Prompt: Fairy Tales

Illustration by Yuko Shimizu from The Wild Swan

Fairy tales are a type of short story that typically features fantasy characters (dwarves, elves, fairies, giants, gnomes, goblins, mermaids, trolls, witches) and usually some magic or enchantments. They differ from other folk narratives such as legends which generally involve some belief in at least some truth to the tale.

We usually think of fairy tales as children's literature, but authors have also written modern and more adult fairy tales.

Like many of us, author Michael Cunningham read fairy tales as a child, but he continued to wonder about what happened after the tales ended. In his collection of stories, The Wild Swan, he answers that question for a number of fairy tales. Cunningham is best known for his novels The Hours and The Snow Queen (which was inspired by a Hans Christian Andersen story).

He gives us a a modern day lazy boy named Jack who lives in his mother's basement rather than get a job. One day he trades a cow for some magic beans. His poor widowed mother is stuck with this kid who is "not a kid who can be trusted to remember to take his mother to her chemo appointment, or to close the windows when it rains." But her opinion of him changes when he climbs the beanstalk and comes back with bags of gold. Mom invests in stocks and real estate. They build a mansion for themselves. He climbs the beanstalk again, More gold and they are able to buy everything they ever wanted. But Jack goes back again for even more gold even though "there's nothing left for him and his mother to buy."

In "Kissing the Toad" by Galway Kinnell, he takes that idea that appears in several fairy tales.

Somewhere this dusk
a girl puckers her mouth
and considers kissing the toad a boy has plucked
from the cornfield and hands
her with both hands;
rough and lichenous but for the immense ivory belly,
like those old entrepreneurs
sprawling on Mediterranean beaches,
with popped eyes,
it watches the girl who might kiss it,
pisses, quakes, tries
to make its smile wider:
to love on, oh yes, to love on.

We also use the term "fairy tale" to describe something unusually, perhaps unrealistically, optimistic, as in "fairy tale ending" or a "fairy tale romance." Of course, not all fairy tales end happily, and some are quite grim (or Grimm).

In her book, Transformations, Anne Sexton has a number of poem-stories in her retelling of seventeen Grimms fairy tales, including "Snow White," "Rumpelstiltskin," "The Frog Prince," "Red Riding Hood" and "Rapunzel". She takes the original story and gives it a modern turn that goes much further than the modern Disney version of the character, as this opening to the poem shows:

A woman
who loves a woman
is forever young.
The mentor
and the student
feed off each other.
Many a girl
had an old aunt
who locked her in the study
to keep the boys away.
They would play rummy
or lie on the couch
and touch and touch.
Old breast against young breast�
Let your dress fall down your shoulder...

For this month's prompt, you may choose from several fairy tale possibilities:
- Continue a classic tale, or following Cunningham and Sexton, rewrite a classic for our times.
- Choose a part of the plot or an element from a tale, as Kinnell did or as in A.E. Stallings "Fairy-tale Logic."

I found in my local library a copy of  Disenchantments which anthologizes a good number of modern day fairy tale poems.

Submission Deadline: July 3, 2016

Sleeping Beauty

Prompt: Never Born

Looking at the title of Thomas Lux's poem, "For My Sister," we might expect a poem on a fairly common subject. There are many poems addressing directly or indirectly sisters and brothers. But this poem is not typical.

For My Sister

Forever we've never spoken.
First, our mother died
and, soon after, our father.
He would've loved you, and I understood why
when your niece, my daughter, arrived.
You'd look like her. She is already twenty-five. 

This is a sister who was never born. The poet wonders "Were you younger than me, or older? / I always wished for younger."

With both his parents now gone, the poet wonders about what he is left with and what is lost.

I have a box of papers: a deed
for pastureland, naturalization forms,
boneyard plots, many pictures, certificates
of births and deaths�though none of,
nor for, nor of, you.

In Thomas Lux's collection, To the Left of Time  (Mariner Books) from which "For My Sister" (click link for the full poem) is taken, there are three sections. One section is semi-autobiographical poems and another is odes, and this poem seems that it might exist in both categories.

Lux is known for his satire and humor and his images both figurative and in plain language.

In this poem for a sister who never existed, he spends most of the poem talking about his mother and father and his own daughter. In some ways, it is a message that tries to update this sister on what her life would have been.

When I first read this poem, I thought of a story that my mother often told about the doctor telling her when she was first pregnant with me that she was going to have twins. There was no twin. Never was a twin, but my mother had prepared for two of us and as a child hearing this story, I sometimes wondered about that sister or brother that never appeared.

This month's prompt is to write a poem for or about a sibling who was never born.

Submission deadline: May 31, 2016

Prompt: In your next letter,

A Lady Writing by Johannes Vermeer, 1665

The Latin �epistula,� for �letter," led to epistolary poems, which are poems that read as letters.

They can be to an internal or external audience, to a named or an unnamed recipient or to the world at large, intimate or not, to abstract concepts or real people. The epistles can use any form or free verse. It's a type of poem with much freedom.

