Frank Bidart’s poem Adolescence, from his book DESIRE, is, he explains in a note, “a ‘found’ poem, carved out of anonymously-published prose.” Through deft strokes of punctuation and lineation Bidart, amazingly, transforms this found language entirely; it feels at home among the other poems in the book (well, that is if any of his poems can be said to be “at home”).

The poem’s layers of time and consciousness and looking mirror our experience as we read this poem knowing it’s been “found,” changed through being looked at by Bidart.

Find language and, using punctuation, erasure, lineation, and whatever other tools you want, make it into a poem of your own.

Adolescence

He stared up into my eyes with a look

I can almost see now.

He had that look in his eyes

that bore right into mine.

I could sense that he knew I was

envious of what he was doing–; and knew that I’d

always wish I had known at the time

what he was dong was something I’d always

crave in later life, just as he did.

He was enjoying what he was doing.

The looking was one of pure rapture.

He was gloating. He knew.

I still remember his look.

Robert Lowell’s poem “The Scream” is based on a short story by Elizabeth Bishop, “In the Village.”

Write a poem based on a short story of your choosing. Like Lowell, give the poem a name different than the name of the short story–but let us know, either in an epigraph like Lowell or in some other way, what short story your poem is based on.

THE SCREAM

(Derived from Elizabeth Bishop’s story, “In the Village”)

A scream, the echo of a scream,

now only a thinning echo…

As a child in Nova Scotia,

I used to watch the sky,

Swiss sky, too blue, too dark.

A cow drooled green grass strings,

made cow flop, smack, smack, smack!

and tried to brush off its flies

on a lilac bush–all,

forever, at one fell swoop!

In the blacksmith’s shop,

the horseshoes sailed through the dark,

like bloody little moons,

red-hot, hissing, protesting,

as they drowned in the pan.

Back and away and back!

Mother kept coming and going–

with me, without me!

Mother’s dresses were black

and white, or black-and-white.

One day she changed to purple,

and left her mourning. At the fitting,

the dressmaker crawled on the floor,

eating pins, like Nebuchadnezzar

on his knees eating grass.

Drummers sometimes came

selling gilded red

and green books, unlovely books!

The people in the pictures

wore clothes like the purple dress.

Later, she gave the scream,

not even loud at first …

when she went away I thought

“But you don’t have to love everyone,

your heart won’t let you!”

A scream! But they are all gone,

those aunts and aunts, a grandfather,

a grandmother, my mother–

even her scream–too frail

for us to hear their voices long.

The winners of our first annual Fall for the Book Poetry Contest, co-sponsored by Fall for the Book and the Writer’s Center, have been decided. Thanks so much to everyone who entered! It was a joy to read the poems and extremely difficult to decide winners among the many, many entries we received.

Stay tuned to the site to read the winning poems–and, of course, for more prompts!

- Lucy & Ellie

FIRST PLACE: “MOTEL,” by Missy Purcell: We love the surprises in this poem, like the description “smells like people” and the sounds of the alphabet sung in the next room.  The way it incorporates the quotations from its chosen Fall for the Book author works with the poem’s progression to create a mysterious setting.

SECOND PLACE: “Yes, Gale,” by Alyse Knorr: This poem’s sardonic tone creates a believable persona that pulls us into it again and again.

THIRD PLACE: “Sounds of Unforgiveness,” by Maggie Beetz: This is a beautifully constructed poem that uses its Fall for the Book author quotation in a way that allows insight into its story without giving us exposition.  We love the rhythms and tone created here!

Honorable Mentions [in no particular order]

[Untitled], by Cori Stash

“The Navigator, by Stephanie Myrick

“Some Might Say It’s Hot,” by Eleanor Graves

“Or as you say, ‘bread and butter,’ by Liz Gerber

“The Message,” by Clarinda Harris

Thanks again to everyone who entered! Congratulations to the winners for your awesome poems. Rock on, poets.

Though Delmore Schwartz was once considered the greatest young poet in America, now his name is rarely mentioned without the term “failed promise” somewhere nearby.

In WOUNDED SURGEON, a book about Schwartz and five other Confessional poets, Adam Kirsch says that it was Schwartz who first “enacted the transition from Modernist to post-Modernist” poetry, but he calls Schwartz “the only important poet of his generation whose work declined, rather than improved, with the years.”

Robert Lowell’s poem “To Delmore Schwartz” and John Berryman’s set of Dream Songs mourning Schwartz’s death are full of romantic reminiscences–and of the dream of being a poet. Saul Bellow’s novel Humboldt’s Gift is based on Schwartz’s early rise and precipitous fall.

