PROMPT:

Select an interesting poem that you would like to be in conversation with, whether formally or in terms of content. Then, respond to the original poem line by line in your own piece. This may mean answering a question asked by the poet in the line or posing another in response, further developing an idea or image, or experimenting with similar metrical or sonic schemes. Feel free to be playful, but try to isolate each line as its own unit of thought and see where that lens takes you.

Happy Holidays from Poetry Instigator! We hope that you are enjoying time with friends and family, and (maybe) writing some new poems! This week, I have been reflecting on the role of food in poetry; my favorite holiday traditions revolve around sharing food and drink, and food (both through consumption and preparation) is central to some of my favorite poems. For example, one of the first poems I remember reading is W.C. Williams’s “This is Just to Say,” with its description of the stolen plums, “so sweet/ and so cold.”

As in this poem,  a description of the food itself, while memorable, isn’t necessarily the central subject of the poem—it can function as a detail that reveals character and relationships, just as a choice of clothing or automobile can expose personal taste, economic status, age, geography, and all kinds of other factors. In similar ways, food bears cultural and religious significance. For other poets, food and its role in sustaining life inspire reflection. For example, in “cutting greens,” Lucille Clifton feels a connection with “the bond of live things everywhere” while working with vegetables. Many foods even venture into the political realm; for instance, the moniker “freedom fries” and the event of the Boston Tea Party imbued specific goods with additional significance.

Think about poems you know which involve food—how is it functioning? why is it there at all? what devices are used to describe it? Included here are two poems in which food plays very different roles: “cutting greens” and “Divorced Fathers and Pizza Crusts” by Mark Halliday.

PROMPT:

Write a poem in which food is important. This may mean that it is set at a family mealtime or the occasion of trying a new dish, or perhaps that a character’s food is symbolic in an external sense. If you want, the food can BE a character. Write an ode to your food (see Neruda’s “Ode to the Tomato“). Take this opportunity to reflect on what food means and how it functions in your work.

cutting greens

curling them around

i hold their bodies in obscene embrace

thinking of everything but kinship.

collards and kale

strain against each strange other

away from my kissmaking hand and

the iron bedpot.

the pot is black,

the cutting board is black,

my hand,

and just for a minute

the greens roll black under the knife,

and the kitchen twists dark on its spine

and I taste in my natural appetite

the bond of live things everywhere.

Divorced Fathers and Pizza Crusts

The connection between divorced fathers and pizza crusts

is understandable. The divorced father does not cook

confidently. He wants his kid to enjoy dinner.

The entire weekend is supposed to be fun. Kids love

pizza. For some reason involving soft warmth and malleability

kids approve of melted cheese on pizza

years before they will tolerate cheese in other situations.

So the divorced father takes the kid and the kid’s friend

out for pizza. The kids eat much faster than the dad.

Before the dad has finished his second slice,

the kids are playing a video game or being Ace Ventura

or blowing spitballs through straws, making this hail

that can’t quite be cleaned up. There are four slices left

and the divorced father doesn’t want them wasted,

there has been enough waste already; he sits there

in his windbreaker finishing the pizza. It’s good

except the crust is actually not so great—

after the second slice the crust is basically a chore—

so you leave it. You move on to the next loaded slice.

Finally there you are amid rims of crust.

All this is understandable. There’s no dark conspiracy.

Meanwhile the kids are having a pretty good time

which is the whole point. So the entire evening makes

clear sense. Now the divorced father gathers

the sauce-stained napkins for the trash and dumps them

and dumps the rims of crust which are not

corpses on a battlefield. Understandability

fills the pizza shop so thoroughly there’s no room

for anything else. Now he’s at the door summoning the kids

and they follow, of course they do, he’s a dad.

Last year, I attended a reading by Kimiko Hahn in which she discussed her interpretation of the Japanese form ziuhitsu, which is in some ways a fragmented essay and prose poem combined. In an interview with BOMB Magazine, Hahn compares the form to emails or lists—anything with “a feeling of randomness”, a mixture of genres and source material, an opportunity for associative thought. It is a form which, in many ways, relies on the collage of different linguistic textures and intentional incompleteness. This idea is mirrored by the form’s name, which translates as “running brush.” It seeks clarity through disorder and spontaneity.

