How does living or working in a city affect you? Where are the boundaries between you and another person’s space? How does it differ from the country? Are there shared experiences in the city that bring us closer together? How about further apart? Perhaps there is a particular city encounter you can think of when you had a realization. Read Tim Seibles’ (recently named the poet laureate of Virginia) poem Faith and think about how the city will inspire your poem.

Have you ever mistaken a word for another? Which words? Let both words have a presence in your poem. Check out Kristy Bowen’s poem House Strays for an example.

This week, we are studying line breaks and how they can affect the reading of a poem. Two terms you must know are enjambed lines and end-stopped lines. End-stopped lines are where the author ends the line at the end of a phrase, or where punctuation would be. Enjambment happens when a line is broken in the middle of a phrase, often offering a bit of a surprise to the reader on the next line. Take a look at William Carlos Williams’ To a Poor Old Woman. In the second stanza, he repeats a sentence three times, breaking the line in a different place each time. What sort of affect does it have? Also take a look at Amy Gerstler’s In Perpetual Spring. Pay attention to the first line break after “Gardens are also good places” and also the line break after “queen of the weeds, revives.” What do you expect to be on the next line? Does it add to the surprise to have a pause in those places? After studying what line breaks can do, we will try to guess where the line breaks go in a few poems that have been stripped of line breaks. Can’t wait to try these exercises with you! Also note, this lesson was developed after I learned about line breaks from Wes McNair at The Writer’s Hotel. For further reading check out The Art of the Poetic Line by James Longenbach.

This week, I offer up to you two examples of poems about fathers with mixed emotions in them, Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden and My Papa’s Waltz by Theodore Roethke. I would like to challenge you to write a poem about a father or father figure with complicated emotions in the poem. One way to start doing this is to list images of the father figure taking some action. Perhaps the father is mowing the lawn with sweat on his brow. Perhaps he is cooking a meal, nudging the stir fry until it is just right. Try to indicate the speaker’s feelings about these actions by using visceral descriptions of the reactions. Avoid saying “I feel sad” or “I feel happy” but instead describe the physical reactions the speaker has in the poem, like how the small boy is dizzy in My Papa’s Waltz. Try to choose at least one “positive” image and at least one “negative” image in order to capture the complexity of the emotions.

I got back from a wonderful writer’s conference this week- The Writer’s Hotel. I’ll write more about the experience in some follow-up posts. So this week, the prompt is inspired by a poem I was introduced to by my workshop mentor, Tim Seibles. The poem is When A Man Hasn’t Been Kissed, by Jeffrey McDaniel. In it, the speaker starts with an action stemming from a strong emotion that seems odd but still within reason. By the end of the poem, the actions that the speaker has taken are dangerous, almost absurd. I’d like you to start with an emotion or motivation, and escalate a string of actions that the speaker takes in the poem to absurd heights.

This week we have a guest prompt offered up by Adriana Rambay Fernandez:

Play with patterns and repetition by structuring your poem as anaphora. Draw out the emotion and imagery in a piece by repeating the first words in each line of the poem as Joe Brainard does in his book-length poem, I Remember or begin and end with the same line as Angelina Weld Grimké does in, El Beso. As an added extra or alternative, using Grimké’s example, repeat the same word twice in one line at various intervals within the poem. Consider other ways to begin such as repeating; I’m sorry, I lost, or in the mornings we…

What secrets do you keep from your friends, your lover, your mother, even yourself? I want you to write a poem this week which reveals something vital about the speaker in the poem. It doesn’t have to be true or about yourself- although hopefully it comes from a place of truth. Perhaps the poem merely reveals the reasons why the secret is kept, but only hints at what the secret might be. In what situation might the truth be revealed? For inspiration, read Stephen Dunn’s A Secret Life.

The example poem this week is Jack Gilbert’s Alone, in which he is mourning his late wife Michiko. Imagine someone you’re grieving– someone you’ve lost to death, or perhaps it is an ex-lover. What form would they take if they returned to you somehow? Would they be a certain type of animal, or perhaps an inanimate object? How do you interact with this loved one, now that they are in new form? Write a poem in which this interaction takes place.

The first prompt this week is inspired by Marie Howe’s poem Part of Eve’s Discussion. Think of a moment that was significant to you, heavy with meaning, with a lot of emotion behind it. Perhaps it was your sister’s wedding, the birth of your son, or a time you failed a math test. Get in touch with that emotion.Then think of other situations where you might feel that same emotion, or perhaps that might heighten that feeling. I want you to start your poem with “It was like the moment when…” and list some of those moments. Try using vivid language that engages the senses. See if you can take your readers to the same emotional place without mentioning what the actual moment was. Then, if you like, give a hint as to what the moment was in the title of the poem. Continue reading →