Experience Writing

Poetry as a Wedge

In the Q&A with Cathy Park Hong called “Double Doors Open” by Dana Isokawa in the May/June 2020 Poets&Writers Magazine, the word “wedge” is used three times in three different ways.

Dana Isokawa writes, “I spot Hong’s three poetry titles on a top shelf, wedged between Homer’s Odyssey and Garrett Hongo’s Coral Road.” In answer to a question, Cathy Park Hong says, “I had to wedge writing time in when she” (her five year old daughter) “went to swim class or early in the morning before she woke up.” Then when speaking about her essays about her experiences as an Asian-American she says, “sometimes I feel like a traitor, because of how we’re always used as this wedge. We’re not entirely victims nor are we entirely aggressors; we’re somewhere in between.”

That first use of wedge, makes me picture shoving something in, the second makes me think of prying something out, and the third? Being used to create a separation, forcing things/people apart. A poem can work in all of these ways, through juxtaposition, through condensation, and through observation.

A wedge is a simple machine. You have to apply force to make it work.

The Prompts

NaPoWriMo : use alliteration, consonance, and assonance

PAD Challenge : Write a persona poem

Poetry Non-stop : write a poem inspired by fire. This could be a literal fire (like a bonfire, campfire, home fire, wild fire, etc) or a metaphorical fire (like the fuel for passion, love, determination, etc). Whatever sparks your interest!

Today’s Poem

A Fire Friday Morning

I am but fire, fighting
the elements to flicker and flame
fiercely fed fuel for hour after hour

Aflight in the night as he cried
to my pyre about the liars
I flashed and danced

to the boom, boom, boom
of his tunes, but now I see
her light across the lake

and feel faulty, even feeble
on a Friday at five am in the rain
my feisty light must be an odd sight

Does she think me insane
a fire in the rain, or does she
only hear the bass beat boom?

Does she fear for the friendless
or try to forfend a foreign
feeling of foreboding?

She will forget me as light
creeps over the horizon.
A freakish fire that died in the rain.

See you tomorrow!

The Violence of Poetry

In the Q&A with Natalie Diaz called “Energy” by Jacqueline Woodson in the March/April 2020 Poets&Writers Magazine, Natalie Diaz said, “I have lived many lives. I have tried and failed at many things. I have won and lost much. I don’t know much, but I believe language lasts. In all its violence and tenderness, it lasts and lasts.”

She continues, “You and I are here because of how it lasts—because of story. Story was the technology that let our ancestors survive and that they gave to us, in songs, in codes, in maps, in dreams, so that we might do more than survive. Poetry, like story, is meant to be long, to be through us but beyond us.”

Is story (and poetry) the answer to Camonghne Felix’s question from Monday’s post, “What does it look like to depart from a journey of survival and enter a journey of thriving?”

In story there has to be conflict. In poetry there is the volta, or turn. This violence of language challenges the reader to think, to learn, to change perspective.

The Prompts

dVerse Poets Pub OLN : It’s open link night, so you can link up one of your poems. Though I did not write to the mini-prompt which is the painting “The False Mirror” by Rene Magritte, 1928, it did help me choose which of the Proust Questionnaire questions I wanted to focus on.

NaPoWriMo : write a poem based on the “Proust Questionnaire”

PAD Challenge : write a homonym poem. A homonym is either (or both) a homograph (word spelled the same with different meanings and possibly different pronunciations) or a homophone (word that is pronounced the same but has different spellings).

Here are some examples of homophones and homographs to get you started:

Today’s Poem

What is your current state of mind?

With swift and intense force the real
makes you reel, and steel
against the steal of the imagined.
You had rolled along in your
role, content with its
content, but the tear brought
tears. The whole has a hole,
and that wound has you
wound up tight.

The real came with rough vehemence
like a bolder boulder thrown so close
you had to close your eyes and wish
that it would miss or you weren’t there
where you’re wearing
your worry like you’re bare
to a bear. But out of sight
of that site you could incite
some insight and imagine a reel
of the real with content
that makes you content.

See you tomorrow!

Unpinnable Poetry

In the Q&A with Natalie Diaz called “Energy” by Jacqueline Woodson in the March/April 2020 Poets&Writers Magazine, Natalie Diaz surprised me with the word, “unpinnable.” She saidd, “I learned quickly that myth is what makes me dangerous—the ability to make a rock weep for its creator, a way to say the river runs through my body, a way to say you are my eye. When America says myth, they mean we’re unpinnable, and out of time, from before the beginning.”