In her 2006 book, The Narrow Road to the Interior, Hahn utilizes zuihitsu, as well as another Japanese form called tanka. Amanda Rudd writes that Hahn’s use of these forms draws connections between traditional Japanese texts (Shonagon’s The Pillow Book and Matsuo Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Interior) and postmodern uses of “mutabilitity, fragmentation and pastiche, fluidity, indeterminancy, and the transgression or ‘effacement’ of boundaries.” Consider the movement between sections and subject matter in this poem from The Narrow Road:

Wellfleet, Midsummer (2000)

10
At low tide, this marsh pools around the road, the vein from the illicit cottage to the unfeeling world.

8
It is the heart-that-is-afraid-to-be-heard, this bridge over the salt marsh at high tide. Still—it is passable.

3
He picks up a box-turtle in the middle of the road. He’s fifty-two but believes it will bring childhood back in a box.

12
From grasses fretting with oysters and crabs, the mud stutters and I can tell you wait for another dusk to ask me. And I am not impatient.

14
At dawn, wading in the bay’s shallows, I am pinched by something sharp—I still feel beside myself.

PROMPT:

Write a poem in fragments, in which you follow the “running brush” and allow for differing formal choices and unplanned ideas. You can use the model provided by Hahn’s zuihitsus or invent your own combination of sections, prose, and poetry. If it helps, begin by writing a list or by collaging material. Think about the rules and boundaries you have set for your boundaries and try to break at least one of them.

Lyn Barzilai described Oppen’s work as dependent on “subverbal primitive modes”. The way I understand this concept (in my limited way) is that it supposes that Oppen’s language and its syntactic disjunction is reminiscent of a pre-language ordering. Also, Oppen’s motifs of children, animals, the moon, rocks, etc are reminiscent of a thing “prehistoric” or immune to the limitations imposed on it by language’s functions. Oppen’s ethics of poetry resisted a Poundian organization of the poem around the ego, which I guess is what objectivism was all about. Yet, he also resisted pigeonholing emotion within set images, or within a presupposed tradition of association of images or words with a specific human reaction.  I am really interested in two poems of Oppen’s which talk to each other, “The knowledge not of sorrow,” and # 37 in Of Being Numerous.

Notice how in the first poem, the emotion shifts from “sorrow” to “boredom” and then explanation is attempted through an image which (although beautiful) is not necessarily precise or special in its words, but that is specific to the character’s perception. This, I think, is a reminder of Oppen’s relation to a tension between the “individual” and “collective”. In the first poem, the perception is accessible to all through the simple image. Yet,the emotion, although universal, is discussed within the realm of the character’s (a literary reference to Joyce) world.

The knowledge not of sorrow, you were
saying, but of boredom
Is—aside from reading speaking
smoking—
Of what, Maude Blessingbourne it was,
wished to know when, having risen,
“approached the window as if to see
what really was going on:”
And saw rain falling, in the distance
more slowly,
The road clear from her past the window-
glass—
Of the world, weather-swept, with which
one shares the century.

In Of Being Numerous #37, Oppen revises his previous poem, he recognizes the inaccessibility of the emotion through a set images, he recognizes that the “seeing” of this emotion is obstructed by the image, which was set and defined in the last poem. He reorganizes the portrayal of the complexity of the emotion by returning to a smaller constituent of the perception “the motes/in the air, the dust/here still”. The point of view of the poem is also that of the first person singular/plural, which allows him the shift between the collective consciousness and the poet. The ethics of Oppen’s poetics, therefore, recognize a reader, and recognize that the poet is the beginning of perception, but that the end could be a collective understanding.

Of Being Numerous # 37

‘… approached the window as if to see…’

The boredom which disclosed

Everything—

I should have written, not the rain

Of a nineteenth century day, but the motes

In the air, the dust

Here still.

What have we argued about? what have we done?

Thickening the air?

Air so thick with myth the words unlucky

And good luck

Float in it…

To ‘see’ them?

No.

Or see motes, an iron mesh, links

Of consequence

Still, at the mind’s end

Relevant

Prompt:

Write two poems that speak to each other. One could be a “revision” of the other, or it could be exploring a different perspective of the same situation.

Write a poem that shares a title with a famous/canonized poem. Your goal should not be to recreate the poem itself but, starting with the famous title, write a poem that you think should follow such a name.

Suggestions include: “The Wasteland” (TS Eliot), “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” (W. Stevens), “Why I Am Not a Painter” (F. O’Hara), “In a Station of the Metro” (E. Pound). Some potential ways to approach this: Challenge yourself and start with a poem that has a lot of “cultural baggage” (such as “The Wasteland”) and seek to work your way out of it, make it your own. Start with a poem which seems to point toward a very specific poem or form of poem (“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”) and subvert the expectations of the reader/yourself. Start with a title that seems to promise an end (“Why I Am Not a Painter”) and find a creative way to meet or not meet that end.

