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The Work of the Poet

3/24/2021

Image: Markus Winkler

Introduction

This week we consider the work of the poet, as influenced by the two mentor poems. Diane Ackerman suggests the work of the poet is "to name what is holy," and, as in Clemonce Heard's poem, it is to register a response to a current event. In our writing practice, PoBo writers try their turn at each of these challenges. Stay tuned, because the work of the poet is an idea we will revisit again and again.

First Mentor Poem

The Work Of The Poet Is To Name What Is Holy
DIANE ACKERMAN

The work of the poet
is to name what is holy:

the spring snow
that hides unevenness
but also records
a dog walked at lunchtime,
the hieroglyphs of birds,
pawprints of a life
tiny but resolute;

how, like Russian dolls,
we nest in previous selves;

the lustrous itch
that compels an oyster
to forge a pearl,
or a poet a verse;

the drawing on of evening
belted at the waist;

snowfields of diamond dust;

the cozy monotony
of our days, in which
love appears with a holler;

the way a man's body
has its own geography––
cliffs, aqueducts, pumice fields,
but a woman's is the jungle,
hot, steamy, full of song;

the brain's curiosity shop
filled with quaint mementos
and shadow antiques
hidden away in drawers;

the plain geometry
of you, me, and art––
our angles at rest
among shifting forms.

The work of the poet
is to name what is holy,

and not to mind so much
the pinch of words
to cope with memories
weak as falling buildings,

or render loss, love,
and the penitentiary
of worry where we live.

The work of the poet
is to name what is holy,
a task fit for eternity,
or the small Eden of this hour.

Source: Journal Therapy, Compliments of the Center for Journal Therapy

Writing Prompt #1

Name what is holy in your life. Make a list, or a “list poem,” as Diane Ackerman has done.
Tell me about the “work of the poet.” What is the work of a poet?
What is the role poetry plays in your life? What role would you like it to play? How can you bridge the gap between the two, if there is one?

Second Mentor Poem

All My Stresses Live in Texas
CLEMONCE HEARD

Now I’ve seen everything:
Ivy sagged like an IV neck-
lacing the windows of the burning
house; snow killing my neighbor’s
cacti in their terracotta pots
dwarfing the one my friend sent
a picture of, lampshading a pillar
candle cordoned off by a coup-
le of cinder blocks that would help
heat his house in a blackout
if it was 10,000 sq. ft. smaller. Trans-

former state senator feels no way
about the system he helped deregu-
late over two decades ago.
Says he’s only lost power tw-
ice since then, & notes how,
hunched over, he makes coffee
in his fireplace. I counted two rats

sniffing around my cracked porch,
curled inside my idling sedan.
I spoke to Wisconsin, who s-
aid she smelled gas the same time
I smelled burning wires & thought
it was my battery I hadn’t replaced
before I’d left the Midwest.
How I’d wished it wasn’t the alt-
ernator as it was in the negatives
that day, & I’d have to take so much
out to get to the problem.

Source: Rattle, Poets Respond feature, Feb. 21, 2021

Writing Prompts #2

Write notes in response to a recent (within the last week) news story. Choose a local story, neighborhood story, national or international story. A science story, an education story, a human interest story.
Write about how a recent news story directly affected your life.
Write about how you mulled over the recent news. Were you grocery shopping when it popped into your mind? Jogging? Sleeping, and woke up? Write about how you processed a recent news story.

For Discussion

Jogging after the Vatican Resolves the Dubium “Does the Church Have the Power to Give the Blessing to Unions of Persons of the Same Sex?”
KAITLYN SPEES

The paths I love, my Lord, are narrow and switch-backed
and I’m puffing my way up them parsing
my disappointment--
Today the Vatican confirmed that the Church cannot
“bless the unions of persons of the same sex”
because they say that “blessing” treads
too close to “sacrament” for comfort, and moreover
sex divorced from procreation
is apparently still a sin.

Rattlesnakes drowse on the trails I love, Lord,
and I knew I wasn’t suicidal anymore
when I accidentally stepped
between a knotted pair napping in the dust.
The diamond band of their backs pressed
my brainstem even before I parsed them
into snake, into threat, but—here’s the miracle--
once I understood I still gasped “ohshit” and pounded away.
The seatbelts and bike helmets came back later.

