond beam (model signs) holds the world at a distance.”
I love that last line, in particular. Berssenbrugge evokes such space and light with it. A home (even an imagined one) becomes a whole world, a place of origin and a vantage point from which one develops one’s perspective. And the lack of an actual physical structure to which to tie the speaker’s longing transforms the poem itself into a kind of home in which imagination dwells. A process that, I think, has particular resonance for me, not just as a child of diaspora, but as one such subject who writes.
Prompt: Write a poem that uses the architectural structure of a building as a frame or form by which to shape its content and imagery.
