Poets Respond: Writing About Current Events

At the 2021 Presidential Inauguration in the United States, Amanda Gorman reads her poem "The Hill We Climb" as a National Youth Poet Laureate. 

​The Youth Poet Laureate has first been chosen as Poet Laureate for their city or region, and as a young person, demonstrates "skill in the arts, particularly poetry and/or spoken word."  Youth Poet Laureate is also described as "a strong leader, committed to social justice, and active in civic discourse and advocacy. "

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Writing about current events within the week a news story happen is an interesting writing challenge.  There is not much time to fully process an event. There is no editorial panel assessing your place among the voices that have spun out of the event. There is barely time for the dust to settle from the event itself before you are "poeming" it.  So this week, we look at poems with urgency toward current events and challenge ourselves to write with a similar urgency.  

First Mentor Poem

Good Bones 
MAGGIE SMITH
 
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
 
SOURCE: poetryfoundation.org

Writing Prompts

• Write in response to a current news topic – big or small – political or entertainment.
• Participants were also invited to post an "on the spot" prompt – a word/phrase from the poem that triggered writing.  Choose a prompt for yourself from this list:

a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
you could make this place beautiful
broken, bagged, sunk
​good bones

every bird / loved child / kind stranger
this could be beautiful, right?
​I keep this from my children
chirp on

Second Mentor Poem

On Ceremony
WENDY VIDELOCK                                                      
                    Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation.
                                                                                                          —Abraham Verghese
In winter the house
of grief deepens.
Down
 
in the dark earth,
small mouths sipping.
Someone
 
reading, someone
seeking some
kind
 
of feeling. Some kind
of healing.
A child has eyed
 
a star
 
spangled banner,
the grey dove’s
feather,
 
another bleak
scandal. There,
 
in the window, someone
burns
a solitary candle.
 
Source: Rattle

Writing Prompts

• Tell me about your winter house
• Tell me about underground
• Let the last word of a group of lines, kick off a different idea in the next group of lines (stanza)

For Fun

Cartoon from NewYorker Magazine, 2008.  For a quick chuckle, read "The Pen and the Sword: A Fable"