Elizabeth Bishop�s �Letter to N.Y.," uses rhyming quatrains and begins:

In your next letter I wish you�d say
where you are going and what you are doing;
how are the plays, and after the plays
what other pleasures you�re pursuing:

Bishop's poem came back to me when I read "In your next letter," from Cause for Concern (Able Muse Press, 2015) by Carrie Shipers when it was featured recently on The Writer's Almanac.

Shipers poem uses Bishop's opening for its title and then goes on to say:

                                             please describe
the weather in great detail. If possible,
enclose a fist of snow or mud,

everything you know about the soil,
how tomato leaves rub green against
your skin and make you itch, how slow

the corn is growing on the hill.
Thank you for the photographs
of where the chicken coop once stood,

clouds that did not become tornadoes.

This month we'll be writing epistles, which date back to verse letters of the Roman Empire, and was refined and popularized by Horace and Ovid.

You may want to use the conventions of a letter, as Langston Hughes does in his �Letter," which begins:

Dear Mama
Time I pay rent and get my food
and laundry I don�t have much left
but here is five dollars for you.

You can certainly be creative in your use or abuse of letter writing forms and conventions.

Submissions to this prompt are due: Sunday, May 1, 2016

More on Carrie Shipers at www.carrieshipers.com

Prompt: The Sound Of

I listen every day to the few minutes of podcasted radio from Garrison Keillor�s The Writer�s Almanac,  which features a poem and several literary calendar items.  He has featured four poems by Faith Shearin already this year. I enjoyed them and it set me off to buy two of her books. (An excellent byproduct of his podcast.)


I can see why he likes her poems. They "accessible and meaningful, without gimmick and possessing a music and imagination."  All necessary qualities for a poem that you will hear read aloud (although you can read the poem more closely online too).

The poem I'm using as our March prompt is one he read last year. �The Sound of a Train� is from Faith Shearin's collection, Telling the Bees (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2015).

Even now, I hear one and I long to leave
without a suitcase or a plan; I want to step
onto the platform and reach for
the porter�s hand and buy a ticket
to some other life; I want to sit
in the big seats and watch fields
turn into rivers or cities. I want to eat
cake on the dining car�s
unsteady tablecloths, to sleep
while whole seasons
slip by. I want to be a passenger
again: a person who hears the name
of a place and stands up, a person
who steps into the steam of arrival.

As soon as I heard her poem, I thought of Paul Simon's song, "Train In The Distance." (I included a YouTube of the song and lyrics below.)  The poem and song have different stories, but both of them spring from that distant train sound that seems to conjure up certain feelings for people. I'm not sure that I can pin the feeling down to one word. Is it longing?

Everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance
Everybody thinks its true

What is the point of this story?
What information pertains?
The thought that life could be better
Is woven indelibly into our hearts and our brains
Like a train in the distance

There is a form known as "sound poetry" which bridges literary and musical composition and is usually intended more for performance than the page. That is not what this month's prompt involves. And , although using sound devices isn't forbidden here, those resources used by poets to convey and reinforce meaning  through the use of sound, is also not this month's prompt.

Though you may want to use assonance, consonance, dissonance or even cacophany in your poem, the prompt is quite simply to write a poem about the sound of something or someone. What is a sound that immediately evokes some feeling or memory in you? Is it a natural sound, like that of a barred owl hooting "Who cooks for you?"  Is it the sound of waves as you fall asleep near the ocean?  Is the sound of children at play or of your mother's voice?

Submission Deadline: April 2, 2016

Dear Poet: What does your poem mean?

My friend and fellow poet, Adele Kenny, posted one of her writing prompts recently that asks us to think about what one of our poems means. Think of this in the way a student might ask a poet that question.

As a teacher of poetry, I had many students - young and old - ask me what the poet (not present, perhaps long gone) "meant" by a word, line or the entire poem. That should be an easy question to answer if you are the author of the poem, but sometimes it is not easy.

Haven't you heard poets avoid an answer to that question? Perhaps because they don't want to hand you the answer, or because that don't want to trap the poem in one cage of meaning, or because they don't know the meaning for sure either.

Adele quotes Michael T. Young who says that

�When people ask what a poem means, it seems they expect to be led back to some point of origin that is a clear thought, articulated as prose, and which then defines the poem. The problem is that poems emerge out of fog. A poet doesn�t have a thought that he translates into words but more often he has a vague feeling, �a sense of wrong, a homesickness��as Frost called it�that he struggles to find words for. It�s one of the reasons it nearly always stumps a poet to be asked what his poem means."

I recall reading a new poem of mine aloud for the first time many years ago. The poem is titled "Weekend With Dad." After the reading, a woman came up to me and thanked me for the reading and in particular that poem. She said, "I can really identify with that poem because I am a single parent too." I thanked her, But, I am not a single parent.

I thought about, as Adele's prompt asks us to do, what my poem means. To me, it was about spending the weekend with my one son because I was giving my wife time with our newborn second son. The poem was about trying to protect who we are, knowing that we will both age, grow, and change. But I had to admit to myself that the poem and the title certainly open a door to the woman's different interpretation.

This is one of the reasons writers like to be in writing groups and read their poems and be read and hear what listeners and readers think about their work.

When you send your poem out into the world, like a child, it takes on its own life, and you have very little control over its destiny.

