This week’s prompt comes from LR reader “YW,” whose submission to our National Poetry Month Contest we’ve chosen as our second runner-up.
Prompt: Rewrite a fairy tale in verse from a different character’s perspective (e.g. the witch in Hansel and Gretel).
We were intrigued by this persona poem exercise, and thought that it might be interesting to consider in conversation with Louise Glück’s haunting take on Hansel and Gretel, “Gretel in Darkness.” Here’s an excerpt of the poem to get you thinking (the rest can be found on the Poetry Foundation’s web site):
“Gretel in Darkness
by Louise Glück
This is the world we wanted.
All who would have seen us dead
are dead. I hear the witch’s cry
break in the moonlight through a sheet
of sugar: God rewards.
Her tongue shrivels into gas. . . .
Now, far from women’s arms
and memory of women, in our father’s hut
we sleep, are never hungry.
Why do I not forget?
My father bars the door, bars harm
from this house, and it is years.”
Congratulations to YW, and happy Friday to all! Look out for the prompt from our first runner-up next week.
A big thank you to all of you who submitted prompts to our National Poetry Month contest! We’ve chosen three runners-up and one winner, and will be announcing them week by week as we post the ideas that they submitted.
This week, we’re featuring, as our third runner-up, a prompt that comes from an idea submitted by LR reader Joy.
Prompt: Write a poem having to do with place characterized in some way by a border or boundary.
Congratulations to Joy, and thanks again to all of you who submitted entries.
Check back again next Friday to see the prompt from our second runner-up!
In honor of the poet Ai, who recently passed away, this week’s prompt focuses on the dramatic monologue — a technique for which she was famous.
Born Florence Anthony, she adopted the name “Ai” after discovering that she had been conceived through an affair between her mother and a Japanese man that she (Ai) had never met. The Poetry Foundation’s bio on her describes her particular sensibilities well:
Ai is a poet noted for her uncompromising poetic vision and bleak dramatic monologues which give voice to marginalized, often poor and abused speakers . . . She has said that her given name reflects a “scandalous affair my mother had with a Japanese man she met at a streetcar stop” and has no wish to be identified “for all eternity” with a man she never knew. Ai’s awareness of her own mixed race heritage—she self-identifies as Japanese, Choctaw-Chickasaw, Black, Irish, Southern Cheyenne, and Comanche—as well as her strong feminist bent shape her poetry, which is often brutal and direct in its subject matter.
Ai’s poetry practically vibrates with the force of its imagery. Her lyrics leap from the page and inhabit the personas she takes on without apology. One of the things for which she was noted was her ability to enter the voices of those at the margins of society and infuse them with dignity and magnetic strength.
To illustrate, here is the opening to her poem Salomé:
I scissor the stem of the red carnation
and set it in a bowl of water.
It floats the way your head would,
if I cut it off.
But what if I tore you apart
for those afternoons
when I was fifteen
and so like a bird of paradise
slaughtered for its feathers.
Even my name suggested wings,
wicker cages, flight.
Come, sit on my lap, you said.
I felt as if I had flown there;
I was weightless.
You were forty and married.
That she was my mother never mattered.
She was a door that opened onto me.
The three of us blended into a kind of somnolence
and musk, the musk of Sundays. Sweat and sweetness.
That dried plum and licorice taste
always back of my tongue
and your tongue against my teeth,
then touching mine. How many times?—
I counted, but could never remember.
What stands out for me in these opening lines is the unforgettable boldness and clarity of its images: the scissored red carnation becomes a severed head, her description of dried plum and licorice give a sickening viscerality to the complexity of the speaker’s relationship to the “you” — he is at once abuser and lover, taker of innocence, and seductor, the wielder of an invisible tyranny in which the mother is also implicated: at the end of the poem, when a ghostly sword slices through the speaker’s throat, the mother’s dress is like that “of a grenadier,” and we are made to see how her kiss becomes an act of terrible violence disguised as tenderness.
In honor of Ai’s life, work, and legacy, here’s this week’s prompt.
Prompt: Write a poem in the form of a dramatic monologue in the voice of a single speaker who is not yourself. Optionally, if you do not wish to write a traditional persona poem, you may imagine the speaker’s voice as a loose projection of your own.
