Weekly Prompt: Playing With Perspective

So you’re drafting a poem and nothing seems to be working.  Fifth draft, sixth draft…  the language drags, the images remain hackneyed.  But here’s a thought: have you considered experimenting with point of view?

Though this is something you probably had to do in middle school, I’ve actually found that shifting the narrative center of a poem (unless, of course, you’re not working with a narrative center, in which case you’ll just have to keep on drafting) can bring new energy to a drafting process gone slack.

I wouldn’t recommend doing this too early in the process – I’ve come to think of this “trick” as something of a last resort, like when I’ve done all I can to work through a poem and still don’t feel it’s arrived.  For example, earlier this week I was working on a fairly straightforward poem about a family in a hospital watching their dying father take communion: the wife waited, the child sat.  The chaplain poured the grape juice.  The chaplain blessed the grape juice.  The chaplain passed the grape juice.

Things were getting a little boring.  So I switched it up and forced the narrative into a second person point of view.  All at once, it wasn’t “the man dying,” but you.  And you were dying.  Working through the poem with this fresh perspective forced much of the material (about half the lines, I’d say) from the narrative, but also demanded that certain details be added.  What do “you” hear when you’re at death’s door?  How do “you” perceive your family?

Whether or not you stick with the perspective switch after you’re done with the exercise, hopefully you’ll find that this has forced you to write toward a different set of expectations and demands.  Work to make the individual versions as distinctive as possible, and have fun!

Weekly Prompt: Inversion

Inversion

A couple of weeks ago, we posted an imitation exercise, so I thought it would only be fitting to post that exercise’s opposite: writing an inversion. I’ve done this exercise a few times before, and on each occasion I’ve found it very difficult! The decisions one has to make about how to flip another poet’s meaning inside out and yet still remain somewhat faithful to the sonic/syntactical frame of the original poem and at the same time create a piece that has some aesthetic sense to it really stretch one’s abilities in all sorts of ways.  Though I couldn’t imagine the results of any of my inversions as finished poems (I’m not yet good enough at the exercise to have made it really work for me!), I’ve often found myself being pleasantly surprised by the fresh aesthetic directions in which the exercise has pushed my language and has caused me to step out of myself.  Often, I find that allowing myself the freedom to write what feels like complete nonsense truly makes me pay further attention to technicalities of sound and word choice.

Prompt: Write a poem that is an inversion of another poem.  Take each line of the original poem and  try to write its antithesis or opposite, subverting the original poet’s imagery and meaning while remaining as close to their rhythms and syntactical patterns as possible.

Just for kicks, here is an excerpt from a first draft of an inversion exercise that I patterned on Pattiann Rogers’  “Address: the Archaeans, One Cell Creatures“:

“Yes, some are fully clothed
but too large for even the boldest
black and white and since they are silent
and neither tuneful nor stoic, they are,
therefore, not any less than mirage, less
than illusion, less than truth.

They have not stood against stiff
white desert surfaces and stayed,
they have crumbled beneath the breath of equatorial steam, have failed to root
amidst loose radicals and reactive
salts, slipped away easily while coughing up
conjoined flesh. They are more whimsical
than concrete, far more solitary
than black holes (. . .)”

Another interesting possibility for the inversion exercise—one that I have yet to fully explore myself—is the opportunity that it might afford for a poet to “write back” at the politics of a poem representing a set of ideals that he or she might want to subvert.  I’ve yet to find a poem that this would work well with for me (the success of the exercise depends as much on one’s choice of an original poem as it does on the execution!), but if you’ve tried this before successfully, I would love to hear about your experience—please do share your thoughts with us in the comments!

Happy writing, and happy weekend!

Weekly Prompt: Letter to My Country

Dorthea Lange's iconic Pledge of Allegiance image (via Wikipedia)

I recently visited the MOMA in New York City, where I had the chance to see a print of Dorthea Lange’s famous image of a Japanese American girl reciting the Pledge of Allegiance hanging in their photography gallery.  Lange’s photo, taken during the Internment era, when Japanese Americans’ loyalty, Constitutional freedoms—and indeed, their human dignity—were under extreme duress, serves as a witness to the injustices of the past, but also reminds us of the fact that we, despite our often-difficult political relationship to this nation that we claim as our home, are a part of it.  That we participate in the making of the messy narrative that is American history, and that the narratives that make up the history of this nation are necessarily entangled with our own.  In short, this is our America, too.

