Tag: poetry

Meditations in an Emergency

It’s not that I am curious. On the contrary, I am bored but it’s my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the earth. And lately, so great has their anxiety become, I can spare myself little sleep.

Frank O’Hara, “Meditations in an Emergency”

Everything seems to be in emergency lately–our pets need us during a thunderstorm, our children need us after difficult school days, our bodies react to the stress around us with headaches and pain, with illness. Maybe the emergency is a relationship in crisis, as it seems to be (at least partly, if not centrally) for the speaker in Frank O’Hara’s poem “Meditations in an Emergency”–and surely nothing is more relatable than the emergency of heartbreak and wanting to be loved, to be desired and wanted. Near the opening of the poem, O’Hara writes:

Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there’ll be nothing left with which to venture forth.

Why should I share you? Why don’t you get rid of someone else for a change?

I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.

Frank O’Hara, “Meditations in an Emergency”

Writing is one way we can release some of the tension and the anxiety from our bodies. The title of O’Hara’s poem (“Meditations…”) reminds us of the link between writing, thinking, and meditating–musing, pausing, wondering, making space for our minds to breathe.

What has felt to you like an emergency lately? Is it your sleep, or taking care of your own needs (nutrition, getting outside, exercise)? Your job, or your pile of assignments due? Not having time for friends? Or is it a larger concern, like the climate crisis, or the current governmental chaos and ineptitude, and the threat of ICE raids to our educational spaces? Of emergencies there are an abundance of choices.

Writing Prompt: Read O’Hara’s poem, and write your own “Meditations in an Emergency,” allowing yourself the space and time to wonder and wander, as O’Hara does. Do not hold yourself to a standard of perfection, but let yourself journal and muse. Remember that the word meditation comes from the Latin for to remedy (medēri), and that you are writing your way into healing by naming, first of all, what the emergency is.

February 7, 2025

American Poetry, blogging, creative-writing, Frank O’Hara, meditation, poem, poems, poetry, prompt, writing, writing prompt, writing-prompts
The Work of Attention

What is the work of attention? How do we train ourselves to attend to the world around us? Is attention simply looking? Listening? Smelling? Tasting? Stilling ourselves and feeling our breath, the ground under us, the points of connection between our bodies and the ground, the chair we sit on? Is attention slowing ourselves, pausing, observing? The act of attention, the habit of attention is the foundation of good writing–it is the meat, the drink, the daily bread. Writers are often people watchers, world watchers–we love to walk, to take notes. We love to look up at the pines, to watch the birds. Practice attention, practice listening. “Writers notice what they notice,” says Verlyn Klinkenborg.

“[…] keep a journal in which [you] write, very briefly, six things [you see] each day—not beautiful or remarkable things, just things.”
Linda Gregg, The Art of Finding

Your prompt this week is to start keeping a notebook of attention, where you write down six ordinary things you notice every day. That’s it. And here is a longer explanation of where the prompt originates, from the poet Linda Gregg:

I am astonished in my teaching to find how many poets are nearly blind to the physical world. They have ideas, memories, and feelings, but when they write their poems they often see them as similes. To break this habit, I have my students keep a journal in which they must write, very briefly, six things they have seen each day—not beautiful or remarkable things, just things. This seemingly simple task usually is hard for them. At the beginning, they typically “see” things in one of three ways: artistically, deliberately, or not at all. Those who see artistically instantly decorate their descriptions, turning them into something poetic: the winter trees immediately become “old men with snow on their shoulders,” or the lake looks like a “giant eye.” The ones who see deliberately go on and on describing a brass lamp by the bed with painful exactness. And the ones who see only what is forced on their attention: the grandmother in a bikini riding on a skateboard, or a bloody car wreck. But with practice, they begin to see carelessly and learn a kind of active passivity until after a month nearly all of them have learned to be available to seeing—and the physical world pours in. Their journals fill up with lovely things like, “the mirror with nothing reflected in it.” This way of seeing is important, even vital to the poet, since it is crucial that a poet see when she or he is not looking—just as she must write when she is not writing. To write just because the poet wants to write is natural, but to learn to see is a blessing. The art of finding in poetry is the art of marrying the sacred to the world, the invisible to the human.