Prompt: Dark Places

The Angel Gabriel Appearing to Zacharias by William Blake

The past two months, I have lost four people from my life. Two were old enough that people would say they had a good, long life. Two were old but still young enough that everyone felt their,lives had been cut short.

Friends tell me that I am never without something to say. Choose your adjective depending on how that talkative person feels in your world - chatty, loquacious, garrulous, voluble, conversational, communicative. But often when someone I know dies, words fail me, and the closer I feel to that person, the greater the failure of words to come.

As poets or readers of poetry, we often turn to other poets' words for consolation.

A few years ago, Edward Hirsch published a book of poems called Gabriel: A Poem  about his adopted son who died at age 22 in 2011.

This was his �reckless boy� who had a troubled life. Hirsch said  �There�s something really unnatural about losing a child, and there�s something unnatural about having to write an elegy for your child, but I felt that I wanted people to know what he was like.�

I bought the book two years ago and have never been able to read more than a few pages at a time. The opening lines - "The funeral director opened the coffin / And there he was alone / From the waist up� - stopped me on first reading.

The poem consists of more than 700 three-line stanzas. It has a rushing feel without punctuation of momentum sometimes out of control. That is an odd form for an elegy which I generally think of as being as slow as some heavy organ music in a cathedral.

His poem is roughly chronological and begins with the happiness of the adoption and the energy of youth.

With so much energy he was like a wound top,
He could almost fly a kite when there was no wind.

And then comes multiple diagnoses and the various/ Specialists who plagued us with help� and the ineffective drugs.

The population of his feelings
Could not be governed
By the authorities.

And finally, the looking back, the what-ifs and doubts.

Maybe we were too hard on him/ Maybe we were too soft. 

That God, which ever lives and loves,
One God, one law, one element,
And one far-off divine event,
To which the whole creation moves. 

I will not forgive you
Indifferent God
Until you give me back my son.

Hirsch's poem is too long - and probably too difficult - to use for this prompt, but we have no shortage of poems of lamentation and other topics that go into dark places to consider.

February is our coldest month in much of the Northern Hemisphere? and no doubt the season is also driving this prompt for me.

"Darkness" by Lord Byron (George Gordon) opens with lines that have always seemed to explain that feeling of waking up in a dark place, even if the sun was shining. Whether that darkness comes from a loss or a darkness in ourselves.

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went�and came, and brought no day,

Byron�s poem was literally inspired in part by a �year without a summer,� 1816, that was caused by the clouds of ash from the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815. Many people interpreted it as the end of the world. Byron took this sense of apocalypse to express a pessimism about nature.

Turning the pages in a thick anthology, I also reread TS Eliot�s "East Coker." This meditation on mortality is the third section of his Four Quartets.

In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur, and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.

The Londoners of the poem seem to live in his Waste Land, a place landscaped by war.  They are forced to enter the darkness of the unlit underground stations to escape the nightly air raids.

A more modern poem by Stanley Kunitz that I have always been affected by is "The Portrait" which begins:

My mother never forgave my father
for killing himself,
especially at such an awkward time
and in a public park,
that spring
when I was waiting to be born.

For this February prompt, we go to dark places. Those places can be real and quite  literally dark, or imagined and dark in the many figurative ways we use that word. The darkness of night, of death, depression, lamentation and loss is different and the same. We don't want to go to these dark places, but, especially as writers, we do go there. Going there might not be a choice, but sometimes we put ourselves there.

Keep a light nearby and a hand on the wall for support and walk carefully.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: February 29, 2016

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In 2014, Ron Charles interviewed Ed Hirsch for �The Life of a Poet� series and Hirsch talked about Gabriel, though he would not read from it.

Prompt: Poetry as Food

I read an article about how the Galway University Hospitals Arts Trust works with a poet who is appearing at C�irt International Festival of Literature to select poetry suitable for display in waiting areas of their hospitals. These "Poems for Patience" is a collection that hopefully will give people pause for reflection and space for hope in both those joyful celebratory moments as well as the all too often times of pain or worry. This year the poems were selected and introduced by Naomi Shihab Nye.

On Poetry Day (7 May) a Menu of Poems called �Flow� was distributed throughout Irish hospital wards, waiting rooms and other healthcare settings for patients, visitors and staff to enjoy. You can see the menu at www.poetryireland.ie

This got me thinking about serving poetry as food. Poetry as something you take in on a daily basis and that sustains you. Some of it good and solid and healthy, and sometimes some that is light and sweet, or heavy and probably not the best thing to have at that time.

There are a good number of poems about food, but that is not what we are dealing with in this prompt. There are also some well known poems about eating poetry.

One that is often anthologized and used in schools is "How To Eat a Poem" by Eve Merriam.

Don't be polite.
Bite in.
Pick it up with your fingers and lick the juice that
may run down your chin.
It is ready and ripe now, whenever you are.
You do not need a knife or fork or spoon
or plate or napkin or tablecloth.
For there is no core
or stem
or rind
or pit
or seed
or skin
to throw away.

Also well known is "Eating Poetry" by Mark Strand, which appeared on this year's National Poetry Month poster and begins:    
     

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry...

