Sorry for the delay in the prompt this week! This one comes from Rahima Ullah, our fellow GMU grad student.

Pablo Neruda, regarding his Elemental Odes, said, “We’ll even make poetry from those things most scorned by the arbiters of good taste.”  An artichoke and socks are among some of the items he writes about, pulling them into the realm of poetry through image and metaphor, bringing the objects alive and imbuing texture via words.  Write a poem focusing on and describing something that people may consider rather mundane and non poetic.

Today’s prompt comes from Alison Strub.

Theodore Roethke’s poems have been described as progressing from stage to stage, regardless of their brevity, and giving the strong sense of entering at one place, winding through a series of internal developments, and coming out somewhere else. Write a poem that consciously attempts to progress through stages and end up at a different point than where it began.

Matthew’s Bio

Interview done by Eleanor S. Tipton

ET: Which upcoming authors from Wave Books should we watch out for?

MZ: Our newest books are poems by Rachel Zucker, a book of prose by Maggie Nelson, and Dara Wier’s Selected Poems; in the Spring, we are releasing new books by Dorothea Lasky and Geoffrey Nutter. You should probably watch out for all of them, they are very dangerous. In a good way.

ET: As the editor for Wave Books, what do you look for in a poetry manuscript?

MZ: I really don’t think I can answer that question in the abstract. I will say that when we are ready to work with a poet, it’s because we believe in that person as an artist. And we are very excited to work with authors on putting a book together, creating new work, etc. So while we are often introduced to a poet by a particularly strong book manuscript, we also are always on the lookout for previous books, readings, poems in a magazine, chapbooks, etc., which will give us a good feel for whether we would be able to work well with a particular poet.

ET: Can you talk a little about your newest book Come on All You Ghosts? Specifically, what drew you to the creation of this book? Since the book is forthcoming, our readers may not have gotten their hands on it yet.  Could you discuss what its major concerns/concepts/structures/or themes are?

MZ: Mostly I just write as many poems as I can over several years; as I blunder through my life, the best ones accumulate inevitably into a set of echoing concerns, values, interests, emotions, etc.

Eventually I put them together in a book, and at that point start to think a lot more carefully about the order, the experience the reader might have. Usually for a while after that I keep writing new poems, taking some out, putting new ones in, refining things but also trying to keep them feeling open and free.

Hopefully each poem approaches things in a different way, and along with the poems the book as a whole grows in the mind of a reader, so by the end the reader has hopefully had a deep emotional and intellectual experience. I don’t believe a book of poems has to present that experience systematically, and in fact, I’m suspicious when it does, though of course there are great exceptions to what I just said.

In this case, the book is a set of about 40 or so individual poems, and ends with the long title poem. The book is in part dedicated to my father, who passed away in January of 2006. It’s about that, but lots of other things too. I try to know some things, but not too much, when I am putting a book together. I want it to feel right, but I don’t want to know exactly why.

ET: In your LA Times article, you mentioned that you wrote formal exercises when you were learning to write poetry.  How do you create your poems now?  Perhaps, it would be easier to think about one poem in particular and discuss its process (as I’m sure it varies depending on the poem).

MZ: Usually I just begin with a phrase that seems both interesting to me in its possibilities, and at least a little bit musical to my ears. That music can be pretty plain, and the line can be anywhere from completely mundane to mysterious.

The most recent poem I wrote began, “All day I have felt today is a holiday/ but the calendar is blank./ Maybe it’s Lamp Day.” I go on from there to talk about a lamp I remember finding in an old apartment, imagining a bunch of things about it, and then moving on into other stuff. I guess that’s pretty typical, for better or worse.

PROMPT:

One easy way to get started on a poem is the following. First, pick a sentence from a book at random. Then, figure out the action or principle underlying the sentence, and begin the poem by saying you (or someone) is NOT doing that action or doesn’t believe in that principle, thereby negating the premise. The book isn’t important, though probably it’s best if it’s not a book of poems. Prose is better. Here are three examples:

1. “Mrs. Kim, busy dusting the vases in the corner, stopped and stared at Ted as he walked in the store” (from Everything Asian, by Sung J. Woo, a book which happened to be in the office I am working in).

2. “Did you see the article in the Sunday Times about testosterone?” (from The Importance of Being Iceland, by Eileen Myles, a book I am greatly enjoying)

3.  “As I walked up the steps, the glass doors in front of me parted automatically” (from The Ramen King and I, by Andy Raskin, whose office I am working in)

And here are the three examples of how one could negate the sentence and begin the poem:

1.

Never once in my life have I dusted a vase. Never have I sat in the sun,

absentmindedly doing exactly what is necessary not to drop it, thinking ….

2.

For once she decided to put down the Sunday Times

and walk out into the morning. She didn’t want to know

what had happened or was going to, about testosterone

in pandas or what was making Congress sad.

3.

For a long time I stood in front of the automatic doors,

waiting for them to open. A whole day passed,

then a decade, a couple of eclipses. I grew very dusty,

but also peaceful, like a statue built on an island

no one will ever rediscover.

Those are of course just beginnings, and probably I would write for a while and then go back and find the most interesting place to begin, which might or might not be at the original beginning. But it’s a good way to start. The reason this can be interesting is because saying what is not there, what we don’t care about, what we haven’t done, etc., gets us out of our preoccupations and concerns and allows our imagination and impulses to make up cool stuff take over the poem. As long as you follow those instincts you will go very interesting and new places.

I (Lucy) have been thinking lately about what it means to be a DC writer. (more…)

Lucy Biederman: Can you talk a little bit about the DC poetry community? Why does Beltway publish DC-area writers exclusively?

Kim Roberts: The greater DC poetry community is incredibly rich and complex and diverse.  I started Beltway Poetry in order to learn more about this community, and meet more writers.  But I was hoping that the journal could actually help build community not just for myself but for others too.

LB: BPQ is not only a journal but an awesome resource for writers–its DC poetry news section and resource bank are the pretty much most extensive publications of their kind. How do you maintain them? How do you see them contributing to the community?

(more…)

Kim Roberts is the founding editor of Beltway Poetry Quarterly and author of two books of poems, The Kimnama and The Wishbone Galaxy. She has been featured in numerous anthologies. She has published widely in literary journals throughout the US, as well as in Canada, Ireland, France, Brazil, and New Zealand. Her poems have been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Mandarin. She is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the DC Commission on the Arts, and the Humanities Council of Washington. She was awarded a 2008 Independent Voice Award from the Capital BookFest.

Write a free verse poem with hidden rhyme.  A model for this exercise is W.H. Auden’s wonderful poem, “Musee des Beaux Arts,” reprinted below.  In this poem, the end word of every line but one rhymes with another end word somewhere else in the poem.  There is no pattern to the rhymes, it just appears to be an extra challenge the poet gave himself.

MUSEE DES BEAUX ARTS W.H. AUDEN

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking
dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the most dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy lives and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

The rhyme here is:

a
b
c
a
d
e
d
b
f
g
f
g
e
h
h
i
j
k
k
i
j

The only word that doesn’t have a partner is “place” at the end of the third line.  What I love about this exercise is that it forces us to think about line breaks in a fresh way, and by working toward end rhymes, we must modify some of the habits we all naturally fall into.  The discipline of the rhyme makes us speak in new ways.