Lord, I thought the rattlesnakes were going to be
metaphors. I thought that next I’d bring up
my mild familial allergy to apples just in case
the imagery wasn’t blatant enough already.
But, Lord, I loved the woman who ran
these trails with me. I didn’t know I loved her.
It ended badly. And the way that I love, Lord,
is narrow and branching and switch-backed and, Lord, I love you.
Lord, I will not let you go. Bless me. Let me bless you.

Source: Rattle, March 23, 2021

"Poets Respond"

. . . is a feature of Rattle's online poetry magazine, highlighting the immediacy of poetry, instead of the customary publication time which would lag by months behind the current news cycles. I love the Poet's Respond challenge because it requires a writer to process unfolding news enough to craft a poetic response. Check it out their overall content, consider submitting to Poet's Respond, tune in to the podcast!

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Addressing the Imaginary Reader: 3 Writing Prompts

3/18/2021

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Image: Angela Yuriko Smith on Pixabay

Introduction

Helen Vendler, American literary critic, writes in her book SILENT LISTENERS, "Although no one else is present in fact, the solitary poet is frequently addressing someone else, someone not in the room. " This week's theme is exploring to whom we are writing. Who are we imagining as we write, if we are indeed conscious of imagining anybody?

First Mentor Poem

To You
WALT WHITMAN

   STRANGER! if you, passing, meet me, and desire to speak to me, why
         should you not speak to me?
   And why should I not speak to you?
                                              ~ LEAVES OF GRASS (1900)

Writing Prompt #1

Directly address your future reader. What will the reader need to know? Is there anything you need to explain? Write whatever you want to say to your imagined future reader(s).

Second Mentor Poem

MORE FROM VENDLER: “...poets address their poems, in whole or in part, to someone they do not know and cannot set eyes on, their invisible listener. George Herbert speaks to God; Walt Whitman to the reader in futurity; John Ashbery to a painter of the past. What are we to make of this choice of addressee? With many visible listeners presumably available---the beloved, the patron, the child, the friend---why does the poet feel he or she must hold a colloquy with an invisible other?"

This is my letter to the world
EMILY DICKINSON

This is my letter to the world
That never wrote to me, --
The simple news that Nature told,
With tender majesty,
Her message is committed
To hands I cannot see;
For love of her, sweet countrymen,
Judge tenderly of me!

Writing Prompt #2

With so many confidant’s available, who is the imagined other you MUST speak to? Say what you need to say.
Like Dickinson, write your “letter to the world.”

Who Did PoBo Writers Address?

The following are examples of our writer's directly addressing someone, or something -- excerpted from their poems.

Is it enough, dark traveler? Is it enough for both of us?
Grandma, did you know your grandma?
I write to the me that remembers why I'm here
Because you are here with me, I am writing to you. You are witnessing me, and the value of that is not lost on me.
I don't mean to deceive you, but I fragment easily.
Dear future readers, I wonder if you’re out there.
TO whom it may concern…
Dear Sir/Madam, In return I say I am not that person.
Maybe Ando, that pudgy Mexican kid who nobody knew was writing mysteries about all the subtle crimes being committed against his sensibilities.
Perhaps I should listen to you first/ if you’re ready to share/ I’ll creep inside your mind and search until I find you there
Allow your thirsty souls to open, to be saturated, in the daily wonders--strip yourself naked and see all that we take for granted.
If you have to break, break into a million stars because you shine. You will shine! Then tell me about it.

For Discussion

To You (excerpt)
WALT WHITMAN

Whoever you are, I fear you are walking the walks of dreams,
I fear these supposed realities are to melt from under your feet and hands
Even now your features, joys, speech, house, trade, manners, troubles, follies, costume, crimes, dissipate away from you,
Your true soul and body appear before me,
They stand forth out of affairs, out of commerce, shops, work, farms, clothes, the house, buying, selling, eating, drinking, suffering, dying.

Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem,
I whisper with my lips close to your ear,
I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you.

SOURCE: https://poets.org/poem/you

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Colorful Writing

3/11/2021

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Artist: Prawny

Hello, Poetry

It's a colorful life! The first poem below, Matt Donovan's "Green Means Literally a Thousand Things or More" is a favorite of mine -- so layered -- and wanted to kick off this session with it. Does it look familiar? PoetryBones has read this poem before, but in a closing discussion. You can see it HERE along with other "color-related" poems with which we've worked. TODAY, we revisit the theme, but with a different writing challenge! Off you go, now!