Independence Day is coming up, and in thinking about our history as Americans of color, I’m inspired by the fraught complexity of the relationship between nation and speaker that exists this poem by Claude McKay [text via the Poetry Foundation]:

America

by Claude McKay

Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth.
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving me strength erect against her hate,
Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.
Yet, as a rebel fronts a king in state,
I stand within her walls with not a shred
Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer.
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
And see her might and granite wonders there,
Beneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand,
Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.

Prompt: Write a poem in the form of a letter to your country.

Weekly Prompt: Imitation

"Warhol Troopers": Artist Mike Stimpson does Warhol's famous Marilyn portrait in Lego - with a little Star Wars twist.

One of the most productive creative writing exercises that I was assigned in college was to write an imitation of Charles Wright’s poem “Clear Night.” My instructor did not give many specific instructions, other than to use the form of the poem as a type of “template” for my own.  I struggled incredibly with the assignment at first, but eventually decided to simply follow (approximately), the rhythms and repetitions of Wright’s syntax.  Once I had decided that, and chosen an opening image, I found that the content of the poem found itself.  When I first started to write,  the poem was (oddly) about mouth ulcers — but somehow that evolved into a vision of a body riddled with the effects of radiation sickness.

In particular, I found myself drawn by Wright’s magnetic use of anaphora: “And the wind says “What?” to me. / And the castor beans, with their little earrings of death, say “What?” to me. / And the stars start out on their cold slide through the dark. / And the gears notch and the engines wheel.”  I followed these patterns closely with my own lines: “But the earth grew deaf to her. / And the ore, with its necklace of fallen particles, grows dim to her. / And the moon grows cold, and the wind shifts / And a thought slips from her fingers.”

What began as an exercise in imitation became the poem “Marie Curie, Dying,” the poem that began my obsession with writing about science and that would, in time, become the first poem of my MFA thesis.

Prompt: Write a poem that closely imitates a well-known poem, using that poem’s the sonic, rhythmic, and/or textural moves as a “template” or “form” for your own.

Weekly Prompt: Writing Through Form

Few of us ever sit down to write and think, “Wow, I feel like writing a double abecedarian today!” or “I’m not sure why, but this feels like a sestina type of morning.”  If you’re anything like me, you have a somewhat removed relationship to form: you know it’s out there, and have grown up loving sonnets and sestinas, but you’re steeped in contemporary free verse and it’s not often that you turn naturally toward the formal constraints of meter, rhyme schemes, and patterns of repetition.  What I’ve discovered however, is that using form (or multiple forms, even) as part of a drafting process can be tremendously helpful.

Take this process, for instance.  I begin with a page and a half of rough, ill-formulated free verse (part of my stream-of-consciousness generating process), cut everything that seems extraneous, then apply a ten-syllables-per line rule that reads roughly like iambic pentameter.  Some lines feel forced, others buckle with newfound muscle and verve.  In certain places, the syntax torques into interesting patterns and the language tightens with sharpened verbs and image.  I extract all the lines that are working well and weave them into a pantoum.  The language overlaps, recontextualizes, and surprising new meanings are forged and unforged.

My pantoum reveals the weaknesses of specific lines, so I cut them, keeping only the lines strong enough to stand alone.  Strong enough to pass, if you will, the “test” of the pantoum.  What’s left is a hodge-podge of lines and my poem looks like a newspaper with the headlines cut out, but one or two stanzas remain untouched.  I smash them into a rough fourteener form, then work and rework the language until what emerges—hammered, refined, and carefully tuned, is a new poem.  I am pleased.

Your process (or experiment) doesn’t have to be as involved as the one I’ve just described.  Writing through form (where form is not the final destination, but rather, the means by which one reaches the poems one really wants to write) can be as simple as: free verse to blank verse, or free verse to haiku to heroic couplets.  Be creative.  Mix and match, invent unexpected combinations of form (ie. “What do you get when you cross iambic tetrameter with an elegy?”).  Some pairings may prove disastrous, but no worries.  Since you’re writing through form as part of a drafting process, even the most awful results can be redirected in the next draft.

Feel free to either post a sample poem or share a few process notes from your attempts to write through form.  Good luck, and have fun!

