Nancy Miller Gomez: “My childhood home was on a small lake in Kansas. I spent many happy hours there fishing with my brother. But I was terrified of the catfish. They looked like nightmares dredged up from a bad dream with their slimy, mottled skin, wide-set, gelatinous eyes, mouths open and groping and all those tentacle-like whiskers. I don’t know if my brother ever convinced me I could bring a dead thing back to life. Perhaps I have mis-remembered it. But ‘Resurrection’ is an attempt to capture my child-desire to believe in myself. According to Michael Anderson, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge, with ‘motivated forgetting’ you can forget with intentionality and sculpt your painful memories into something beautiful. In a New York Times article, Anderson says you can get better at this with practice. ‘How to Forget’ grew out of a thought exercise where the narrator is lining her memories up and making choices about which ones to kill off, and which ones to keep and reshape.” (web)
Prompt: Write a poem with a single word as the title, in which our understanding of that word shifts by the end of the poem.
Note from the series editor, Katie Dozier: “The brilliant economy of language in ‘Credit’ helps this poem knock on our door with authenticity. James further weaves us into the narrative with bold images, such as the upside down Yellow Pages and the cotton entrails of the cushions. When the dialogue hits and is allowed to hang in the air without much exposition, we too feel the slap, which reverberates with the transformative title.”
Tony Gloeggler: “I started writing poetry because I was always pretty quiet and no one was really talking about things I was feeling and thinking. Trying to turn my thoughts into a poem helped me understand myself and how I fit and didn’t fit in the world. That’s still what I’m doing whenever I write. This one’s about the guys in the group home I managed (the place I fit best, where things made the most sense) and how so few people outside the residence viewed them like they viewed anyone else, how they’re mostly just like everybody else. A little nicer or nuttier, funnier, weirder, less guarded. How a couple of them are two of my favorite people ever, how they could sometimes annoy the crap out of me. And how I miss them (apologies to Lee and Florencio for not letting them in the poem but luckily they don’t read poetry just like nearly everybody else) and the staff. Especially Larry.” (web)
John Arthur: “The Lakers lost in the NBA playoffs and my news feeds have been inundated with debate over whether Lebron James is the greatest basketball player of all time or whether it’s Michael Jordan. That prompted the ‘I’m the Lebron James of local bureaucrats’ opening, and the rest of the poem just came out basically as is. By the way, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is the greatest of all time.”
Lynne Thompson: “Although I was a civil litigator for more than fourteen years, the practice of law seldom, if ever, enters my poems. It’s as though that person has gone off for a long (and well-deserved) sleep and this poet—always bemused—has taken her place. I like her.” (web)
Judith Fox: “I wrote nonfiction articles for national magazines, but didn’t start studying and writing poetry seriously until the spare text I wrote for my photography book, I Still Do: Loving and Living with Alzheimer’s rekindled my life-long love of poetry. (My father gave me A Child’s Garden of Verses on my fifth birthday; don’t ask me to recite ‘My Shadow’ unless you really want to hear it.) I’m twice-widowed and live in Los Angeles.” (web)
Tim Suermondt: “The day after a February snow storm the sun came out, and I watched a group of high school students standing on the street corner, all of whom would soon have to face ‘the real world’ and all that that entailed. And despite the years between us, I felt like those teenagers: ready to go—damn the disappointments and worse. And like me, they’d learn to hang in and even occasionally triumph.” (web)
