Supernatural Experience

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Free Write Prompt

Tell me about a supernatural occurrence. Tell me about ghosts you have known. Tell me something mystical you experienced though facts seem to deny its possibility.

Poem Prompt

Let "poetry proliferate in the intellectual blind spot." The goal is to write a poem that captures the mood of the experience, the imagery of the phenomenon, the visceral reaction of the experience in your senses. You do not have to make sense of the experience, only to let “poetry reside in the recess of the mystery."  Fictionalize whatever you like. (Quote excerpts from Christina Pugh's essay "On Ghosts and the Overplus." See link below.) 
(OR)
Fictionalize what you need to, to write a gripping, good ole ghost story  poem. 

Example Poems

Agha Shahid Ali, “Vacating an Apartment” from The Half-Inch Himalayas. Copyright © 1987 by Agha Shahid Ali.

"All Hallows" from The First Four Books of Poems by Louise Gluck. Copyright © 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1985, 1995 by Louise Glück.

Louise Erdrich, "Windigo" from Jacklight (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1984). Copyright 1984 by Louise Erdrich.
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Something Extra

1. A SHORT STORY, "The Haunted Apartment" by Max Cohen  in the New Yorker, hilariously features a "gentrifier," paying exorbitant monthly rent, while being forced to live with the pre-war ghostly tenants who still hold rent controlled contracts.   
2. In the sincere and beautiful New Yorker VIDEO, Unearthing Black History at the Freedom Lots, a team of students and historians discover and restore the Freedom Lots of Green-Wood Cemetery to honor the lives of  New York's black citizens from the nineteenth century. I am particularly struck by the sensibilities of former Mather High School student Khalilah Clark as she feels in personal measure an emotional connection to "her people" who were "good people" who "had a good head on their shoulders."  She holds their legacy through the restoration project.
3. Read Christina Pugh's ESSAY,  On Ghosts and the Overplus: Magic, metaphor and dealings with the dead at Poetry Magazine.  In it she describes visitations about which she seems nonplussed, allowing "Ratiocination" to address that which is un-namable.  Pugh's essay is a tangential exploration of what to do with the mysteries we will experience from time to time in the human condition.  The fault lines of the essay shift frequently.  The through line is poetry, residing in the "recess of the mystery."  Poetry will be the place we can try to get answers--"that won't be there -- but still we will call."

Green-Wood Cemetery | Brooklyn, NY