January 31, 2025

blogging, creative-writing, list, poem, poet, poetry, prompt, writing, writing-prompts
ready the mind to write
```
swishing the toilets,
cleaning the house, I ready
the mind to write

[haiku by Shin Yu Pai, from Ensō]
```
How do you ready yourself to write? Some people need a certain pen, or to sit at a certain desk, or a certain place on their couch. I like to sit with my dog, Bug, and write–pictured below. Some people write on the bus as they ride to school or work, or at school or work (I used to write my poems in class, in my notebooks–don’t tell my professors, ha). It is good to have a sense of ritual–to figure out the rhythms of your days, to try and identify what they are. Every other week, on Thursday evenings, I drive one of my children to an appointment, and I sit in the car for an hour and wait for them–that is a guaranteed quiet hour. I usually take a book with me. Try to figure out when your quiet hours are, and write or read during them. Feed yourself, your mind. Your body is not the only part of yourself that is hungry. I talk more about Bug and squeezing in writing time here.

Your writing prompt this week is to locate a regular time to write–take a look at your planner, and identify a quiet time, an odd half hour that you usually spend scrolling on your phone (haha, I do that, too). Now set down your phone, and write about the things you had to do before you allowed yourself the time and space to write. Write down some images of things you noticed throughout the day. Anything you noticed outside? Sounds you can hear as you write? Colors? Light? Scents? Enjoy the grounding time of your own writing. I especially encourage you to write longhand, with paper and a pen or pencil.
January 24, 2025

blogging, books, creative-writing, fiction, poetry, process, prompt, prose, schedule, writer, writing, writing process, writing-prompts
To Repair (on Self Kindness)
There are so many ways we think to make ourselves better in the New Year: we think about making our diets better, our bodies; we start new journals, new books, new podcasts; maybe we start a new hobby, a class, a new job. It is the turn of the year, and though it is cold and the ground is buried and the bulbs wait for warmer weather, we turn towards the light and newness.

I find myself also thinking about the verb repair–so many things are in need of fixing, and in need of our repairing attention–ourselves included. So I turned back to the dictionary, our friend for definitions and meanings and history of language, to see where the verb repair comes from:

Middle English, from Anglo-French repairer to go back, return from Late Latin repatriare to go home again, from Latin re- + patria native country

Yes, I’m thrilled by these meanings, and what they bring to the meaning of repair, and what it means to repair even something small–to fix a child’s jammed coat zipper, to put a spare tire on the car, to apologize to a friend you hurt. And this brings us to a poem about karmic repair by Richard Brautigan, a poet of the 1960s counterculture, closely following the Beat poets (Ginsberg, Kerouac, Diane Di Prima, and gang):
```
Karma Repair Kit: Items 1-4        by Richard Brautigan

1. Get enough food to eat,
        and eat it.
2. Find a place to sleep where it is quiet,
        and sleep there.
3. Reduce intellectual and emotional noise
    until you arrive at the silence of yourself,
        and listen to it.
4.
```
Your writing prompt this week is to write your own Karma Repair Kit, as a numbered list (or a paragraph, if you’d rather). Perhaps leave one numbered section blank, and spend some time imagining what needs to really go there.

What do you need to repair, to go back, to go home again to yourself?
January 15, 2025

blogging, community, creative-writing, list, poem, poet, poetry, prompt, repair, richard brautigan, writing-prompts
We Manage Most When We Manage Small
It is a time of seasonal overwhelm–the light growing shorter and days chiller, the end of semester and final grades nearing, the holidays approaching–and we each balance and navigate our different caregiving responsibilities while trying to also, somehow, care for ourselves.

