Writing Prompts: Reclaiming the Body

Both poets in today's post write from Black, Queer identity through narratives of trauma, expanding the discourse of the black body (https://www.jaribradley.com/). 

The intended goal for the PoetryBones writing practice is to connect with what is universal or even archetypal in these poems to explore your own relationship with body, gender, identity, and reclamation of self.  

Prompt #1

 Read "Unruly" below or hear poet, Jari Bradley read it in the SoundCloud link.  After, begin writing to the provided prompts (see under the poem).
​

Unruly
by Jari Bradley

Hushed whispers in an undisclosed room
            Take it out of the girl
a child, boyish in nature             their smallness magnified.
Outcasted—the soft bodied animal you are
determined unruly animalia,
                                                   what survives inflation & inertia?
The body is a set of complex feedback systems
nothing is as it appears
                                                   the coexistence of a beard & breasts
                                                   evidence of the body’s willfully defiant nature
The body’s resilience amid the promise of perish:
                                              somehow the child survives their own hand
                                              the day’s weary edge inverted toward grace
A child, boyish in their nature           & barrel shaped
            survives sedimented against the residue
            of dunes, soil, leaf litter,       & the bodies of a lesser
What couldn’t be excised
            your boyish nature
            your untamed phylum,         your small heart pulsing loud
                                                        notes against the night.

​Copyright © 2020 by Jari Bradley. Source: https://poets.org/poem/unruly

Writing Prompts:

• Tell me about what you survived from childhood, from 20 years ago, from yesterday. Or tell about someone else.
• Construct a poem about the body’s resilience against _______ .
• Write a poem about a “willfully defiant nature” or about “what couldn’t be excised.”

Prompt #2

Read Smith's poem; then, write to the poem prompts that follow.
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a note on the body
Danez Smith
 
your body still your body
your arms still wing
your mouth still a gun
 
          you tragic, misfiring bird
 
you have all you need to be a hero
don’t save the world, save yourself
 
you worship too much & you worship too much
 
when prayer doesn’t work:      dance, fly, fire
 
this is your hardest scene
when you think the whole sad thing might end
 
but you live      oh, you live
 
everyday you wake you raise the dead
 
          everything you do is a miracle

From Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017) Copyright © 2017 by Danez Smith. Source: Academy of American Poets here
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Writing Prompts: 

• Write a poem that "raises the dead," that cheers on survival, that resounds about the arms that can still "wing."
• Write a poem about how "everything you do is a miracle."
• Write a poem that defies whatever happened to your character in your writing from the first prompt.
• Write a poem that defies any wrong doing that has happened to you. Reclaim your body, your heart, your spirit.
• Watch "Today" and write about that.

"Let my body be a godless church holy for no reason beyond itself"
"Let the curse of my blood be the old testament and each day I am still alive be the new"
"My name still my name and it is a good name
and I am still here . . . despite"

Something Extra

In this six-minute listen, hear Danez Smith and NPR host Michel Martin talk #NPRPoetry Month.  I'm featuring this discussion because it sets us up for our February writing challenges, which is to explore form/structure and word play in writing poetry.  Consider Smith's points about use of space and line breaks and the visual aspect of how a poem operates on the page.  

You know, when we see repetition, we think ancient. . . rhyme and repetitions are some of . . . the oldest things that we know. And they feel like the witchy tools of poetry to me.

​

Still I Rise
Maya Angelou
​You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
’Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.
Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don’t you take it awful hard
’Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

​Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.
From And Still I Rise by Maya Angelou. Copyright © 1978 by Maya Angelou.
Source: poets.org/poem/still-i-rise