Weekly Prompt: Poems About Fruit

The remains of a kiwi

I’m spending a some time at my parents’ place at the moment, and one of the things that always characterizes home for me is the overabundance of fruit that my family likes to keep in the house — on top of the microwave, in the fridge, on the butcher block, on the floor next to the butcher block, in cardboard boxes in the garage.  We really love our fruit — we eat lots of it after every meal, and lots of different kinds.  This week alone, the five of us here have demolished a number of mangoes, a large pineapple, half a giant watermelon, a honeydew melon, and much of a large box of strawberries (we’ve yet to break into the large papaya next to the counter but I suspect that it’s slated to appear at tonight’s evening meal).  Fruit may seem like an odd topic for a poetry blog — but I assure you that it’s much less far-off than it may sound.  It occurred to me recently just how many famous poems have been written about fruit — Li-Young Lee’s “Persimmons,” Gary Soto’s “Oranges,” William Carlos Williams’ “This Is Just to Say,” and Robert Frost’s “After Apple-Picking” are just a few that come to mind (Poets.org has a list of many more).  And then there is the Biblical association of the fruit that stems from original sin, the folk associations in many traditions between fruit and fertility.  Fruit, it seems, is a subject that has the potential to draw out longing, desire, sensual pleasure — both epicurean and sexual — for the writer.  And writing about encounters with different kinds of fruit and with different ways of preparing them (as in Lee’s “Persimmons”) may be a way of engaging with cultural difference, alienation, or homesickness, as well. I never thought much of eating papaya, pomelo, longan as a child — but it was fruit like these that I would find myself missing the most deeply years later when I grew up and moved away.

Prompt: Write a poem about a fruit whose associations figure significantly in your memories of a particular person, time, or place.

Weekly Prompt: Superstitions

This week’s prompt is based on a surrealist exercise.  I tried leading a version of it this past spring at the Center for the Homeless, where I was participating in a writing group, and it was fascinating to hear the kind of responses that the topic of superstition evoked.  Everyone had a story to tell: of Irish grandmothers who threw salt over their shoulders, fathers who insisted that if their son did not wear a particular “lucky” jersey, their favorite team would lose, fears of opening umbrellas indoors and ruminations on the subject of black cats (What happens to people who own black cats? They must cross their pets’ paths all the time). Whether or not one would identify oneself as superstitious, there is something attractive about the imaginative possibilities evoked by unusual relationships of cause and effect.  If I sleep with my notes under my pillow the night before a test, will the information really seep into my brain?  There’s something intriguing about the idea of translating physical symbols — marks on the page — into knowledge which might be acquired through touch, mediated by the permeable state(s) of sleep and dreaming.  Superstitions celebrate the strange and fantastic, the unusual and the inexplicable and the ways that we ground our narratives of encounter with them within the contexts of ritual and belief.  Where do superstitions come from?  What happens when we develop new ones?  (For example, “If you sneeze when the wind is blowing South, you’ll generate a tornado somewhere” or, “Don’t eat pretzels on a Sunday; you might come down with the measles”). The following exercise asks you to engage with the question of where and how we come to associate actions with otherwise mysterious consequences.

Prompt: Come up with a new superstition and elaborate upon it in a poem; or, develop a series of new superstitions — and use them to write a list poem.

As an interesting example of a poem based on a made-up superstition, we’ll leave you with this excerpt from Marin Sorescu’s poem, “Superstition“:

My cat washes
with her left paw,
there will be another war.
For I have observed
that whenever she washes
with her left paw
international tension grows
considerably.
How can she possibly keep her eye
on all the five continents?
Could it be
that in her pupils
that Pythia now resides
who has the power
to predict
the whole of history
without a full-stop or comma?
[Visit the Poetry Foundation web site to read the rest of Sorescu’s poem.]

Poetry In History: Writing About the I-Hotel

Scene from the 1977 I-Hotel Eviction (Credit: SF Chronicle)

In celebration of APIA Heritage Month, we’ll be running a special Poetry in History series once a week in lieu of our Friday prompts.  For each post in the series, we’ll highlight an important period in Asian American history and  conclude with an idea that we hope will provoke you to respond. Today’s post is about the fraught history of the International Hotel in San Francisco’s Manilatown.