But what I am more interested in for this month's prompt is what Galway Kinnell does in his poem "Blackberry Eating."

Maybe the Galway Hospital triggered the Kinnell connection, but in his poem we have him first being quite literal in his eating -

I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making;

- and then something else happens. The blackberries, with their "black art" become words, if not poems.

and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry-eating in late September.

The prompt this month is poetry as food - poems that explore how we consume poetry, what it gives us, and may or may not contain references to actual foods.

With holidays and such at year's end, I'm sure you will have more than enough foods prompting you.

The submission deadline for this prompt is January 10, 2016.

Prompt: The Ode and the Body

For National Poetry Month last year, poets who serve on the Academy of American Poets Board of Chancellors participated in Poet-to-Poet, a multimedia educational project. Through videos, they invited young people in grades three to twelve to write poems in response to those shared by the poets.  Here is one of those poems.

"My Skeleton" by Jane Hirshfield

After reading the poem, Jane talks in the video about the poem and tells us it is an ode. �Ode� is from the Greek aeidein, meaning to sing or chant. It is an old form of lyric poetry which would have originally been accompanied by music and dance.

The Romantic poets used it as a way to formally address an event, a person, or a thing not present.
There are three typical types of odes: the Pindaric, Horatian, and Irregular. You can check into the more formal aspects of each, but we're being more general in our approach this month.

William Wordsworth's poem �Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood� is an example of an English language Pindaric ode.

The Horatian ode (named for the Roman poet Horace) is more contemplative, less formal, less ceremonious, and less theatrical. Look at the Allen Tate poem �Ode to the Confederate Dead.
 
The Irregular ode is just that. �Ode on a Grecian Urn� by John Keats was actually written based on his experiments with the sonnet.

Others: Shelley�s �Ode to the West Wind," Robert Creeley�s �America," Bernadette Mayer�s �Ode on Periods," and Robert Lowell�s �Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket.�

For this month, we ask you to write an ode that focuses on the body. Jane Hirshfield's poem opens with her direct address to the skeleton.

My skeleton,
you who once ached
with your own growing larger

She follows chronologically, following the skeleton as it ages.

each year
imperceptibly smaller,
lighter,
absorbed by your own
concentration.

Generally, the aging of the body is not a kind thing.

Angular wristbone's arthritis,
cracked harp of ribcage

And finally, she concludes with this beautiful image of its life work.

You who held me all my life
inside your hands
as a new mother holds
her own unblanketed child,
not thinking at all.

Our November prompt is an ode about a part of the body.  I suppose the skeleton is a part of the body, although it is made up of many smaller parts. That is true of the ear, the hand and the brain, so you might want to choose a specific part. You might choose the nose, a breast, the mouth, lips, tongue or a thumb. So many options. You don't need to get down to an anatomical level (although that might be interesting) and you could easily be like those Romantic poets in your approach.

One ode I heard read aloud by the poet several times is "Homage to My Hips" by Lucille Clifton. It is a short poem that probably would not count as an ode by Horatio's standards, but I'm fine with it as an ode.

Homage To My Hips

these hips are big hips.
they need space to
move around in.
they don't fit into little
petty places. these hips
are free hips.
they don't like to be held back.
these hips have never been enslaved,
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips.
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top

            

Prompt: Verse Goes Light with Garrison Keillor

Everyone seems concerned with losing weight, watching calories and avoiding heavy foods these days. It seems natural that we might want our verse a bit lighter too.

I imagine that many of you also listen or read Garrison Keillor's Writers Almanac for a poem to start the day. He has also edited several anthologies of his favorite poems, but he has also published O, What a Luxury: Verses Lyrical, Vulgar, Pathetic and Profound.


The title says it pretty succinctly. Some light verse is lyrical, some vulgar, some pathetic.

Keillor says that when he was in high school an English teacher tried to interest him in "Mr. Frost's guy who stopped in the woods to see snow fall and Mr. Eliot's guy who was not sure whether he should eat a peach" but that didn't work. It was "like serving bran flakes to someone who'd eaten buttermilk pancakes slathered with maple syrup."

Maybe you have read Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear or Ogden Nash or even W.S. Gilbert or, as Keillor has it "the great Anon." Light verse may be an acquired taste, but no one seems to consider it gourmet dining. It's more like acquiring a taste for cotton candy.

There are many notable poets in this genre and many "regular" poets who dabbled in light verse. Even serious Mr. Eliot wrote that book of cat poems that went on to be a long-running Broadway play.

Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats ("Old Possum" was Ezra Pound's nickname for him) was Tom's shot at light verse. After Eliot's death, the book was adapted as the basis of the musical Cats by Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Here is one of Garrison Keillor's poems that I like in this genre:

Cicadas

The seventeen-year cicada crawls out of the ground
And looks around from a wall or a low-hanging limb�
He looks for her and she discovers him.
Courtship does not extend for months.
Their only job is to have sex once.
No long interlude of pleasant reminiscing about days gone by.
Just buzz and whir and thank you sir and then you die.
Cicada love does not involve poetry or song.
Was it good for you? Thanks. So long.