I think of the below, beautiful poem by the late poet Linda Gregg at times like these. Inspired by Gregg’s title, I would like to recommend that you try your hand at writing a small piece of writing this week, sometimes called micro, or flash, or simply a short form (or small poem). For a poem, keep it under ten lines, or several sentences if a prose poem. See what you can do inside a small space; see how you can manage most when you manage small; see how generous a space a small form can be.

And now for Linda Gregg:

We Manage Most When We Manage Small
```
What things are steadfast? Not the birds.
Not the bride and groom who hurry
in their brevity to reach one another.
The stars do not blow away as we do.
The heavenly things ignite and freeze.
But not as my hair falls before you.
Fragile and momentary, we continue.
Fearing madness in all things huge
and their requiring. Managing as thin light
on water. Managing only greetings
and farewells. We love a little, as the mice
huddle, as the goat leans against my hand.
As the lovers quickening, riding time.
Making safety in the moment. This touching
home goes far. This fishing in the air.
```
November 15, 2024

art, blogging, books, creative-writing, poem, poetry, prompt, writing, writing-prompts
Have You Heard the Good News? Writing With Headlines…
“It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.”

William Carlos Williams, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”

Writing inspiration is all around us–the weather, our mood, something someone said to us on a train or at school, a line from a television show. Writers often find themselves responding to headlines in real-time, because, if you haven’t noticed, people are so, so interesting. Life is brimming with wildness, with beauty, with ODDITY. I remember when I was younger, and the “Human Interest” section of the newspaper was my favorite section, but the older you become you see that the whole newspaper is the human interest section. There’s nothing more delightful than something being interesting, after all, which is a central element of Cleopatra’s beauty and attraction in Shakespeare’s play Antony and Cleopatra, her “infinite variety” remarked upon with wonder.

So here, then, are some interesting headlines I’ve pulled for you to use as inspiration for your own poem or story or essay:
Hopefully you will have time to vote and time to rest and even time to write this week!
November 4, 2024

books, creative-writing, headline, poems, poetry, prompt, writing, writing-prompts
Feeling Your Feelings in Fall
Whether you love the crisp, falling leaves, the pumpkin spiced lattes and sweater weather, or whether fall fills you with some deep melancholy you can’t quite name, most people find that fall gives them feelings of some kind. The good news is that writing, like all art, is a place where feelings are a natural part of the context in which we make our art. I will even go so far to say that no writer or artist makes good art by denying, dismissing or minimizing their feelings.

Here is a poem by the 19th century poet Gerard Manley Hopkins that is all about feeling some VERY big feelings in autumn. In fact, it is about an adult watching a child who is crying over the falling leaves. It is such a richly beautiful poem in terms of sonics or sound: “Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed / What heart heard of, ghost guessed”–what incredible lines for the day after Halloween! Though “ghost” really means “spirit” here, like the holy ghost, or the holy spirit. But when I was running through our park yesterday, and the gold poplar leaves were crunching underfoot, I thought of Hopkins’ “though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie”–like WHAT an incredible line that somehow describes the feeling of all the leaves dropping at once and also such a feeling of human desolation, it’s almost a SciFi scene.

Today’s prompt, then: write your fall feelings by first writing a list of ten images or details you’ve noticed about the changing season. And then write your heart out!

Spring and Fall by Gerard Manley Hopkins
```
Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
```
November 1, 2024

books, creative-writing, list, love, poem, poetry, prompt, writing, writing-prompts
Writing Letters to Each Other
I am thinking about mailboxes. Penpals. Letter writing. Stamps. Stickers. Waiting for something good to come in the mail. I’m also thinking about writers who acknowledge the act of writing in their work. How good it is to hear from someone we like, love, miss. A text from a friend. A voice message.

Here is a poem that imagines a letter with a single word that somehow conveys the whole entire sense of summer and a relationship.