Unpinnable makes me think of a colorful butterfly that can’t be caught. As the net approaches, it flits into another dimension, or is so fast, it appears so. Unpinnable makes me think of a picture on a bulletin board that constantly falls to the floor. Something that can’t be pinned up, pinned down, or pinned to. Only soft and porous objects are pinnable, but unpinnable appears to be a descriptor for

The Prompts

NaPoWriMo : write a poem that begins with a line from another poem (not necessarily the first one), but then goes elsewhere with it.

PAD Challenge : Write a maximum poem

Today’s Poem

Shark Signalling

(Sharks are listening right now, I’m sending out signals)
I can’t help it tried to silence with distraction
but it was full of sharp teeth each biting through the last
sore spot. The bait and switch triggering
Maximum Hormonedrive

(Sharks are listening right now, I’m sending out signals)
I can’t help it it’s chemical out of my control
salt water tears their siren song have stopped, but I don’t trust
for long. Unexpected downcastness waves
Maximum Coverage

Broadly to the max

from hope to despair
the sharks are listening
They’re everywhere, circling
I’m sending out signals
with salty psychic energy
the bait and switch
of his electricity
may be the death of me
Maximum Deeperdive

See you tomorrow!

A Poem as Time

Time also came up a lot in the special section of the Jan/Feb 2020 Poets&Writers Magazine. Keith S. Wilson who wrote Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love _{(assoc link)} his writer’s block remedy is: “Time. They say time heals all wounds, which is a lie, but it is true that no wound healed without time. I hope that given enough time, I will come to an epiphany or someone will happen to teach me just the right something, or I’ll learn to let go.”

Marwa Helal who wrote Invasive Species _{(assoc link)} gives poets this advice: “Take your time . . . Time is your friend . . . Trust your path and your work.” And when speaking about patience, John Murillo who wrote Up Jump the Boogie _{(assoc link)} says, “the more time a poet says she spent writing her book, the less time she seems to have had to spend convincing someone to publish it. So the firs bit of advice I’d give is to tend to your craft, take as long as you need to write the best book you can, work hard until you are genuinely satisfied.”

One of the things I love about poetry is one poem can extend a fleeting moment, or condense years, even eons, into seconds. A poet can manipulate time in so many ways. You may want to steal a moment and listen to The Slowdown poetry podcast.

This month we’ve spent what time we could find to focus on writing poems, but for many of us, these drafts are only the beginning. How much time will pass before we revise something we wrote this month into a finished poem that genuinely satisfies? What a poem demands is that we put time into it, and also patiently give it time.

The Prompts

NaPoWriMo : Write a superhero poem

PAD Challenge : For today’s Two-for-Tuesday prompt:

Write a “(blank) of the Heart” poem, and/or…
Write a “Heart of the (blank)” poem.

Poetry Non-stop : Write a Triolet

Since this week’s focus for Portable MFA is form, I thought I would try the Triolet. It was fun using what I was writing in this morning’s journal and putting it into form.

I’m also linking today’s poem to the dVerse Poetics prompt because I think it goes well with the Louis Wain painting, I Am Happy Because Everyone Loves Me (1928).

Today’s Poem

Heart of the Hero

And like a prince he kisses me back to life
A true hero battling cognizance thief sleep
His tongue on my nose the only remedy to dark rites
like a prince he kisses me back to life
To him I am Sleeping Beauty or Snow White
He worries I’m dead, my sleep’s so deep
And like a prince he kisses me back to life
A true hero battling cognizance thief sleep

See you tomorrow!

Poetry as Survival

In the Special Section “Inspiration” in the Jan/Feb 2020 Poets&Writers Magazine, several of the poets used the word “survival” when talking about how their collection began.

Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes who wrote The Inheritance of Haunting _{(assoc link)} said, “This book emerged as a result of poetry as a mode of survival and healing at the intersections of my own autoimmune illness and excavations into historical memory, generational trauma, and collective responsibility.” Sara Borjas who wrote Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff _{(assoc link)} said, “Much of our lives, ideas, values, and traditions are survival tactics. And Camonghne Felix who wrote Build Yourself a Boat _{(assoc link)} asked, “what goes beyond survival? What comes after it? What does it look like to depart from a journey of survival and enter a journey of thriving?”

I really love that last question. Something to think about while writing our poems.

The Prompts

NaPoWriMo : write a poem in which two things have a fight. Two very unlikely things, if you can manage it. Like, maybe a comb and a spatula. Or a daffodil and a bag of potato chips. Or perhaps your two things could be linked somehow – like a rock and a hard place – and be utterly sick of being so joined.