What is this light poetry, or light verse? I would say that it attempts to be humorous (not the same thing as "funny" as anyone who has ever read an anthology of humor). They are usually brief. They can be on a frivolous or serious subject. You'll want to feature some word play, including puns, adventurous rhyme and alliteration.

There are plenty of anthologies of light verse and the journal Light is a source of new poems. I was delighted to see that one of my online friends, Toby Speed, has the "Poem of the Week" on their site. Hers is a good, terse example of all the "rules" I listed above. Of course, poets of light verse laugh and make puns from rules.

How to Use a Lemon

Squeeze some into tea.
Frizzle off the zest.
Add it to piccata
and pith away the rest.

~ Toby Speed


This prompt is open to submissions until the deadline: October 18, 2015

Prompt: Directions Home

Years ago, I was interested to see a feature in The Saturday Review each issue that was called "Writer's Desk." The idea was simple. It showed a writer's actual desk and explained a bit about how they worked there. I always thought that I might gain some insight into writing or writers by knowing about the how and where of their writing. It is a questionable theory, but when I visit a writer's home I am still interested in seeing their writing space.

Thinking about Charles Bukowski's battered desk looking over the Los Angeles harbor or Raymond Carver staring out his Port Angeles, Washington window across the Strait of Juan de Fuca and thinking about going fishing, did give me a bit of a sense about their writing.

So, I looked at Emily Dickinson's home and Wallace Steven's house looking for clues. I walked through Walt Whitman's home in Camden, New Jersey looking for signs of his ecstatic poems, wandering spirit and curiosity.

I was interested to see that a poem by Juan Felipe Herrera, who was recently named Poet Laureate of the United States, was used during National Poetry Month as a writing prompt about home.


Juan Felipe Herrera reads �Five Directions to My House� as part of National Poetry Month 2014.
https://youtu.be/8UPjEcaCG5E

Five Directions to My House

1. Go back to the grain yellow hills where the broken speak of elegance
2. Walk up to the canvas door, the short bed stretched against the clouds
3. Beneath the earth, an ant writes with the grace of a governor
4. Blow, blow Red Tail Hawk, your hidden sleeve�your desert secrets
5. You are there, almost, without a name, without a body, go now
6. I said five, said five like a guitar says six.

Actually, I was more interested in the responses to his poem by students. Here are two of the poems written in response to Herrea's poem.

Six Ways to the Sky by Leyla, age 9

Turn around go to the end of the long bridge
Into the wave of clouds under the colorless arch
Under the heat of the center core.
Over the peregrine falcon flying fast as the race car
Out of the endless underwater cave
Around the wheel of fortune, around, around, around the wheel.
I said six, said six like a rainbow says seven.

Five Minutes to My House by Ilyssa, age 18


One,
the mountain cradles the rising sun as it leaves
a warm pink collection of colors in the air.
Bright, brutal sunlight turns the sky on
like an electrical switch and the sky becomes
alive.

Two,
the staccato of a wood pecker tapping on my roof
in the morning stirs me awake.

Three,
an endless stretch of rocks and dirt, harsh
to the eyes, a barren desolate land.

Four,
a dead bunny carcass lies on the newly
paved road, it ran towards the wheels of a
car. Now, it�s left behind a sore sight
for all except hungry lone scavengers.

Five,
time, time slips through the fingers like
yellow grains of sand left behind on a beach.
Even time moves slowly in this eternal home.

Your writing prompt is to write a poem that gives directions (in any format) to your house or any particular house - including the home of a poet - take a look at my earlier post about writer's homes.

Submissions to this prompt are due by September 6, 2015.

Prompt: His Master's Voice

We love our pets. Writers love their pets, and they often write about them. I see more and more books about dogs and cats, and that includes poetry.

I recently went to a reading with Billy Collins who has a good number of dog poems. In two of those, he  introduces us to dogs "whom have taken the command 'speak' quite literally."

One of those which has the dog contemplating his relationship to his owner, is titled "A Dog on His Master" - a title that makes me recall an old advertising slogan from the RCA Victor company used for early phonographs.

A DOG ON HIS MASTER

As young as I look,
I am growing older faster than he,
seven to one
is the ratio they tend to say.
Whatever the number,
I will pass him one day
and take the lead
the way I do on our walks in the woods.
And if this ever manages
to cross his mind,
it would be the sweetest
shadow I have ever cast on snow or grass.

(from Ballistics: Poems)

Beau & Arden on the UK edition of Dog Years

In Dog Years: A Memoir, poet Mark Doty decides to adopt a dog as a companion for his dying partner. Beau is a large, malnourished golden retriever in need of love. He joins Arden, their black retriever. These two companions accompany them on the sad journey and teach lessons about love and loss.

I loved Doty's poem (or is it Beau's poem?) "Golden Retrievals" the first time I heard him read it. Like many of Collins' poems it hits you as light and funny, especially in his reading of it. But, also like Collin's poems, there is something more serious going on in the poem.

The dog starts off with his joy in his dog world, rejecting the people world of:

Fetch? Balls and sticks capture my attention
seconds at a time. Catch? I don�t think so.

