Poetry as Carrying

The second issue of Poets&Writers Magazine in my stack is the Sept/Oct 2018 issue with Ada Limόn on the cover. In the article, “The Poetry of Perseverance,” Carrie Fountain talks with Ada Limόn about her fifth collection, The Carrying_{(assoc. link)}.

Ada Limόn says the poems in this collection were answering the question, “Where do I put all this?” She also said, “When I finally had about thirty poems, I realized I was writing something real, making a complicated living thing. Then started to push myself to plunge further, to be as veracious as possible and follow the craft, follow the song as far as it would take me.”

She says that her book terrifies her and when asked what it is about The Carrying that terrifies her she says, “I think what scares me the most is that I’m writing more about the body and from a place of physical vulnerability. . . .I address more of the frailty of my own body.”

Just before I started writing this, I came down the stairs carrying a Poets & Writers magazine in one hand and a mug in the other, and I thought about how I carry myself. I instantly felt my spine straighten, but not completely because I was watching the stairs. I thought about how I’ve always slouched, and the string that is supposed to pull the top of my head toward the sky always goes slack when I’m not focused on it.

What do my poems carry? How do they carry themselves? What are the things I am carrying that I need to put into my poems to let the poems carry for me?

The Prompts

NaPoWriMo: Write a surreal prose poem.

PAD Challenge: pick a musical act or artist and either make that the title of your poem or incorporate into the title of your poem; then, write your poem.

Poetry Non-stop: Alex Blustin’s prompt is: Try imagining a hapless engineer designing love from scratch. How would it work? What tragic errors would they make in their design, and is any of it funny enough to inspire a poem?

These three prompts seemed to fit well together.

Today’s Poem

The Mothers of Invention Engineer Love

When the idea came to us to engineer such a thing that would excite the body as well as the mind, binding two beings in such a way that they would desire to stay together—the hissing amusements, giggling glucose and rough savor—we hadn’t taken into account that we are antiseptic, rectangular, loose, and astringent. We thought of love as a red sequin unitard with fringe that sticks out her tongue a lot, crawling, climbing, and rubbing up against bodies, but love is as breakable as inflammations, a hollow ricochet of discomfort, tinkling, nasty, searing, grubby, and malty. We tried to stage a low grade, sorta cheap pseudo Mother-mania hysteria event. She was going to demonstrate how in love she is by providing a much needed element. How can someone so electric lust after the faultiest harp? Right now, paper bags are plotting to get rather intimate with dental floss, and ferns that surround us may be genetically unstable. We are in a labyrinth surrounded by people, but we can’t be sure if any of them are real. Right now, pins are plotting to turn invisible which may lead to the result we hoped for: you can get drunk on it, and you can gaze upon it, and you can have a phobia about it. If you want to get completely confused by it, you’ll need a fire exit.

See you tomorrow!