PAD Challenge : write an earth poem

Poetry Non-stop : take a closer look at an everyday object so familiar you don’t usually notice it

Today’s Poem

Many Ways to Love the Earth

The kaleidoscope slips along the lens.
—Why can’t you stay still. I’m trying to focus.
~Movement is my nature, changes the shapes and colors.
—But I want to capture them clearly. You’re a blur.
~Sounds like a problem with you. You’re so old. I’m brand new.
—And she already dropped you. I think you’re cracked.
~I’m in the best shape. It’s you that’s all dusty inside.
—If you would just stay still. I want that view of the flowers.
~That’s right you like the way I see the world.
—That’s the whole reason I’m putting up with you.
~I fill the earth with fun shapes and colors.
—So can I, but today I want to share yours.
~Fine. I mean I can see why, but you could be nicer about it.
The kaleidoscope slides around the lens.
—Could you please stay still.
~I told you that’s not in my nature.

Portable MFA Week Four: Shape

This week’s focus is writing poems in traditional forms.

Writing: The instructions say that this week you will write a sonnet, a sestina, a pantoum, and lyrics for a rap song. It says to look at June Jordan’s work to see how she uses rap for the structure of her poems.

Reading: This week there are two reading tasks. One is to pick my last poem to study by Ada Limón (for now) and focus on its form. I found that there’s a “Sharks in the Rivers II” in her collection Sharks in the Rivers _{(assoc link)}, and the collection ends with “Fin.” I’ll be taking a close look at both of those. The instructions are to write down everything I notice about the poems forms.

The second reading assignment is to read about the forms I need to write. I’ll be looking at The Discovery of Poetry by Frances Mayes _{(assoc link)} and The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland _{(assoc link)}.

See you tomorrow!

Music Lover Poetry

This week I couldn’t resist the Music Lover_{(assoc. link)} magnetic poetry kit. Here’s a poem I wrote with it.

The Prompts

NaPoWriMo: write a poem that focuses on a single color

PAD Challenge: write a trope poem

Today’s Poem

Bad Guys Who Can’t Aim

How do you know who
the bad guy is when
they’re all wearing black?
Who is the villain
in the dead of night
or when everyone
is standing in the shadows?
Who is the miscreant
in the blackness
of space?
Who are the scoundrels
as the seas rise in a cave?

The ones who miss.
The ones whose bullets veer.
The ones with machine guns
that never run out but,
never reach their target.
The ones who hold their guns
at their waists and spray
bullets in every direction
but can’t find the one man
standing in the open.

Those black, black hearts
of such pure evil
must create a black hole
with its own gravity
that sucks the bullets
away from their target:
that noble do-gooder
who will always
save the day
even dressed in black
in the middle of the night.
They never really have a chance.

Poetry MFA Week 3 Review

Writing: This week flew by and yet it feels like last Sunday was a really long time ago. I continued my daily writing in my journal, but didn’t write at night as I had wanted to. Guess it can’t be the most productive time for me to write, if I don’t write at that time. So in a way my question of best writing time has been answered: I write in the morning. I’m looking forward to reading through those journal entries, digging for poetry nuggets.

I workshopped one of the poems I wrote last week for Douglas Kearney’s assignments on Coursera, and it went really well. I feel like this month’s intensive poetry immersion is helping me dig deeper, and bring my ideas to a new level as I had hoped.

Reading: I was happy to find a physical copy of Sharks in the Rivers by Ada Limón on the shelf in my local library. The text of the poem was the same on the page, but the reading experience was different. I had a serendipitous experience this week where a prompt led me to a poem that I felt spoke to the poem I was studying. In the poem “Sharks in the Rivers,” Limón wrote:

“I cannot tell anymore when a door opens or closes,
I can only hear the frame saying, Walk through.

It is a short walkway—
into another bedroom.”

The dVerse prompt from Tuesday led me to “Threshold” by Maggie Smith. Smith writes:

“You want a door you can be

on both sides of at once. “
. . .

“imagine yourself passing from

and into. Passing through

doorway after

doorway after doorway.”

It was a new and enjoyable experience to be studying one poem and come across another that seemed to speak to the first.

I’ll talk about the week three MFA instructions and expectations tomorrow.

Here we are approaching the last full week of the challenges. How’s your NaPoWriMo and/or A to Z Blogging Challenge going? Did you have a good week? Any signs of burn out? My A to Z challenge began to feel like a lot of work. I couldn’t get ahead though I tried. But I also feel like I’m getting a lot out of it. I hope you’re still having fun.

Happy Poetry Month!
See you tomorrow

The Reach of Poetry

In the Reactions section of the Nov/Dec 2019 Poets&Writers Magazine, I read, “Much of the advice and coaching I offer to undergraduate students who are contemplating MFA programs is to take some time to think about what they actually want out of it, to reach out to people who teach at certain programs or those who may have attended,” in a letter from a reader. In another letter I read, “I was a resident of Ha’ikū, Maui, and occasionally saw Mr. Merwin at the post office—like the day after the news reached Maui that he had become the U.S. poet laureate.”