For the literary generation to which these writers belonged Delmore Schwartz became almost a caricature, cautioning against the hubris that can come with early promise. He died a virtual unknown in a seedy Times Square Hotel.

DREAM SONG 150:

He had followers but they could not find him;

friends but they could not find him. He hid his gift

in the center of Manhattan,

without a girl, in cheap hotels,

so disturbed on the street friends avoided him

Where did he come by his lift

which all we must or we would rapidly die:

did he remember the more beautiful & fresh poems

of early manhood now?

or did his subtle & strict standards allow

them nothing, baffled? What then did self-love show

of the weaker later, somehow?

I’d bleed to say his lovely work improved

but it is not so. He painfully removed

himself from the ordinary contracts

and shook with resentment. What final thought

solaced his fall to the hotel carpet, if any,

& the New York Times’s facts?

Write a poem about Delmore Schwartz, or about what he represented to his peers either at the height of his success or at the time of his death. Learn about his life and incorporate what you’ve learned into the poem–or imagine details of his life, and substitute those invented details for the real.

OR erect, in a poem, a contemporary Delmore Schwartz: What would his poems sound like? who would he write like? look like? act like? Where would he live? Who would read him? Who would he drink with? Where would he go to school?

Matthea Harvey’s book MODERN LIFE, contains two unconventionally abecedarian sequences, “The Future of Terror” and “Terror of the Future.” In a interview with Tarpaulin Sky, Harvey explains how she developed the process by which she wrote the poems–and how the prompt led to some surprising results:

I made a list of the words that appear in the dictionary between “future” and “terror” and from that list I wrote a poem called “The Future of Terror.” I had no idea when I wrote this poem that it would turn into a series, but after writing one I clearly had more to discover. I then thought of writing the “Terror of the Future” poems, which take the same terms but in reverse order. I didn’t set out to write political poems—it seems like I must have, but truthfully I felt I was following the words. When I look back on the list that sparked “The Future of Terror /3,” I can see that I unconsciously gravitated towards words like “generalissimo” and “mourning bands” and rejected some other delightful candidates like “outfox,” “pilaf,” and “palanquin.” The formal strategy allowed me to address things that I hadn’t found a way to express previously.

Write a poem by borrowing Harvey’s process.

1. Choose 2 words, and look them up in the dictionary.

2. Make a list of words between those two entries that interest or disgust or bore you–or that elicit some other specific reaction. Or that are on the same part of the page, every 10 or 100 pages. Or develop some other system by which to select words between your two chosen words.

3. Write a poem that employs the words on your word list, keeping the words in alphabetical order.

Some of Matthea Harvey’s The Future of Terror and Terror of the Future poems:

The Future of Terror/1

The Future of Terror/3

The Future of Terror/7

Terror of the Future/4

Louise Gluck’s poem “The Parable of the Hostages” (from MEADOWLANDS) hinges on, or gains its sense of progression from, several questions, my favorite of which is

–oh unanswerable

affliction of the human heart how to divide

the world’s beauty into acceptable

and unacceptable loves!

Write a poem centered on questions. Or composed entirely of questions. Or the last sentence or line of which is a question. Or that starts with a question.

Of late I’ve been lamenting about being stuck in a rut as far as my essays go.  I’m starting to get a voice going that I feel mildly successful at, but at the same time I fear being pigeon-holed.  Will I always have to write in this semi-humorous, gently curmudgeonly voice for the rest of my life?  Is my greatest aspiration to become E.B. White?  Well, yes, probably.  I mean, who wouldn’t want to write both Once More To the Lake and Charlotte’s Web?  Salutations!  But still, there’s a part of me that wants to shake things up a bit – to do something that essayists don’t typically do (at least the ones that get paid) and maybe write something that is a little more fun to write.  You know, something with lots of exclamation points!!!

Actually, what I’ve been thinking a lot about is how to bring in elements of poetry – or, at least, elements of the things that concern poets – into my writing.  I admire prose writing that, like the best of poetry, conjures images and emotions out of thin air – unexplained without careful study, but present to even the most common of readers.  I like writing that can border on the realm of the obscure, without crossing over completely.

Like most essayists, my thoughts were hardly original.  Reading this, I’m sure the first thing that jumped to your mind was The Prose Poem – a form practiced Moderns and Beatniks alike.  There have been some heated debates, but, according to wikipedia, scholars have mostly settled on calling the Prose Poem poetry.  Here’s an example from Charles Simic’s Seven Prose Poems, (published at The Cafe Irreal):

I am the last Napoleonic soldier. It’s almost two hundred years later and I am still retreating from Moscow. The road is lined with white birch trees and the mud comes up to my knees. The one-eyed woman wants to sell me a chicken, and I don’t even have any clothes on.
The Germans are going one way; I am going the other. The Russians are going still another way and waving good-by. I have a ceremonial saber. I use it to cut my hair, which is four feet long.

