Trent Busch: “It seems to me it takes great courage to be comfortable in being ordinary. I don’t mean an ordinary person; I mean an extraordinary person who is comfortable being ordinary. It seems to me there might be worse things.”
Brent Schaeffer: “Lying belly down on the grey rug after church one Sunday, I fell in love with the big words from comic books (uncanny, expatriate, macabre). On camping trips, I’d play with those words telling stories to thrill my friends. Autumn, decay, woodsmoke, hot cocoa: words are still my favorite toys and poetry the best game.”
“Killing the Snake Plant” by Shannon Connor WinwardPosted by Rattle
Shannon Connor Winward
KILLING THE SNAKE PLANT
after “Reupholstering a Chair” by Jenn Givhan
This used to be the tallest living thing
in the house without legs. What happened?
You can’t remember if it was over-water
under-light, death-by-cat—just that
you read somewhere the limbs, sleek and stiff, once
damaged, would never recover. Best to amputate, make room
for the new. Your scissoring left only two fingers
poking out, a desert of husks
tiny and curled
on themselves as if flinching. You left them
by the sliding door—full afternoon sun—and you stayed
your lust, your watering can. You trusted
time would do its work. But then you touched one
and it broke. You watch the other, now
worried it too is illusion
that beneath that dry earth lies the loss
of the plant entirely, its leaves, majestic, green
as serpents rising to the ghost of a charm
that you no longer possess.
Prompt: “When my children were young, when I was tired and sick all the time and struggling to write, I felt Jennifer Givhan’s ‘Reupholsteringa Chair’ like an unvoiced scream. I tried to learn from what Givhan does with space, and the brutality of lines like ‘Your love will no longer / unclog drains or screw in light bulbs / or replace the hydrangeas you’ve suffered / death in the tiny plot you vowed to protect.’ I challenged myself to start with an ‘after’ to echo those invocations—the quiet desperation of trying to patch together chaos with a staple-gun—but from my own lived experience. That cutting voice of self-doubt became my inadvertent murder of the thing I was trying to save in the poem, and over time the scissoring of couplets became the undulating lines of that long-suffering plant that may or may not be dead in the corner of my kitchen.”
Shannon Connor Winward: “My creative process is a cycle of productive highs and lingering lows. Over a lifetime, I’ve learned ways to navigate a dry spell, such as the use of prompts to encourage words to start flowing again. When I am struggling to find my own voice, it often helps to engage with the voices of poets I admire. I might start with a poem that speaks to whatever it is I feel unable to say, looking closely not just at what the poet says, but how, and also what they leave out.”
Prompt: Write a sonnet with the title “The End of _____ Is Not _____” after Jamaica Baldwin’s American sonnet, “The End of Sorrow Is Not Happiness.”
Note from the series editor, Katie Dozier: “As someone that has been plugging my wounds with poetry since childhood, I found the humor in J. B. Pename’s poem as refreshing as it is powerful. These fourteen lines have caused me to redefine what it is to heal. Man what a poem!”
Paulette A. Pashibin: “I fell in love with poetry sometime between reading Noyes’ ‘The Highwayman’ and watching a televised Air Force recruitment ad that featured Magee’s ‘High Flight.’ I was young, bookish, and quite melancholy. I spent as much time at my grandmother’s as I could get away with and ‘High Flight’ always aired during the Fulton J. Sheen show, so it became the first poem I memorized. The internet makes it easy for me to read poetry every day, but I’m an undisciplined writer. Sometimes I toss words in my head for weeks before putting them to paper; other times they spill over the keyboard in a fever. Writing poems—no matter how they turn out—allows me still to ‘slip the surly bonds of earth and dance the skies.’ Like magic.”
Dante Di Stefano: “Often lately, I have been teaching and reading and thinking about generative AI. Despite all I’ve read about Sam Altman, ChatGPT, etc., it’s hard for me to imagine how this technology will transform our world. Reading the article about Meriam-Webster’s word of the year further confirmed how enmeshed we are in this transformation already. Authenticity is a fraught term in poetry anyway, so I think this poem wandered into some of the fraughtness and complexity that comes with the terrain of lyric saying. For me this is less a poem about AI than it is a poem about the ancient technology of poetic utterance in all its mystery. The word rizz that I use at the end of the poem is an internet neologism added to Meriam-Webster this year, meaning ‘romantic charm or appeal.’” (web)