He is far more interested in:

Bunny, tumbling leaf, a squirrel who�s�oh
joy�actually scared. Sniff the wind, then

I�m off again: muck, pond, ditch, residue
of any thrillingly dead thing.

But his poor owner is:

Either you�re sunk in the past, half our walk,
thinking of what you never can bring back,

or else you�re off in some fog concerning
�tomorrow, is that what you call it?

The dog knows that his work here is part Zen master and part physicist trying:

to unsnare time�s warp (and woof!), retrieving,
my haze-headed friend, you.


Mark Doty's �Golden Retrievals� (from Sweet Machine: Poems) is this month's model poem for our writing prompt. And who would have guessed that Beau was a formalist, writing a kind of sonnet.

Your assignment this month is a poem that comes from the mind, heart or mouth of a pet or animal. Let your dog or cat at the keyboard or have them channel the poem to you in that sixth or seventh sense that we know they possess.

Submission deadline: June 30, 2015

I also recommend that you give a look and listen (below) to Billy Collins reading "A Dog on His Master" and one of my favorites, "The Revenant." The revenant (one who has returned, especially from the dead) dog speaking the latter poem is not in love with his master - the person who put him "to sleep" - in fact, "I never liked you - not one bit."

Garth Stein credits "The Revenant" for being the inspiration for his novel The Art of Racing in the Rain: A Novel, written in the voice of a dog.

Like Beau, Collins' former pet also loves those outdoor smells encountered on walks, "but only because it meant I was about / to smell things you had never touched."

This dog's only somewhat kind remark is to confirm something about the afterlife that the poet had hopefully assumed: "that everyone here can read and write, the dogs in poetry, the cats and the others in prose."

bow-wow, bow-wow, bow-wow




Mark Doty's website is markdoty.org   He blogs at markdoty.blogspot.com

Prompt: Epistles to the Poets

It is National Poetry Month 2015 in America. The Academy of American Poets has many special features on its website for this month. One is called "Dear Poet." It is a multimedia education project that invites young people in grades five through twelve to write letters in response to poems written and read by some of the award-winning poets who serve on their Board of Chancellors.

Poets Online asks you this month to join the students. You can read and watch a group of poets reading and discussing their poems. The students are being asked to write letters to the poets to express their thoughts, ideas, or ask any questions they may have about the poems. I wonder why they didn't ask students to write poems to the poets - which is what we we will do.

Epistles, or epistolary poems, comes from the Latin �epistula� for �letter," are poems that read as letters. As poems of direct address, they can be intimate and colloquial or formal and measured.

On our main site, the prompt includes two of the poems and poets from Dear Poets. One is Naomi Shihab Nye's "How Do I Know When A Poem Is Finished?" which itself is addressed to someone - perhaps a student who has asked the poet that question, though all poets ask that question to themselves.

The second example and video is for Edward Hirsch's poem "Cotton Candy" which looks back to the candy and a grandfather.

What would you write to Nye or Hirsch about their poems?

Our prompt is much wider. You can choose any poem on the Academy site or any poem at all. The only requirement is that you address the poet by name and that you include the title of the poem you are responding to in the poem.

Your poem might be titled "Dear Mr. Hirsch" or Dear Elizabeth" for a poem to Elizabeth Bishop, whose own epistle "Letter to N.Y." begins:

In your next letter I wish you�d say
where you are going and what you are doing;
how are the plays, and after the plays
what other pleasures you�re pursuing:

taking cabs in the middle of the night,
driving as if to save your soul
where the road goes round and round the park
and the meter glares like a moral owl

I might write to W. B. Yeats during this Easter week 2015 about his poem "Easter 1916" to let him know that this year:

I am sitting at the start of day
looking out the window
at my desk at a sky gray
above twenty-first century homes

that I have passed on my way,
like you, nodding and saying
polite meaningless words...

Prompt: Shoveling Snow with the Buddha and Billy Collins

If you are in a part of the world covered with snow, you may identify in that way with this month's model poem: "Shoveling Snow With Buddha" by Billy Collins. Our prompt for February is writing about someone who is well known but in your poem "out of place."

I like that in Collins' poem the Buddha is out of place for several reasons. First, he is doing something and we are used to seeing him seated and meditative. We also usually find him in a nice temperate setting, not in the snow. Of course, he is also out of place because he is out of time, dropped into our present from his past.

Besides the idea that he is helping shovel snow, he is also quite interested in hot chocolate and playing cards after the shoveling - two rewards for his work, not unlike a child's rewards for helping clear the snow.

He is more Buddha-like in his mindfulness of the work.

He has thrown himself into shoveling snow
as if it were the purpose of existence,
as if the sign of a perfect life were a clear driveway

Collins is no real life Buddhist, though he is mindful, but the poem touches on several ideas in Buddhism. Like most of Collins' poems, the light, perhaps funny, surface of the poem is a way to slide into more serious points. In this poem, I am reminded about how often we forget that the journey is the destination, and how often we want to be anywhere but in the now.

This prompt asks you to place a well-known person (living or dead, real or fictional) somewhere out of place. There is the suggestion of something absurd in this, although Emily Dickinson at Starbucks is not as odd as if you made her a Victoria's Secret runway model, so the choice is yours when it comes to that aspect of the prompt.