This week’s prompt is inspired by some of the visual poetry work done by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951 — 1982), a Korean American artist and poet who experimented with film, mixed media, intertext, and live performance to push her audience’s experience of the written word in radical directions. Cha lived an incredibly productive, but tragically brief life: at the age of 31, she was murdered by a stranger in New York City. Her much-studied book of hybrid poetry, prose, and image, Dictee, was published a week before her death.
One of the things that interests me most about Cha’s body of work is her experimentation with the book as object. On many occasions (as in the two pieces pictured above), she made use of objects other than the standard book format in order to demonstrate a kind of poetic. The forms and physical textures of the (often handmade) media with which she presented words in these pieces creates a process-oriented experience for the observer, in which we see and can feel the labor required to produce each piece of text. The text itself, too, has a physical quality to it. In the “untitled” piece above, it dangles almost precariously on wire, trapped halfway in a glass jar (the words read “water,” “fire,” “earth” . . . and something which I can’t quite make out . . . in French). We sense the microcosmic nature of language — it becomes a flimsy, yet beautiful item that constitutes our world.
Prompt: Create a poem designed to be presented as a 3-d object.
"Self-Portrait"
The piece I’m sharing with you here is actually a project I created for a contemporary poetry class last year: we were supposed to create an archaism, and I decided to use the technique of embroidery, along with nineteenth century / early twentieth century botanical diagrams and mottos from the language of flowers, to reflect on the idea of a curated representation of self (the work, obviously, is a pun on my name; the antique language of flowers handbook that I used indicated that the Iris used to convey the message “I Burn [for you]”). This, when combined with the sexuality of the plant’s anatomical structures (a flower is a plant’s reproductive organ), and the traditionally gender-bound craft of decorative embroidery, I hope — forms a reflection on gender, artifice, craft, and time.
As always, please do feel free to share your experiments on our Flickr pool. Happy Weekend! (Don’t forget to think about an entry for our prompt contest!)
During the past week or so, we’ve been looking at poems and aspects of presenting poems on the page which take into account (2-D) visual space and make room for illustration and elements of painting, drawing, collage, etc. This Friday, our prompt asks you to reexamine a form which many of us may remember being introduced to in grade school: the concrete poem.
Examples of Calligrams by Guillaume Apollinaire
“Concrete poetry,” according the Poetry Foundation’s glossary, is “Verse that emphasizes nonlinguistic elements in its meaning, such as a typeface that creates a visual image of the topic.” Far from being limited to poems whose words take on the outline of the object they are describing, concrete poetry can encompass everything from a playing with the sizes and spacing of text on the page to certain kinds of full-on “visual poetry,” which are more akin to collage or painting in their methods of arrangement words. The challenge, of course, is how to integrate the visual into a poem in a way that is satisfyingly beautiful (or jarring, depending on the desired effect) and yet feels organic and further enhances the complexity of the reader’s interaction with it.
Prompt: Write a poem takes into account shape and visual space on the flat plane of the page.
Some suggestions:
1) Compose a calligram, or poem in which the shape of the words enacts or take on the visual form of some object as a kind of complex illustration. (See examples of Guillaume Apollinare’s famous calligrams at the top of this post).
2) Create a poem that experiments with unusual typographical arrangements to emphasize its meaning. The Poetry Foundation also has a couple of neat visual poems that play with the shapes of letters: here, and here.
3) Write a poem on a piece of paper (or other flat surface) that is not a standard vertical letter-sized or notebook-sized sheet, using the shape of the surface to guide your form. For example, a long piece of ribbon, or the back of a circular coaster. I’ve found that this exercise (which I’ve borrowed from a former teacher of mine, Bruce Snider) becomes especially interesting if one uses a writing surface that already has words on it and allows those words to seamlessly flow into the resulting poem. (Examples of poets who’ve used a similar technique include A.R. Ammons, who wrote “Sphere” on ticker tape, and D.A. Powell, who wrote one of his books with his notebook turned sideways).