First Mentor Poem

Academy of American Poets · Matt Donovan: "Green Means Literally a Thousand Things or More"

Green Means Literally a Thousand Things or More
MATT DONOVAN

So concludes an essay on “Fern Hill,” in which the student seems
somewhere between jazzed up & pissed off that green might mean
so many things from one stanza to the next: here, a blooming

Eden proxy; here, rot made by the grip of time. For starters. Or
that sun-slaked field, not far from our classroom, as lush-green
as any Welsh farmyard, greyed overnight with frost. Emerald

beer bottle hurled from a car. The slack-jawed lime-green
goblin face spanning a front porch post-Halloween
for so many weeks it looks like it’s here to stay. The long-ago

brown-green of Cleveland, where it rained always & without pity
upon a past I crave despite myself & our team lost always 14—2.
Every time we waited in the bleachers for the game to resume,

my father would look down upon the outfield’s diagonal lines
& proclaim Still a lot of green out there, meaning anything
can happen & will. Have you ever heard in a crowd the saddest part

of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” where everyone lies & pretends
we don’t care if we ever get back & makes the last word echo
twice more? We always want to get back, whether or not

we’re hailing childhood green. Like the student in her essay,
I too could keep rattling off images of spring & decay—June
sunset horizon flash, summer hair stained olive from churning

over-chlorinated pools, green shadow of a hand somewhere
that makes it feel as if owls were bearing everything away--
instead of looking again at the image online I glimpsed before

returning to the still-ungraded hay-high stack of student work.
Maybe you saw it too? Maybe you also had the spellbound luck
of wandering to other tasks instead of asking what it means to know

anything can happen in a wholly different way, instead of looking
once more at the slash of police tape that is the only horizon
that matters just now for the two men in the photograph who sit

together on the curb, faces glowing blue-red in the lights, both of them
bleary-eyed but alive, swaddled in aftermath & a blanket that is green,
a detail that couldn’t matter less, given how the numbers of the dead

still rise. Here we are again, as inevitable as the clock’s tick, looking in
at a place that now will never be young. Is there a way to say it--
There’s been a shooting—that will allow it to be heard, remembered

& heard without the easy glide of our past tense? That will stop us
from wanting to turn to anything under the wide starry sky that is not
the green fire burning in the minds of those men or the green

of a blanket America provides & provides without change?

Writing Prompt

Think of a color. Then take a walk! Observe EVERYTHING in that color--or color family.
Take notes or pictures. Write in your head as you walk. Write when you get home.

Second Mentor Poem

Oranges
ROISIN KELLY

I’ll choose for myself next time
who I’ll reach out and take
as mine, in the way
I might stand at a fruit stall

having decided
to ignore the apples
the mangoes and the kiwis
but hold my hands above

a pile of oranges
as if to warm my skin
before a fire.
Not only have I chosen

oranges, but I’ll also choose
which orange — I’ll test
a few for firmness
scrape some rind off

with my fingernail
so that a citrus scent
will linger there all day.
I won’t be happy

with the first one I pick
but will try different ones
until I know you. How
will I know you?

You’ll feel warm
between my palms
and I’ll cup you like
a handful of holy water.

A vision will come to me
of your exotic land: the sun
you swelled under
the tree you grew from.

A drift of white blossoms
from the orange tree
will settle in my hair
and I’ll know.

This is how I will choose
you: by feeling you
smelling you, by slipping
you into my coat.

Maybe then I’ll climb
the hill, look down
on the town we live in
with sunlight on my face

and a miniature sun
burning a hole in my pocket.
Thirsty, I’ll suck the juice
from it. From you.

When I walk away
I’ll leave behind a trail
of lamp-bright rind.

Remember

Take a look at the other color poem prompts from January 2020 !

Something Extra

I find Philippa Stanton's work engaging for her color-themed photographs. I will post more about her work later and link you to her sites. But for now, wanted to share this Sensory Collecting video with you as you go on your "color" walk. Why not make it a Sensory Collecting walk, as well!

Click on thumbnails below for full image. From Stanton's CONSCIOUS CREATIVITY book.

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Random & Free Association Poetry Prompts (1)

3/4/2021

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Photo by 简体中文

Today's theme is RANDOMNESS. After some advice in a poet laureate's letter to pair words we don't usually put next to each other in lines of poetry, we tried a spin on a couple of random word and image generators--and began to feel it's all less and less random than it seems. That discovery traveled all the the way down to the discussion poem at the end. Just how random is that TSA search at the airport?