Which, I have to say, I like very much even though I’m not sure I know why.  It’s definitely not the kind of thing that I could write, but I like the idea of it.  It seems to me that on the imaginary line that marks Poetry from Prose, this sits just on Poetry’s side, or more on poetry’s side, anyway.  If Poetry can experiment with prose, then why can’t Prose experiment with Poetry?  Is there writing that exists on my side of the border?

It turns out that of course it does, and it even has a name – The Lyric Essay.  While flash fiction and other short form nonfiction can also dip into the poetic, the Lyric Essay more specifically and intentionally plays with image and sound in order to express a tangled narrative.  This too has its complications.  Some Lyric Essays are more poetic than others, and maybe drift freely into what I would properly term prose poetry.  To my mind, a lyric essay must be somewhat concerned with narrative – it must remain a story, however much it revels in language.  Maybe this is a useless distinction – who cares what is or isn’t poetry or prose, so long as its good, right?  But I need that line, if only because it makes it feel more possible for me to write myself.  To demonstrate, here’s an excerpt from Stephen Kuusisto’s Night Song (published in Short Takes: Brief Encounters with Contemporary Nonfiction):

A blind kid rarely sleeps.  Small blind people hear a hundred sounds and learn early to make analogies,

I hear the trees that surround our New Hampshire house.  A spruce sways in the wind and so I think a door is opening, a door with rusted hinges and locks.

At sunup while my parents sleep I dress quickly and slip from the house.  I walk through a meadow, blindly following patterns of light and shade until I reach the university’s horse barn.  Somewhere in all this cool emptiness a horse is breathing.  He sounds like water going down a drain.

I take on step forward into a pyramid of fragrances.

What a thing!  To be a young boy smelling hay and leather and turds!

What a thing!

And the horse gurgles like water in the back of a boat.

Mice scurry like beaded curtains distrubed by a hand.

I stand in this magical nowhere and listen to the full range of sounds in a barn.

I am a blind child approaching a horse!

Behind me a cat mews.

Who would guess that horses sometimes hold their breath?

The horse must be eyeing me from his corner.

Now two cats are talking.

Whin pushes forcefully at the high roof.

Somewhere up high a timber creaks.

My horse is still holding his breath.

When will he breathe again?

Come on, boy!

Breathe for me!

Where are you?

I hear him rubbing his flank against a wall.

And now he breathes again with a great deflation!

He sounds like a fat balloon venting in swift circles.

And now I imitate him with my arm pressed to my lips.

I make great flatulent noises by pressing my lips to my forearm.

How do you like that, horse?

He snorts.

I notice the ringing of silence.  An insect travels between our bursts of forced air.

Sunlight heats my face because I’m standing in a long sunbeam.

I am in the luminous whereabouts of horse!  I am a very small boy and I have wandered about a mile from home.  Although I can see colors and shapes in sunlight, in the barn I am completely blind.

But I have made up my mind to touch this horse.

Judging by his breathing, his slow release of air, that sound of a concertina, judging by this, I am nearly beside him.  And so I reach out and there is the great wet fruit of his noise, the velvet bone of his enormous face.  And we stand there together for a little while, all alive and all alone.

***

I don’t know about you but that blew me away.  It seems clearly rooted in prose, but in what memoir could you get away with a (perfect) line like “I am in the luminous whereabouts of horse!”?  And the sudden, unexplained turn at the very end – “all alone.”  I’m not sure, prosaically speaking, that is fully justified – it seems sudden.  But emotionally, poetically, it fits.

This being a blog, and not a personal soapbox, perhaps I should turn the question to you, gentle reader.  When you are this close to the line – what should be poetry, and what should be prose?  And should we even care?

In Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays,” the repetition in the penultimate line (”What did I know, what did I know?” goes a long way in giving the poem its rueful, mysterious, reflective tone. Write a poem in whose tone or sense hinges on repetition in some way.

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress.
fearing the chronic angers of that house.

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Hi All!  This week’s prompt comes after reading Mallarme. His work influenced Verlaine, Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and many more.

For more on a definition of symbolism (squint and avoid the annoying ads on this website) visit this link.

Prompt: Write a poem using 5 symbols that derive meaning in different ways.  As a bonus, try to incorporate an image from pop culture that has significant resonance today.