In 1977, San Francisco’s Manilatown community suffered a huge blow with the final eviction of the mostly Filipino American residents from the International Hotel (or I-Hotel).  This followed  almost a decade’s worth of protest and community struggle in the hopes that the building, which had housed many Filipino immigrants throughout the years, would not become yet another victim of the city’s gentrification projects.   For years after the final residents were removed, the building — and later, the site — stood empty, the hole a yawning reminder of what had been lost.  One of the major voices speaking out against the fall of Hotel belonged to the poet, musician, and activist Al Robles. The I-Hotel was a recurring theme that wove throughout his work and took on breath, shape, and life through his poetry.  Robles’ nephew wrote the following on the recent anniversary of his death:

“In the I-Hotel he [Robles] traveled up the stairs and the doors opened to those small rooms; the smell of rice and adobo and fish was there; the face of the manong was there—he knew the face—it was the face of his father and mother and ninong and ninang. He sat across from the manongs and in their faces he saw the motherland, in their hearts and minds he journeyed and tasted what he described the “thick adobo tales of their lives”. Those elderly men were alive and in Uncle Al’s poetry they became young again.” (Tony Robles, “Still Hanging onto the Carabao’s Tail”)

The I-Hotel was eventually rebuilt into a community center.  The new building, opened in 2005, houses the Manilatown Heritage Foundation and is a hub for political and arts events.  Al Robles passed away in 2009, but his legacy continues to be celebrated.  Other poets have since followed in Robles’ footsteps, writing about their relationship to the city of San Francisco, and to the “ground zero” that was the I-Hotel site.  One such poet is Barbara Jane Reyes, whose poem dedicated to Robles is forthcoming in the first issue of Lantern Review. In her book Poeta en San Francisco, Reyes touches on the shape of this wound, invoking the evicted bodies whose physical rootlessness signifies a history fraught with forced erasures and displacements.  In her poem “calle de sección ocho, casas de abuelos y de abuelas,” her speaker invites us to enter the hole in the ground where the hotel once stood

“the unused hole in the ground located at the corner of kearney and
jackson across from celluloid god’s patina café may one day contain
supportive tenant services and artifacts of blue men’s billy clubs in the
meantime just gawk at it and take polaroids don’t hold your breath
few descend into the hole it’s been 30 years”

Manilatown itself becomes a ghost with a cavity in place of the organ that was the I-Hotel, which by the end of the poem is revealed to be a type of inverted sanctuary, inhabited by “ghosts and discarded things,” made remarkable for its absence — its existence etched out in the negativity of its space, the way that it tunnels into the earth rather than rises up from it.

Continue reading “Poetry In History: Writing About the I-Hotel” →

Weekly Prompt: Kenji’s Prompt (National Poetry Month Prompt Contest Winner!)

Congratulations to Kenji, the winner of our 2010 National Poetry Month Prompt Contest!

Here’s a slightly paraphrased version of his winning prompt.

Writes Kenji: “This one is not mine originally, but it’s one of the best ones I’ve ever tried. It comes by way of poet Suheir Hammad.”

Prompt:

Close your eyes and think about a time in your life that was extremely difficult.  Imagine the scene in as much detail as possible. Now, holding that moment of difficulty in your mind, search the scene and find one aspect of the situation or your environment that was beautiful. It could be environment and sensory – a sound, color, texture, lighting – or it could be an insight, perspective or emotion that existed at the same time as the difficulty.

Write about that beautiful aspect of this scene of difficulty for 15 minutes.

* * *

We liked the creative possibilities of the paradoxical tension that this prompt asks the writer to explore: not beauty in spite of difficulty, nor a romanticized celebration of difficulty, but the strangeness by which a moment of difficulty can take on aspects of the beautiful.  Exploring this sort of tension in a poem may have the potential to open up an image or brief narrative moment to strange, surprising, and ever more complex associations.

Kenji will be receiving a signed copy of Monica Youn’s Ignatz.  Congratulations to him, and many thanks to all who participated!

Weekly Prompt: Steph’s Prompt (National Poetry Month Contest 1st Runner-Up)

This week prompt is from Steph, the reader whose prompt we’ve chosen as the 1st runner-up in our National Poetry Month Contest:

Prompt: Find a childhood toy and write about the first memory that comes to mind. Also consider the toy’s colors, textures, heft, etc.

We thought this was an interesting take on the exercise of writing about an object as a memorial trigger (I’ve done this before with vegetables and with household items like hangers and lightbulbs, but never with toys, which have a peculiar relationship to memory as both mute witness to and the subject/object of memory).  There are so many ways that you could spin it: a textural list poem, a persona poem, an ode, a poem in the form of an advertisement, an epistolary poem, etc.

Many congratulations to Steph!  Please check back next Friday when we reveal our first place winner and the recipient of a signed copy of Ignatz.