If you enjoy random challenges, try Random & Free Association Poetry Prompts (2)!

First Mentor Poem (which is really a letter)

For National Poetry Month 2015, poets.org presented Dear Poet, a multimedia education project that invited 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 the Academy of American Poets Board of Chancellors. This is an excerpt from Ethan's letter to Juan Felipe Herrera:

I am writing to you about your poem “Jackrabbits, Green Onions & Witches Stew.” One thing that jumped out at me was that the poem was written in the way real people talk. A second thing that jumped out at me was that you talked a lot about space and vegetables. The vegetables fit in with the rest of the poem, but the parts about space didn’t fit in with the rest. Since I didn’t get some parts I would like to ask you some questions.

. . . I’m sorry if some of them are hard to answer. Why did you decide to be a poet? What was your inspiration to write “Jackrabbits, Green Onions & Witches Stew,” and to name it that? Why did you choose these words, “Dinky planet on a skateboard of dynamite,” for this specific part of the poem? Also what were you using space and vegetables to symbolize? I think the vegetables symbolize the different feelings in life you get, like sour when something gruesome happens.

I look forward to hearing back from you.

Herrera wrote back with this advice, excerpted from his longer letter. You can see their full exchange here.

When I put certain words together in one sentence that usually do not go together - like jackrabbits and green onions—I get very excited and inspired. Like scientists, maybe—when they stir new chemicals into each other to see what is going to happen or— when they are looking for a new way to cure a disease.

For me one of the most enjoyable things about writing poetry is to create new things and to play with words as if I was in a giant toy store.

A secret—I love to use words in a poem that I have never used before: “Jackrabbits,” “Green Onions,” or “Witches” or “Stew.” So—it was about time I put these words on the same sheet of paper.

Poetry Prompt #1

Using the “Take Three Nouns” random word generator, make connections between random nouns. I propose you just start writing and let the connection happen . . . randomly.
(Many thanks to JG Web Publishing for these awesome random generators!)

Oh, and also resist the urge to click, click, click the generator. Say YES to whatever pops up, and write! Ready? Click. And write for 10 minutes.

Second Mentor Poem

Random Panic in the U.S.A.
EDWARD KLEINSCHMIDT

SOURCE: poetryfoundation.org

Poetry Prompt #2

Using this random image generator, write to the image that pops up! The website offers two approaches:

Use an image as a free-writing exercise.
Use the image as an exercise in observation and writing description. Look closely at the picture. Describe colors, texture, shapes, sounds and smells.

Ready? Click! And write for 10 minutes.

For Discussion

T.S.A.
AMIT MAJMUDAR

Off with the wristwatch, the Reeboks, the belt.
My laptop's in a bin.
I dig out the keys from my jeans and do
my best Midwestern grin.
At O'Hare, at Atlanta, at Dallas/Fort Worth,
it happens every trip,
at LaGuardia, Logan, and Washington Dulles,
the customary strip
is never enough for a young brown male
whose name comes up at random.
Lest the randomness of it be doubted, observe
how Myrtle's searched in tandem,
how Doris's six-pack of Boost has been seized
and Ethel gets the wand.
How polite of the screeners to sham paranoia
when what they really want
is to pick out the swarthiest, scruffiest of us
and pat us top to toe,
my fellow Ahmeds and my alien Alis,
Mohammed alias Mo--
my buddies from med school, my doubles partners,
my dark unshaven brothers
whose names overlap with the crazies and God fiends,
ourselves the goateed other.

SOURCE: poetryfoundation.org

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...the boost your writing practice needs

The Work of the Poet

Introduction

First Mentor Poem

Writing Prompt #1

Second Mentor Poem

Writing Prompts #2

For Discussion

"Poets Respond"

Addressing the Imaginary Reader: 3 Writing Prompts

Introduction

First Mentor Poem

Writing Prompt #1

Second Mentor Poem

Writing Prompt #2

Who Did PoBo Writers Address?

For Discussion

Colorful Writing

Hello, Poetry

First Mentor Poem

Writing Prompt

Second Mentor Poem

Remember

Something Extra

Random & Free Association Poetry Prompts (1)

First Mentor Poem (which is really a letter)

Poetry Prompt #1

Second Mentor Poem

Poetry Prompt #2

For Discussion

Author

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