Deadline for submissions: March 8, 2015

Prompt: Terrance Hayes and the Golden Shovel

Terrance Hayes

Terrance Hayes invented a poetry form he calls the Golden Shovel. You take a line (or lines) from a poem you admire, and use each word in the line (or lines) as an end word in your poem while maintaining the order. So, if you choose a line with six words, your poem would be six lines long.

This borrowing method is not without precedent in poetry. One similar form is quite ancient: the cento, in which you make a poem entirely from other poets' lines. Another form makes a new poem by removing lines from an existing poem - that is known as an erasure.

For my own first Golden Shovel attempt, I wrote a poem for my daily writing practice last year. I chose a poem by Gary Snyder called "Changing Diapers" and used his line "you and me and Geronimo." I wrote it in the ronka form that all my daily poems for 2014 used.

Geronimo [after Gary Snyder]

After the reading, talking briefly to you
and recalling another time � when I, Steve and
you shared coffee conversation � you remembered me.
A wonderful lie. We are men, and
we jump like paratroopers and shout Geronimo.

My poem came out of a brief encounter with Snyder recently when he read at the Dodge Poetry Festival in New Jersey. It also recalls a longer conversation we had at another Dodge Festival more than 20 years ago.

In what I believe must be the first Golden Shovel poem, Terrance Hayes used a Gwendolyn Brooks poem. He started with Brooks' often-anthologized poem, "We Real Cool." His poem is called "The Golden Shovel.".

"The rules" for this new form are:

• Take a line(s) from a favorite poem
• Use each word in the line (or lines) as an end word in your poem and
• Keep the end words in the order they appeared originally. That means that you could read the stanza at the right edge like an acrostic.
• Give credit to the original poet (it can be in the title, an epigram or within the poem) and for our prompt also include a note a reference to the poem, though it doesn't have to be part of the poem itself. It would be great if you could include a link to the original poem online so that readers could see your inspiration.
• The new poem does not have to be about the same subject as the original poem, but it can be related.

We know how poets love to play by the rules. Mr. Hayes pushes a bit on his own rules by using more than a line and and using every word from the Brooks poem. Twice. Setting the bar high. In his collection, Lighthead, he also has a poem using Elizabeth Alexander's poem, �Ladders� (for his "Last Train to Africa") and borrows lyrics from songs by Marvin Gaye and Louis Armstrong for others.

___________________________________

Terrance Hayes' poem �The Golden Shovel� is from Lighthead (2010, Penguin) which won the National Book Award.




Extra Credit: Think you know why Hayes called his poem and form "The Golden Shovel?"   Tell us your answer in a comment on this post.

Prompt: Totally like whatever, you know?

I like this typographic video that I discovered on Taylor Mali's website that visualizes a reading of one of his poems.

Taylor Mali's poem, "Totally like whatever, you know?," from What Learning Leaves is funny and it's true and it works.

The poem begins:

In case you hadn�t noticed,
it has somehow become uncool
to sound like you know what you�re talking about?
Or believe strongly in what you�re saying?
Invisible question marks and parenthetical (you know?)�s
have been attaching themselves to the ends of our sentences?
Even when those sentences aren�t, like, questions? You know?

It's about language. It is a poem about slang. It's about lazy language.

For this month's prompt, select a word or phrase that would be considered slang as your title and starting place. Your poem can be about the slang itself, but it could be about language or go off some other direction.

Need some inspiration? Try the OnlineSlangDictionary.com


Submission deadline: November 30, 2014

I Sext the Body Electric

Did you catch a poem published last year in The Awl by Patricia Lockwood titled �Rape Joke" which went viral?

Facebook and Twitter shares made Lockwood Internet-famous. She is not a poet laureate. She is not a professor (never finished college) and lives far from the hip places for poets in Lawrence, Kansas.


Her latest book of poems, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, has a number of "sexts" which are her short poems that are erotic and simultaneously ridiculous. Lockwood got attention for her tweets that were inspired by the Anthony Weiner scandal, which imagines surreal sex acts.

Here are two examples:

Sext: I am a water glass at the Inquisition. You are a dry pope mouth. You pucker; I wet you

Sext: I am a living male turtleneck. You are an art teacher in winter. You put your whole head through me

"Rape Joke� changed things. People have said it is funny, harrowing, important and not worth considering. That kind of response gets my attention.

Lockwood is not an unknown. Her last collection, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black, made the New Yorker�s Best Books list for 2012.

Looking through the new collection you can find poems about sexed-up forest creatures that never appear in Disney films, the Loch Ness Monster, and Whitman and Dickinson appearing as ghosts. The poems swerve between hilarious and creepy, profane and profound.

Patricia Lockwood via Twitter

In a radio interview on Studio 260, she said �My baseline voice as a poet tends to be very serious, very grave. But in my life, I tend to be a funny person. It was a challenge that I set myself to try to integrate those two voices.�

Twitter posts ("tweets") are limited to 140 characters. Not a lot of space to compose.

Then again, Ezra Pound's famous little poem, "In a Station of the Metro," fits nicely, title and all with characters to spare.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;  
Petals on a wet, black bough.