Brian Fitzpatrick

This week’s post comes from our friend Alyse Knorr, the Poetry Editor at So to Speak: A Feminist Journal of Language and Art.

In honor of this So to Speak-Poetry Instigator crossover, I wanted to write a prompt based off a poem by Rebecca Wee, one of So to Speak’s founding editors in 1992. One of my favorite poems by Wee, from her collection Uncertain Grace (2001), is a love poem called “hoop snake.”

hoop snake

- for michael, summer, 1994

the second time we met
he told me about the hoop snake

seductive, exquisite,
a godless man

so I listened

we weren’t sure though
if it could be true –

a snake that takes its tail
in its mouth,
then rolls through the world

but there are reasons to believe
in god and this seems a good one

we brought wine to the porch,
spoke of piety, marriage;
commitments assumed
for reasons that could not
sustain them

while lightning took apart the sky
the fields leapt up the
stream’s dark body
slipped off through the grass

and the iris screamed

their flawless mouths
luminous arms the landscape
sexual and torn suddenly desire
and sadness

beautiful
so I don’t remember
what he said his eyes flowering
in the dark

after he left I walked through
the grass the rain asked
how do things work?

we are after something miraculous
we open our mouths we
believe we turn
at times

we gather speed

There’s so much to like about this poem—its elegant sonics, brutal and beautiful line breaks, well-crafted turns. But I’m particularly interested in how it serves as a gorgeous example of a successful contemporary love poem.  Love poems seem to me, at times, to be one of those risky “poems you shouldn’t write” these days. So I often ask myself in my readings and writings—how does one “get away” with writing a love poem?

The “For Michael” and specific time stamp in the poem’s epigraph let us know right away that this will be a poem about love. Wee then starts with a reference to the poem’s occasion: “the second time” the speaker and the beloved meet. She then grounds their conversation in one small, unusual, startling detail: the hoop snake, a legendary (and unreal) reptile originally from Pecos Bill stories that travels by rolling around with its tongue in its mouth—a pretty sexy and wild image, to be sure.

The poem then turns to a further description of this “second time” the pair met—the other things they talked about besides the hoop snake. But we continue to get these awe-struck references to nature’s beauty and power, with some really sexy (and sexual) descriptions of the lightning, stream, and fields that allow all of the emotion to stay grounded in the physical world. Then, just at the moment when things reach their most romantic—the man’s eyes are “flowering” and the rain is talking, Wee returns to close on the hoop snake again, this time comparing human beings to the snake with a grand use of the “we”—something she has prepared us for not only through her repetition of the word earlier on in the poem, but also through her reference to something greater with “there are reasons to believe/in god…”

I admire the ways this poem moves so much. This small piece of trivia shared between the two lovers sets up a deep kind of intimacy, as does the act of the speaker remembering this particular detail of the snake. I also find such great metaphorical power in writing about something as incredible, as unbelievable, but also as small, as trivial, as this mythical snake. Wee doesn’t have to push at us to make us see that this is really a poem not just about two lovers, but about love in general—about how to believe in it, and why, and yet how strange and odd—how utterly unbelievable—that belief can sometimes seem.

PROMPT:

Write a love poem based off something specific a loved one once taught you: either a skill or some other specific “how-to” kind of teaching, or some unusual fact they mentioned to you once (like Wee’s hoop snake).  DISCLAIMER: something someone taught you should NOT include “how to love” or “how to be strong.”  Try to stay away from “advice” kinds of teachings, too—they breed melodrama for this kind of poem.

Horror Poem

It is almost Halloween, a time for ghosts and ghouls and everything macabre! There is often a stigma placed upon “genre” poetry so here is your challenge – Write a horror poem which can be read year round. Try to avoid the conventions of “genre” poetry, particularly the horror genre, by avoiding the following words: dark, scary, blood, death, ghost, monster, vampire, creature, skeleton, evil, zombie, graveyard.

by Brian Fitzpatrick

One of my favorite professors often gives students word lists as prompts. Just like reading some of a favorite poet’s work before beginning to write, using lists can be a generative way to engage with language and themes that you might not usually include in your poems. Word lists are fairly simple to write on your own, either through brainstorming or flipping through the books on your shelf. However, unless you are impressively methodical, these steps are affected by your particular train of thought, the sort of reading material that you hang on to, and the kind of poem you want to write.

