I love composing poems on my computer as much as the next person! But today I would like to encourage (after reading this post of course!) turning the screen off. For this poem project you will want one piece of 8 ½ x 11 paper, a pair a scissors or exacto knife, ruler and some type of cutting surface.

Step 1: Fold your paper, lengthwise, in half. Crease and reopen.

Step 2: Fold in half widthwise. Crease and reopen. Now your creases have divided your paper into fourths.

Step 3: Flip your paper over so the widthwise fold becomes a peak. So, if you were laying the paper on a table it would look like a small mountain.

Step 4: Fold in the ends of the paper to the widthwise middle fold. Crease and reopen.

TA-DA! You have just made an accordion fold! You are 1/3 way to making your own, self-published one-of-a-kind little book of poems!

Step 5: On your cutting surface, cut a slit down the lengthwise crease ONLY along the middle two sections. You want to cut only the middle sections so you don’t split your paper in half. This cut will allow you to have multiple pages to write in.

Step 6: Fold in half, again, lengthwise along the original crease.

Step 7: Push the ends together so the middle section, where you made the cut, will make an X or look like a cube. This creates your pages!

Step 8: Fold over the middle section and wrap around to look like a traditional book.

Now you have options for the poem you will write!

Write a lyric story that fits into the size of your book. Put in photos or drawings. Write a poem that is circular so the beginning is the end and the end is the beginning. Use the middle hidden section to tell a secret story, or reveal a mystery from the poem on the pages.

This is a good exercise to think about form influencing content. How does the look of your book inform the meaning of your poem? Check out Creating Handmade Books by Alisa Golden for more detailed instructions and other book forms!

<3 Sheila M

Turn on your television. Move upward 10 channels from whichever channel your TV happened to be on. Transcribe 1-2 minutes of whatever is on – commercials, news, soap operas, game show, whatever – word for word (DVR/Tivo might help you here). Once you have your word source, turn off the TV and begin to work with your text. Pick one of the following ways: 1)Make an erasure towards a specific theme/image by removing as many words as necessary to create your poem. 2) Enter your text into a translation program such as Google Translate and “translate” it into a foreign language then back into English, do this at least 5 times. 3) Starting at the first word you’ve transcribed, pick a number 1-10, and count forward that number of words. Highlight each Nth word and erase the rest. Assemble a new poem from your remaining word bank. 4) Create your own method/process and stick to it as strictly as you can.

by Brian Fitzpatrick

PROMPT: Use Elizabeth Bishop’s poem Little Exercise as a scaffold to write your own poem. My friend, Alyse Knorr, suggested I do this.I found the imperative “Think” beginning of the lines of Bishop’s poem inspiring. Happy writing!

LITTLE EXERCISE

For Thomas Edwards Wanning

Think of the storm roaming the sky uneasily
like a dog looking for a place to sleep in,
listen to it growling.

Think how they must look now, the mangrove keys
lying out there unresponsive to the lightning
in dark, coarse-fibred families,

where occasionally a heron may undo his head,
shake up his feathers, make an uncertain comment
when the surrounding water shines.

Think of the boulevard and the little palm trees
all stuck in rows, suddenly revealed
as fistfuls of limp fish-skeletons.

It is raining there. The boulevard
and its broken sidewalks with weeds in every crack
are relieved to be wet, the sea to be freshened.

Now the storm goes away again in a series
of small, badly lit battle-scenes,
each in “Another part of the field.”

Think of someone sleeping in the bottom of a row-boat
tied to a mangrove root or the pile of a bridge;
think of him as uninjured, barely disturbed.

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