This got me thinking about the reach of poetry, and how we are reached as readers. Reach has so many meanings. When I looked it up on dictionary.com, I found ten definitions for a verb with an object, eleven for a verb without an object, and eight as a noun. But I would like my poem to succeed in making contact with, influencing, impressing, interesting, convincing, etc

The Prompts

NaPoWriMo : write a poem that recounts a historical event

PAD Challenge : write a poem using at least three of the following six words: bear, collar, flair, hear, praise, ramble. Or for extra credit, use all six words.

Today’s Poem

A Bear in the Area

I think of the bear warning
in the park, the print on the map
rambling so close to homes
when I find the worn open collar
tucked behind the rhododendron
in the corner of the fences
the blue bell flair
not in its belly
I hear rustling and freeze
praise the squirrel
for its metronomic
chirping while scurrying
up the tree away from me.

See you tomorrow!

A Poem Ponders a Question

The word “question” comes up often in the Nov/Dec 2019 Poets&Writers Magazine. The editor’s note starts with a question, “What is the future of independent publishing?” He writes, “That was the question I asked the eight industry leaders whose answer-essays are featured in this issue’s special section. It was, of course, a rhetorical question. . . .” There’s a Q&A with Reginald Dwayne Betts who is the author of A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison _{(assoc link)}. His son who had to come to his poetry event asked, “Is there a toy for me in the poem?” Now, that’s a good question.

In the Reviewers & Critics section, Michael Taeckens asks Carlos Lozada of The Washington Post, “What is your reading process like?” He answers, “It’s long and slow, unfortunately. I go through each book three times. . . .By that point I might have built a three-thousand-word file out of a three-hundred-page book, with quotes and ideas and questions I want to explore.

In the first answer-essay in “The Future of Independent Publishing section, Richard Nash writes, “But one reason I became a coach is because it is a profession with a methodology that is fundamentally about asking questions, not offering answers . . .when the author needed—and I was able to offer—challenging, powerful queries.”

And speaking of queries, in the Small Press Points section it says, “Unnamed Press accepts queries and submissions via e-mail, and is open year-round” keep in mind that’s from 2019.

And in Jennifer Lee’s response to The Future of Independent Publishing, she writes, “We’re beginning to see more and more attempts to resolve the licensing quandaries characteristic of digital works.”

Whether question, query, or quandary, poems are about pondering the unknowns, whether arguing for, against, or both sides of an issue, the poem brings new questions, and answers to the discussion.

While searching the Poets and Writers Magazine for images and text for today’s collage, I started by looking for questions in medium type, but as I searched I found the imagery brought up more questions than the text. Every object in a picture of a bookstore was full of questions: Where did it come from? What is it’s function? Why is it placed where it is? Every picture of a place brought up questions: Where is that? Do I want to go there? Would I like it there? What would I do there? What would happen. Once you’re in question mode, everything is a question.

On the A to Z Challenge site today, they also chose “question” for Q. I really like the question they end their post with, “What question do you want your readers to answer today?”

What’s the question that you keep asking? How can you answer it with a poem?

The Prompts

NaPoWriMo : What are you haunted by, or what haunts you? Write a poem responding to this question. Then change the word haunt to hunt.

PAD Challenge : pick an emotion, make it the title of your poem, and write your poem

Poetry Non-stop : focus on your daily environment and reimagine its importance to you

Today’s Poem

Desperation

The sun is out, and it’s warm in the living room
I search the giant wood beam of my high ceiling
remembering how the stain dripped onto the light carpet
as I tried to battle with spray, then soapy water.
It hunts me, last summer’s invasion.
After I thought I had won,
once I destroyed the nest,

the daily swarms like a writhing alarm clock
attacked the roofline in wave after wave
crawling through the window seals,
trailing along the beam
to what end? With nothing sweet to eat,
it felt like revenge.

It hunts me, last summer’s invasion
the tiny white eggs under the wood
in the window sill, giving birth
inside the house! They were in the walls!
Coming out of electrical outlets.
But it was the trail along the beam
that broke me. Rust-stain proof
that I couldn’t win. I saw some
climbing up the chimney
through the window.
They hunt me.

See you tomorrow!