PROMPT

For today’s prompt, I offer you two options. The first is to come up with your own list of 10 words and to write a poem using at least 7 of them. You can vary these numbers a bit depending on the length of poem or the level of difficulty you wish to encounter. Try to select words which don’t have an obvious association with each other already (ex. what you can see from your office window, words for 3 articles about gardening). Mix in a variety of parts of speech. Also, look for words which are interesting but not “poem-y”.  For most poets, it will be more natural to use “maroon” in a poem than “circumnavigate”.

The second option is to pick from several word lists I have written using favorite texts. You still have some agency in deciding which of these to use, but fewer opportunities for overt manipulation of the process. I will post the title and authors of the books after the jump, if you’re interested, but I thought that some of you might want to have access to the words without any other guiding information about their context. Again, pick a list of 10 words and try to use 7 of them in your poem.

List 1:

press

upstairs

least

world

skin

how

appear

seamless

revisit

drum

List 2:

height

pillow

devour

arrive

your

purple

reach

instant

again

tremble

List 3:

behind

black

fossil

smile

movement

knot

cynical

step

shiver

tray

List 4:

branching

cradle

forgotten

synthetic

pause

fiddle

tone

provoke

incarnation

coil

(more…)

Jouga

The physical world is meaningless tonight

And there is no other. There is Ha-ee-me, who sits

And plays his guitar. Ha-ee-me is a beast.

..

Or perhaps his guitar is a beast or perhaps they are

Two beasts. But of the sae kind—two conjugal beasts.

Ha-ee-me is the male beast. . . an imbecile,

..

Who knocks out a noise. The guitar is another beast

Beneath his tip-tap-tap. It is she that responds.

Two beasts but two of a kind and then not beasts.

..

Yet two not quite of a kind. It is like that here.

There are many of these beasts that one never sees,

Moving so that the foot-falls are slight and almost nothing.

..

This afternoon the wind and the sea were like that—

And after a while, when Ha-ee-me has gone to sleep,

A great jaguar running will make a little sound.

…

The poem starts with the sentence “The physical world is meaningless tonight” which immediately invites and denies the reader access into the poem. What does Stevens mean by the “physical world”? Are we to discuss the “abstract world” in this poem? Or what is the function of “meaningless”? Is it meaningless in a pejorative sense? Or is it meaningless because it does not exist? Or is it because it remains in the shadows of another world Stevens is about to create for us? All these questions start taunting the reader after reading only the first line! When stevens follows that with “there is no other”, the reader could consider the possibility that the world is all there is, there is no alternative. We are stuck within the world as this poem portrays it. As we follow the speaker of the poem, who starts talking about a man playing his guitar, we probably form an image of this man. There is not much sensory detail actually, Stevens mentions plainly that he sits and plays. But then Stevens surprises the reader with “Ha-ee-me is a beast”. What kind of beast is he? Is he really physically a beast? Or is beast here an adjective that is related to his size? This simple declarative sentence is followed these lines which contemplate if the guitar is also a beast and what kind(s) of beast(s) the guitar player and his guitar are. When Stevens mentions “male” beast, something is revised about our creation of the scene thus far. Why is it necessary to mention that? Also why does the speaker seem to have such a disdain for the character as he “knocks out a noise”? Then when the “she” is introduced, the world of the poem shifts, our perspective changes, where did the she come from? How is she a contrast to Ha-ee-me being a “male beast”? As we get to the line “There are mnay of these beasts that one never  sees” we think of the “imaginary” or “unreal” quality of the scene, we contemplate a reason for it. Once the sea and wind are introduced, bringing forth “nature” into this scene, we are temporarily brought out of the world of the guitar playing for a line, and then we are reintroduced to it again in the penultimate line when Ha-ee-me goes to sleep. The last line is the most interesting to me. It brings back “nature” by using the jaguar. The jaguar is sonically similar to Jouga, which is a pun on the French word for “play”, and it is also similar to “Jaime” which is the real spelling of the name Ha-ee-me. The jaguar making a sound is parallel to the music made by Ha-ee-me. This implies to me that making music might be a “natural” thing in this world. The jaguar and the character are the same. This music playing might be “meaningless”, depending on who does it and how it is done. The uncertainty of all of these variables in this scene are therefore, not only interesting, but also part of the poem’s world which it has created. The poetic imagination of the poem is that balance that Stevens maintains in how much information he gives the reader and how it all connects together.