4) Write a poem that engages with the use of negative space in an existing piece of text or image (for example, a poem written in the margins of a newspaper, between the lines of a letter, or in the background spaces of a photograph or advertisement).
We realize that this week’s prompt is a little different, in that your response may or may not be easy to share in comment form. In light of this, we’ve created a Flickr pool where you can upload photos of your responses to our prompts if you’d like to share them [if you don’t feel comfortable uploading photos of whole poems, feel free to crop creatively or blur out portions of the text]. Here’s how to do it:
2) Click “Join this Group.” (Sign into Yahoo/Flickr if you need to do so, or create an account).
3) Confirm that you want to “Join this Group.”
4) Upload the image or video you want to your stream. In the description, mention the prompt you’re responding to (if you like you can include the text, too, but that’s not necessary). We suggest that you tag your poem for ease of navigation as the pool grows (for example, I’ve tagged the concrete poem I uploaded with “concrete poem”), but that’s also optional.
5) Choose “Groups >> Your Groups”
6) Select the group “Lantern Review — Weekly Prompt Responses”
7) Click “Add something.” Follow the instructions to add your photo to the pool. That’s it!
We hope that you’ll share some of what you’ve written with us; we’d love to see how your experiments turn out. If we get enough responses, we may even feature some of them on the blog in upcoming weeks.
Torso of ApolloEdvard Munch’s “The ScreamGrecian Urn
In keeping with our theme for the month, The Page Transformed, this week we’ll be looking at the ekphrastic poem, or poetry written in conversation with a work(s) of visual art. In its most traditional form, the ekphrastic poem is an elaborate, highly detailed description of a work of art: a painting, a statue, even a drawing or photograph. In contemporary poetry, however, the ekphrastic mode has evolved to include a wide range of forms and responses to visual art. The poet can respond to the artwork, challenge its claims, inhabit it in the lyrical mode, or even use it as a point of departure into a larger discussion or narrative.
Alternatively, ekphrasis can also be an invitation to reflect upon the moment of encounter between the poet and painting (for example), or the circumstances under which the work of art was created. Some of the most successful poems of ekphrasis are contemplations on the materials from which specific visual masterpieces were created. Others adopt a mode of “re-framing” the painting, and narrate a particular scene from the perspective of someone situated outside of the painting, or someone shadowed in the periphery of the image.
Virtually any of these forms of engagement (and many others, not listed here!) can afford the poet a powerful way to further explore the rich intersections between language and visual art.
* * *
Prompt: write a poem that engages a work of art in one of the modes discussed above. You can either begin with a selected work of visual art and let your poem unfold from there, or begin with a line (or image) of poetry and work “backwards,” searching for a work of art that captures the mood or sensibility you want to evoke.
However you choose to approach this, allow your creative process to be dialogic, to move in conversation between image and text, and to afford both the room to be works of art that can stand on their own.
For further reading and some wonderful examples of ekphrastic poems, take a look at the Academy of American Poets’ article “Ekphrasis: Poetry Confronting Art.” Among the poems listed in the article are:
The deep of winter can be a particularly difficult time, especially for those who (like me) are affected by short, dark days and perpetual gray skies. El Nino has wrought some particularly freakish incidences of heavy snow this year on the East Coast and some has dumped some uncharacteristically heavy bouts of rain on parts of the West Coast, but even here in the Midwest, where the storms have been much milder than usual (last year at this point, we were in the middle of a deep freeze in which the moisture in my nostrils would turn to ice each time I stepped outside), the weather’s inability to make up its mind in favor of clear skies has made my artificial sunlamp my new best friend.
Winter weather (and in particular, the alien quality of harsh winter storms) has always been a popular subject of poetry, it seems. Robert Frost fixed winter in the national imagination forever with his “Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening.” William Carlos Williams captured the human viciousness we often project onto driving snow and ice in his poem “Blizzard.” And Cathy Song’s “Leaving” deftly embodies the feeling of being under siege that can result when one is housebound by winter rainstorms:
The mildew grew in rings
around the sink
where centipedes came
swimming up the pipes
on multiple feet
and the mold grew
around our small fingers
making everything slippery
to touch.
We were squeamish and pale.