Prompt: If you could send a word to someone in an envelope to remind them the way the speaker in the poem wants to remind their reader of a whole summer, what would it be? Now write a poem titled that word that also includes that word.

Hummingbird by Raymond Carver
```
                  for Tess

Suppose I say summer,
write the word “hummingbird,”
put it in an envelope,
take it down the hill
to the box. When you open
my letter you will recall
those days and how much,
just how much, I love you.
```
October 23, 2024

creative-writing, letter, penpal, poems, poet, poetry, prompt, Raymond Carver, writing, writing prompt, writing-prompts
No Workshop 10/18 and a Floating Prompt with Lorine Niedecker
It has been a rainy, flood, hurricane-filled time these past few weeks, so while your workshop leader is travelling to Youngstown LitFest this week and we won’t be having workshop this Friday (10/18), I will be leaving you with the warm recommendation to read Lorine Niedecker’s incredible poem “Paean to Place” which includes the lines:
```
O my floating life
Do not save love
      for things
            Throw things
to the flood

ruined
by the flood
```
And of course, a few writing prompt suggestions to start your own writing flowing:
- Write your own paean (a song of praise) to place, to where you grew up, to your history with water? maybe a specific memory of water?
- Write two columns: in one, a list of things you have lost. In the other: a list of things you have recovered or found or saved. Use the two lists to generate a new piece of writing, poem or prose.
- Write a piece that contains a vocative “O” as in “O my floating life” or “O Pioneers” or “O Brother Where Art Thou.”
- Write a piece where something is ruined. Or where you think something is ruined. What happens?
- Write your own flood story, or write about a time of past disaster. Write about what came after.
See you next week, writers!

Don’t forget you can subscribe to weekly posts at the bottom of the home page.
October 14, 2024

books, creative-writing, poems, poetry, prompt, workshops, writing, writing-prompts, writing-workshop
Of Presidents and Figurative Language
Ordinary language slips so easily into figurative language–or language that is not literal, but something else, like metaphor. For example, if you write about a spider in your kitchen, it can easily represent something else in your life: an unpleasant present, a bother, a challenge you are facing. Or, perhaps the spider stands in as a friendly presence, a listening presence. Figurative language hovers always near our everyday language.

Then again we have W.S. Merwin’s poem “Presidents,” a poem that is not at all about literal presidents, despite its literal-sounding title. Instead, Merwin does something quite dramatic with Allegory, which is when abstract concepts become characters, like Truth climbing out of her well, or Victory has wings. In Merwin’s poem, we have a President of Shame, a President of Lies, the Kingdom of Grief, Silence the Messenger, and Silence the Climber.

The dictionary definition of Allegory is “the expression of truths or generalizations about human existence by means of symbolic fictional figures and their actions” (Merriam-Webster).

Read the following poem and then try your hand at this week’s writing prompt!

Presidents by W.S. Merwin
```
The president of shame has his own flag
the president of lies quotes the voice
of God
at last counted
the president of loyalty recommends
blindness to the blind
oh oh
applause like the heels of the hanged
he walks on eyes
until they break
then he rides
there is no president of grief
it is a kingdom
ancient absolute with no colors
its rule is never seen
prayers look for him
also empty flags like skins
silence the messenger runs through the vast lands
with a black mouth
open
silence the climber falls from the cliffs
with a black mouth like
a call
there is only one subject
but he is repeated
tirelessly
```
Writing Prompt:

Write your own allegory, beginning either with a “The president of ___” line as Merwin does, or choosing your own kingdom “the kingdom of ___” to write about, or completely inventing your own allegory.

An allegory can be about anything, which is the best part…
- The President of Worry [About My Midterm Math Grade/Essay Grade]
- The Kingdom of the Missing Pepsi Vending Machines
- The President of the Far Parking Lot
- The Kingdom of the Campus Library
- The President of Sadness
October 7, 2024

allegory, creative-writing, figurative language, literature, poems, poetry, prompt, writing, writing-prompts