Poetry’s Power of Perspective & a Pantoum

In The Literary Life section of the Sept/Oct 2019 Poets&Writers Magazine, Steve Almond wrote an article called “Manuals for Living: What Our Favorite Novels Teach Us About Ourselves. He says he rereads Stoner _{(assoc link)} by John Williams (1965) “an alarming percentage of his time.” In the article he writes, “And so I read the novel as a study in human conflict, the ways in which Stoner unwittingly stokes his feuds, seeks to defend himself, and struggles to accept the limits of his power in the world.”

In another article in The Literary Life section, “The Turn” by Benjamin Percy, I read “But I am here to tell you about the generative power of no. I can’t wait to see what I build out of the wreckage of last week. I can’t wait to find the turn. Because I know the only true failure is to stop trying.”

In the fiction prompt, “School Days,” it talks about power dynamics and says, “You might chose to integrate narration from an older, more removed character with scenes from an adolescent’s perspective.

Writing is a way to express our struggles for and with power. We may write in spite of every no, in response to rejection, to show the power of our perspective. But there is another power of perspective and that is that the writer does not have to be the speaker. Though much poetry is confessional and assumed to be about the writer, it may be fiction, or written from someone else’s point of view. A poem can explore many perspectives, or through using second person have you questioning your own perspective.

Have you read a poem that changed your perspective? What did the poet do to accomplish that?

The Prompts

The Meet the Bar prompt at dVerse Poets Pub is to write a Pantoum.

NaPoWriMo : write a poem in which the speaker expresses the desire to be someone or something else, and explains why.

PAD Challenge : write a pessimistic poem

Poetry Non-stop : write a conceit (or unlikely metaphor); think of two things, perhaps one concrete and one abstract, which don’t immediately seem alike, and then use this interesting metaphor in a poem.

Today’s Poem

She Would Rather Be

A swimmer says
she would rather be a chameleon
as her tongue darts to catch
water dripping down her cheek from her eyelashes

She would rather be a chameleon
warm and dry, able to collect
water from her own eyes
easily changing to blend in

Warm and dry, able to collect
herself, still rosy from exertion
easily changing to blend
among non-swimmers sunning on the rocks

Herself still rosy from exertion
I observe her colors dissipate
Among non-swimmers sunning on the rocks
she wants to change at will like a chameleon

I observe her colors dissipate
as she darts to catch her tongue
she wants to change at will like a chameleon
a camouflaged swimmer says

See you tomorrow!

Poetry as Ordinary Observations of Opposites

After yesterday’s discussion of novelty, the word “ordinary” stood out to me in the Sept/Oct 2019 Poets&Writers Magazine. In The Literary Life section article “Historical Fiction: Th Pleasures and Perls of Writing About Other Eras” by Christina Baker Kline and Lisa Gornick. Kline mentions a New Yorker piece in which Jill Lepore writes, “Fiction can do what history doesn’t but should. It can tell the story of ordinary people.” Kline says her book A Piece of the World _{(assoc link)} is about an ordinary woman.

Then in The New Nonfiction 2019 section, I found Jaquira Díaz and her book Ordinary Girls _{(assoc link)} which is described as, “a debut memoir examining the author’s childhood as a runaway juvenile delinquent, and high school dropout who finds love and family; a fierce, unflinching account of ordinary girls leading extraordinary lives. The article quotes Díaz as saying, “Writing nonfiction for me has never been cathartic—quite the opposite. And in the Poetry prompt: Ghost in the Skin, I read, “the narrator recounts her sister’s observations of an unfamiliar holiday: Halloween.”

So much of poetry is just that: observations of the ordinary and comparing them to their opposites, because what one person sees as ordinary (customary, usual, normal, plain, undistinguished, of no special quality or interest) another may find extraordinary. It’s in close observation that we see with fresh eyes and change the ordinary into the extraordinary.

How can you change your ordinary into its opposite today?

The Prompts

NaPoWriMo : Write a poem that is inspired by a piece of music, and that shares its title with that piece of music.

PAD Challenge : Today is a title prompt “Not (blank)”

Poetry Non-Stop : Write a poem about the future. What do you think is going to happen in the future?

Thought Purge Today’s prompt is “Why I Write”

This is one of those great mornings when combining prompts paid off. Combining the NaNoWriMo prompt with the PAD Challenge led me to “Not One of Us” by Peter Gabriel (1980).

Today’s Poem

Not One of Us

I’m writing this today
because I see the future coming

Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh,
It’s only water

And yet it is changing
the shape of the world

and the herds of frightened
are closing ranks and
worshiping the wolves

what matters now is which diseased
herd you’re in,
for the other dies, but

How can we be in
when there is no outside

because though it’s only water
that water continues to rise

The Prompts

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Portable MFA Week Four: Shape

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Poetry MFA Week 3 Review

Happy Poetry Month!See you tomorrow

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