Writing Prompts: Poetic Subjects #2

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Mentor Poem

Poem Prompt #1

Write your own “poetic subjects” poem.  Let your mind wander to every little tangent or image that flashes in your head, to every sense that is aroused. Maybe, close your eyes and write. Maybe tell me a little bit about each one or only the most pressing ones. Write for 10 minutes.

Mentor Poems

Poem Prompt #2

Develop one of your “poetic subjects” into its own intensely imagined or intensely observed poem. What should we never “forget” about the subject?  Make this poem
an “antidote to the river of forgetting" via Lindenberg's poem.

Something Extra

Poetry Is a Sickness
BY ED BOK LEE
 
You write not what you want,
but what flaws flower from rust
 
You want to write about the universe,
how the stars are really tiny palpitating ancestor hearts
watching over us
 
and instead what you get on the page
is that car crash on Fourth and Broadway--
the wails of the girlfriend or widow,
her long lamentation so sensuous
in terrible harmony with sirens in the distance
 
Poetry is a sickness
 
You want to write about Adoration,
the glistening sweat on your honey's chest
in which you've tasted the sun's caress,
and instead what you get
is a poem about the first of four times
your mother and father split up
 
Want to write about the perfection of God
and end up with just another story
of a uniquely lonely childhood
 
If I had a dime for every happy poem I wrote
I'd be dead
 
Want to write about the war, oppression, injustice,
and look here, see, what got left behind
when all the sand and dust cleared
is the puke-green carpet in the Harbor Lights Salvation Army treatment center
A skinny Native girl no older than seventeen
braids the reddish hair
of her little four- or five-year-old Down's Syndrome daughter
 
Outside, no blinking stars
No holy kiss's approach
Only a vague antiseptic odor and Christian crest on the wall staring back at you
 
I didn't say all this to that dude who sent me his poems
from prison
 
You want everyone to feel empowered
Want them to believe there is beauty locked in amber
inside each of us, and you chip away at that shit
one word at a time
You stampede with verbs, nouns, and scalpel adjectives
Middle-finger your literalist boss
Blow grocery cash on library fines
Sprain your left knee loading pallets all day for Labor Ready
You live in an attic for nine years
You go bankrupt
You smoke too much
 
 
Drink too much
Alienate family and friends
Say yes, poetry is a sickness, but fuck it
Do it long enough, and I promise like an anti-superhero
your secret power will become loss
 
Loss like only old people must know
when the last red maple on the block goes
 
and the drizzle turns to snow
 
Maybe the best poem is always the one you shouldn't have written
 
The ghazal that bled your index finger
Or caused your sister to reject your calls for a year
The sonnet that made the woman you loved fear
That slam poem you're still paying for
The triolet that smiled to violate you
through both ears
 
But Poet, Sucker, Fool
It's your job
to find meaning in all this because
you are delusional enough to believe
that, yes, poetry is a sickness,
but somehow if you can just scrape together enough beauty and truth
 
to recall, yes, that Broadway car crash was fucked up,
but the way the rain fell to wash away the blood
not ten minutes after the ambulance left
was gorgeous
 
Or how maybe your mother and father would sometimes scream,
but also wrapped never-before-seen tropical
fruit for one another every Xmas Eve
 
How in the morning before opting out I watched
that tiny Native girl fumbling
to braid her own and her now-
snoring mother's long black hair
together
                   in a single cornrow--
 
If I can just always squiggle
down like this:
                                even half as much
as what I'd otherwise need
to forget
 
maybe these scales
really will one day tip
to find each flaw that made us
 
Exquisite
 

Source: poetryfoundation.org
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