If I were to consider the critics’ reading of this poem, which is  that this portrays a sexual scene and the lady in question is the guitar personified, then our consideration of poetic imagination can take on a whole other layer too. Stevens’ disgust with the scene prompted him to create a world for which it exists, this world recognizes that it is a natural thing (thus the references to jaguar and sea and wind), recognizes that watching people have sex is potentially funny (in its puns and its revisions of itself), but also is unapologetic about the poet’s disgust with witnessing the sexual act. I read a critic who mentioned that Steven’s relationship to the third person address is connected to his avoidance of a lyric I. This is in fact a way to make himself a poetic “subject” of the poems, the remove allows Stevens to perceive himself within a distance, as he removes the I from his perception, he can judge it. This does not mean that all he writes is autobiographical and I am not suggesting that this poem is about him; yet I think that this is also an element of poetic imagination, how to manipulate one’s perception into a remove and render it a subject.

PROMPT

Write a poem in which you leave out “definitive” descriptive information and in which you allow the imagination of the reader to create multiple possible “meaning” for the poem. Remember that imagination lies in the directive information that the poem offers, but is also stimulated by absence.

SUPPOSE AN EYES

Suppose it is within a gate which open is open at the hour of closing summer that is to say it is so.

All the seats are needing blackening. A white dress is in sign. A soldier a real soldier has a worn lace a worn lace of different sizes that is to say if he can read, if he can read he is a size to show shutting up twenty-four.

Go red go red, laugh white.

Suppose a collapse in rubbed purr, in rubbed pur get.

Little sales ladies little sales ladies little saddles of mutton.

Little sales of leather and such beautiful beautiful, beautiful beautiful.

In  “Suppose An Eyes”, Stein relies on colours, repetition of words and phrases, and unusual associations in order to pull the reader into the world of the poem.  The title of the poem places the reader in a place of uncertainty with the “suppose” and the treatment of the “eyes” as a singular entity. And as the reader goes into the poem, it is hard to think of what is being “supposed” as opposed to what is true. Is this a hypothetical situation, or is this a real one? Such uncertainty is maintained in the language of the poem as well, as the very first line with the part “which open is open at the hour of closing”. Stein is known for her hate for the comma (in general), but this line is interesting not only because there might have been an elided comma between the first “open” and “is”, but it is because it implies discrete as well as continuous states of being. “Hour of closing” is a discrete moment in time, it is not a continuous one. However, “open is open” could be either. It could be an adjective, which implies continuity or it could be a discrete specific situation.

Other uncertainties and interesting grammatical issues that come up include the available readings for the repetition in the last three lines. For instance, it is possible to read a transformation of  the adjective “beautiful” in the last line into a noun. This might inform the reading of the penultimate line as one of transformation as well, so that the “little sales ladies” are transformed into “little saddles of mutton”.This is interesting in terms of the visual aspect of the poem as linked to uncertainty.

One other thing that is interesting about this poem and telling about Stein’s poetics is the fact that there are lots of colours and textures in this poem, and only one instance of a loud sound, which is “laugh white”(I read the “that is to say” as conversational here and not as a real utterance). This is interesting in the sense that the sonic elements are quite loud in this poem, as is true for the rest of TB. The loudness of the sonics seems like a juxtaposition with the visual elements in the poem. “Blackening, white, red, white” and textures and other visual references such as “worn, lace, size, rubbed, leather”.  The contast between colours here is also interesting in connection to the actions ascribed to them. “Go red” and “laugh white” implies sexual actions, especially if considered within the other words, which might reference sensuality (lace, rubbed purr), virginity (white). The sounds also bring forth other meanings (by puns and homonyms..etc). For example, “An eyes” can also be heard as “a nice” or “an ice”. “purr get” is close enough to “purge it” or “forget”.

The narrative here is not really available for the reader to pinpoint, the reader does not know how the soldier connects to the “white dress”, or to the “sales ladies”. A reader can only imagine and create a scenario in her head as she connects and reconnects these words. A reader is participating in making meaning for the poem.  All of this shows how Stein combines her handling of language with a cubist attitude which presupposes that the reader need not necessarily know where she started, but follow with her words (with an open mind) and rely on her poetics of sound and language in order to get somewhere. Where some critics, such as Lisa Ruddick, have parsed out really interesting sexual subtexts to Stein’s writing, I think what makes Tender Buttons so influential is the fact that it allows many readings, it allows a personal experience with the text that is different from one individual to another.

PROMPT: Relying on one perception, emotion, or object write a non-narrative poem. Experimenting with puns, homonyms and multiple word meanings is encouraged.