On the page across from the editor’s note in the May/June 2020 Poets&Writers Magazine, there’s a full page ad for the 2020 Pushcart Prize XLIV Best of the Small Presses edited by Bill Henderson. The X in this number is ten subtracted from the L after it, as the I is one subtracted from the V after it, so we end up with forty-four.
There’s a quote from Jane Hirshfield on the bottom of the book cover that says, “A book made by the entire community of writers, for the entire community of writers.” Yet it only contains 72 poems, stories, essays and memoirs from 47 presses. And there are so many other types of writing and writers.
I enjoy reading the collection and I’m glad they had an ad in the magazine so I had an entry for “X” but that word “entire” is gnawing at me. The purpose of the collection is to choose what they consider the best work in all the journals over a year, and that’s from what was published, when 97% to 98% of submissions are rejected, and that’s only including the people who submit their writing to journals. What could be less of an entirety?
However, this morning’s NaPoWriMo prompt, to write an American Sonnet, has an example from Terrance Hayes’s American Sonnets to my Past and Future Assassin which I was reading recently. His book was inspired by the work of Wanda Coleman who developed the American Sonnet, and while reading her American Sonnets published in 1994, I read Sonnet 17, “i am seized with the desire to end” which sounded uncannily similar to the title of the novel I finished this week “I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” (which I see was made into a movie in 2020 on Netflix), and the next sonnet, 18, is “after June Jordan” who came up in the Portable MFA this week, which said, “You might also want to look at poet June Jordan‘s work to see how deftly she uses rap to give structure to some of her best poems.” (links in this paragraph are my amazon associate links)
Looking at all these connections in just one morning’s reading, I can see how one poem, or collection of poems, of poetry form can include perhaps not the “entire” community of writers, but a lot of us.
The Prompts
NaPoWriMo : Write an American Sonnet
PAD Challenge : Write a remix poem
Today’s prompts inspired me to return to my post Poetry as Boxes from Day 2 (Oh so long ago. Who was that person writing those things?), and remix my poem, “The Light on the Top of the Box is Blinking Yellow” using the paper cube idea to find different points of entry for my American Sonnet.
Today’s Poem
1.
Only yesterday I swore acceptance
of all that was to come. Only yesterday
I would have open mind and arms
to every barrier in my way, thinking
of last year’s fall, last month’s illness, knowing
something always goes wrong, I would greet it
with acceptance. And here it is, the unexpected.
I awoke without a tether to the world.
And worrying that you’re gone for good
that I couldn’t bring you back
plans shredded and flapped in the wind
all communications lost.
I’m not sure when our relationship changed
from casual to this unhealthy dependence.
Experience Writing 
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