This week’s exercise asks you to follow in this tradition of writing the winter blues.
Prompt: Write about an experience of extreme winter weather.
Here’s an excerpt from my own attempt:
February Brown
The ground liver-spotted
with half-receded ice scales
takes up fresh powder
with swift muddy gulps. Snow
mageddon is what the weathermen
back home are calling it,
and yet here, we are stuck
between ice storm and thaw.
Let there be less of this
frozen monochrome, more
of the acid sun slanting off
the glazed drifts . . .
As usual, we’d be thrilled if you shared a portion of your own attempt with us in the comments below. Happy writing — and for those of you who are snow or rain bound, hang in there! May spring come very, very soon.
This week we’ll be experimenting with poems of invocation; that is, poems that employ direct address to construct and position a “You.” When thinking of the “addressee” of a poem, we are often tempted to think simply of audience. In the poem of invocation, however, “You” is a much more active presence in the poem; it is actually called into being, by the poem. For example, by saying, “You come and stand before me,” one literally creates a “you” who materializes through the mechanism of the direct address, comes before the speaker, and stands—at least, in the world of the poem.
To view poetry in this light transforms the art of versifying into a kind of conjurer’s art, which is what happens every time we write: we conjure people, places, events, and affective states, some of which are “real,” and some of which are purely imagined. It also grants the poet the power of creation.
This year’s Year of the Tiger begins on Sunday, Feb. 14th (according to the Gregorian calendar).
Orchids for the turning of the year.
For most people, the approach of the New Year (whether according to the Gregorian or Lunar calendar) signals a time to reflect upon our habits and to make lifestyle changes in order to have a “fresh start” in the coming year. The traditions surrounding New Year’s celebrations are filled with rituals celebrating transition and fresh hope, and also with traditions that remind us of our roots — our connections to family and beloved friends. Whether toasting to Auld Lang Syne or visiting our elders to exchange New Year’s greetings and receive gifts, our traditions engage us in a rhythm of return and renewal — each year, we come home or look back at what’s familiar and beloved in order to move forward again. Lunar New Year rituals, in particular, are rich with symbolic resonance. Cleaning out the house, donning new clothes, consuming foods which are meant to stand in for one’s hopes for the year, celebrating with firecrackers and tree blossoms — these are actions which can remind us of the fleeting nature of what’s past, but which also evoke a sense of hope for the new experiences we anticipate in the coming season. It’s with these things in mind that we give you this week’s prompt
Prompt: Write a poem about a personal or familial ritual for the turning of the year.
If you need help getting started, here are a couple of links to some beautiful New Year’s poems from the Poetry Foundation’s archive:
The cento is a poetic form composed entirely of secondary (usually poetic) texts. The word “cento” derives from the Latin word for “patchwork,” or “patchwork cloak,” and in its classical form, was composed exclusively of language from either from a single poet or from several. Ausonius, the Roman originator of the form, stipulated that the cento-writer could lift entire verses from another work of poetry or splice verses from separate poems together, but never use two consecutive verses from a poem, nor to extract any less than half a verse from an outside poetic text.
Modern forms of the cento include writing a poem that borrows a single line from another poetic work and echoes that line throughout, stitching together lines, images, or phrases from other poems and using only original prepositions and conjuctions, and (or simultaneously) juxtaposing voices and images from a variety of poetic sources, thus creating a wholly new artistic work. The contemporary cento is generally associated with a certain witty, humorous, or ironic tone, but of course these conventions are subject to (re)invention. For even more explanation and classic and contemporary examples of the cento ranging from Virgil to John Ashbery, see the Academy of American Poets’ entry on the subject.
In my own writing, I have used the cento as a way to rhetorically frame and arrange found language from a variety of sources: interviews, artists’ statements, oral narrative, and lyrically composed prose. Because my writing often clusters around a specific constellation of issues (transculturation, cross-cultural/cross-national encounters, “ethnic” narratives, etc.), these sources generally feature Asian/Asian American subjects or speakers, or those (like Vietnam war veterans or turn-of-the-century “globe-trotters”) whose lives have somehow crossed or complicated a sphere of Asian life.