One hundred and forty characters (including spaces and punctuation) makes for a long line of poetry.
The previous sentence is only 100 characters.

Robert Frost would have gone over by only 3 characters if he had tweeted:

Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here to watch his woods fill up with snow

In this shortened month, our new prompt asks you for poems composed of tweets. By this we mean "stanzas" of 140 characters that can stand alone. You can thematically thread together as many as you wish though, so your poem can be as short as 140 characters and as long as 140 X ?  Line lengths are your choice, but stanza length is 140 characters. (If you use Twitter, you might want to compose there as it counts your characters automatically.)

To make thing more interesting for readers, we are asking you to make the topic of your poem sex. Of course, that means that the serious and the not-so-serious side of the topic is fair game.

Submissions due October 4, 2015

Carl Sandburg: I Wish I Never

Having read poems by Carl Sandburg in my elementary school English classes, I was not a fan. "Fog" was a cute little thing. I still recall a teacher using it to teach us personification.

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

His poem "Chicago" was in at least two anthologies in school and we read that too.
It begins:

Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation�s Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your
painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys...

Other than those painted women, it didn't interest me very much.

Then, in high school, I read "Mag" without knowing it was by Sandburg. It was bitter. It kind of shocked me. No curse words, but so cutting.

Mag

I wish to God I never saw you, Mag.
I wish you never quit your job and came along with me.
I wish we never bought a license and a white dress
For you to get married in the day we ran off to a minister
And told him we would love each other and take care of each other
Always and always long as the sun and the rain lasts anywhere.
Yes, I'm wishing now you lived somewhere away from here
And I was a bum on the bumpers a thousand miles away dead broke.
     I wish the kids had never come
     And rent and coal and clothes to pay for
     And a grocery man calling for cash,
     Every day cash for beans and prunes.
     I wish to God I never saw you, Mag.
     I wish to God the kids had never come.


It was first published in his collection Chicago Poems (1916). This volume, along with Cornhuskers (1918) and Smoke and Steel (1920), established Sandburg's reputation as a talented free verse poet, known for portraying industrial America.

I suppose the obvious prompt from the poem is about marriage. Too obvious.

What struck me about the poem initially is the negative wishing. I was more used to reading poems where the wishes were for things in the future. Good things. Better things. But Sandburg is wishing to change the past. To undo what was done.

Your task this month is to write a poem about a negative wish (or wishes) - a wish to undo, wishes that change the past. Those are the wishes that pull you right back to the present and have you thinking about the future.

Submission Deadline: August 31, 2014

Are All the Break-Ups in Your Poems Real?

If you are a poet and publish or give readings, you may have been asked questions about your poems. Readers and listeners often wonder how real or autobiographical the details in your poems might be.

Some readers expect that the first car you owned in that poem must, in fact, be the actual first car you owned. That Francine who was your first kiss - Was she really your first kiss?

How honest do you need to be in your poems? How autobiographical are your poems and how much poetic license do you allow yourself? Is there a line of fiction that poems shouldn't cross?

For this month's prompt, we consider the questions readers ask (or might ask) about your poems.

There are two poems by Aimee Nezhukumatathil that serve this prompt. First is her poem, "Are All the Break-Ups in Your Poems Real?" I like the way she answers that question in several ways and I think for many poets the answer does depend on the poem and situation.

The second poem is "Dear Amy Nehzooukammyatootill" in which Aimee gives us a found poem, composed entirely of e-mails from various high school students. (As the title implies, Aimee's last name is a tough one for most readers.) The students have asked questions and made observations about the poet and her poems. The poet responds - but only through her selection, arrangement and repetition of the found comments.

What are readers asking you about your poems, and what are you answering?

Submission deadline: July 31, 2014


Aimee's website is at http://aimeenez.net 

Prompt: All About June

What does the month of June suggest to you? Summer? Weddings?

In Richard Wilbur's poem, "June Light," the month is present in someone "with clear location" and "the just soft stare of uncontested summer."

The Latin name for June is Junius. Ovid offered multiple etymologies for the month's name: from the Roman goddess Juno, the goddess of marriage and the wife of the supreme deity Jupiter; the second is that the name comes from the Latin word iuniores, meaning "younger ones", as opposed to maiores ("elders") for which the preceding month May (Maius) may be named. Though we might associate JUne with weddings, in ancient Rome, the period from mid-May through mid-June was considered a bad time to marry. Ovid says that he consulted the Flaminica Dialis, the high priestess of Jupiter, about setting a date for his daughter's wedding, and was advised to wait till after June 15. Then again, Plutarch said that the entire month of June was more favorable for weddings than May.

I like the Icelandic folk story that says that if you bathe naked in the morning dew on the morning of June 24, you are supposed to keep aging at bay for a longer period.

If you believe in the power of the heavenly bodies, the start of June finds the sun rising in the constellation of Taurus, and at the end of the month it rises in the constellation of Gemini.

Does the month mean to you, as in this month's full moon, strawberries and roses?

This month we ask you to consider June as the theme for your poem. Perhaps, you can teach us something new about the month.

Submission deadline: June 30, 2014