M: “I was widowed at a very young age. My therapist suggested I attend a grief support group to share with others in similar circumstances. When I walked into the room, I was struck by the realization that everyone was at least 25 years older. And while we shared grief in common, the concerns of these older widows were very different from mine. On many levels, we just couldn’t connect. I also read stories online of other young widows who experienced similar feelings of alienation in grief support groups filled with older women. I wanted to write about this disparity, but didn’t know how to approach it. Then about a year ago, I attended a reading by Lucille Clifton. She told an unrelated story about driving through a forest with a friend, and their joy upon catching a glimpse of a rare albino deer. The more I thought about that misfit deer, the more I realized Ms. Clifton had unknowingly offered me a perfect metaphor for my experience. I became the albino deer, and I hope that my poem will speak to other young widows who find themselves lost among the elders of the herd.”
Karan Kapoor: “This poem is the faux title-poem of the collection I’ve been working on for three years: Portrait of an Alcoholic as a Father. Writing about a troubled external subject is as much an excavation of their deepest flaws as it is a revelation of the writer’s biases. Leonard Cohen, at whose altar I worship, says ‘poetry is merely the evidence of life.’ I think this means that not only is a poem rooted in real life, but that much of real life is understood through a poem.” (web)
Patrick Ryan Frank: “In my work, I’m interested in issues of control: how people master their fears, or else are mastered by them; how a poem’s movement can push against its structure; how meaning can determine shape. Essentially, life is composed of conflict and tension, and poetry is the art of struggling beautifully.” (web)
“If you don’t believe in something, you’ll fall for anything.”
—Falsely attributed to Alexander Hamilton
Felicia Culpa, if you don’t believe in something, you will fall
off a ladder in a purple-curtained Bourbon Street shop where
you were stocking bamboo shelves with magic
doodahs, and a voodoo doll for “Change” will
fall with you, and its head will break off, and you’ll breathe
in all the change vapors and sawdust and you’ll find yourself
floating in space and orbiting yourself.
Then, wild girl, if you believe only in yourself you will fall,
into your own atmosphere, and you’ll breathe
your own fire in, and you’ll dive down to depths where
rock flows free, and, believe me, you’ll wonder how there will
ever be solidity without some kind of miracle or magic.
So, dear one, you’ll want to believe, because if there is magic,
presto change-o, you can still make solid ground for yourself,
sweet Felicia, you can grab a wand and work your will.
But if you don’t believe the warnings you will fall
pregnant and your Victorian aunt will tell you where
the wayward go, and the air you breathe
will stiffen to suffocate, and you can’t breathe
pure incense, that’s not the kind of magic
that’s going to get you to a place where
you can set up the Jenga pieces of yourself.
If you believe the moralizers you’ll fall
like a tower that went up too far too fast, and you will
end up a Babel-tongued mess, writing your will
in Comic Sans hieroglyphics on the memories you breathe.
If you believe everything you’re told, you’ll fall
into wyvern caves inside rabbit holes lined with magic
fur, get snared in the warp of rhyme and weft of stories, and you will
get lost at last in the ant farm of words, and end up nowhere.
But you might have to go nowhere before you can get anywhere;
things get strange when you’re making a change, and I know you will
make yourself try again to assemble the kit of yourself
and you’ll build yourself a pair of lungs to breathe
with and you’ll pick some plausible, livable kind of magic,
knowing that even if you believe in something, you’ll fall.
So fall (“o felix culpa!”) where all the laughing children fall, and breathe,
from that pile of leaves, the air which will crackle with dying, living magic—
just let yourself believe, disbelieve, believe, disbelieve—and fall.
Prompt: “The prompt, given on the Rattlecast, was to enter in a Google search the words ‘if you don’t’ followed by a single letter, and to choose one of Google’s suggestions for completing the phrase as a starting point for a poem. I picked ‘if you don’t believe …’ and it seemed to me that an awful lot of different kinds of things can happen if you do or don’t believe in something, so I thought it might be fun to use a form, the sestina, that would give me a lot of room and motivation to look at different perspectives on belief and disbelief.”
Brian O’Sullivan: “Thirty years ago or so, when I was taking a great poetry workshop as an undergrad, I liked prompts because I had no idea what I was doing, and I needed a jump start. Afterwards, when I went to grad school, more academic, argumentative kinds of writing took up all of my time and most of my sense of identity as a writer, and I stopped writing poetry (though I never stopped reading it and talking with students about it). When the pandemic left me with more time on my hands, I started working on poems again. I had some specific stories and themes (mostly growing out of my other lockdown obsession, family history) that I wanted to write about, so I didn’t think I’d be all that interested in prompts. But I tried a few prompts at Rattle and elsewhere, and I was hooked. At first, I think it was because my ADD brain (which I had learned about late in that 30-year gap between my undergrad years and the pandemic) responded well to having at least the semblance of some imposed order and focus, and that actually somehow made more room for the chaos of imagination to come through. Combining a prompt with a form, like the sestina, worked even better at making the writing seem to come almost ‘automatically’ and get past my over-active internal censor. But then I found that I also loved the fact that a whole bunch of people were working on the same prompt as me. I’ve never been very good at networking; it’s one of my biggest professional hinderances. But with poetry, there’s something beyond networking. It’s more like a community, even if it’s an invisible one. And shared prompts help to build the sense of community.”
Katherine Hagopian Berry: “Mainers will know I took liberties moving the Auburn travel center to Lewiston (they are sister towns) and by putting the tagging station inside the convenience store (as is often the case in rural Maine). Forgive me. I love you all. Stay strong.” (web)
David James: “I write to figure out what all of ‘this’ means, what it’s worth, how to understand a world that speeds by and leaves us all in a ditch by the side of the main road, confused and dazed, after spending a lifetime working and buying and making ends meet, and for what? I write to let go of the unknown in my brain, the darkness there, the questions that live on the outskirts of my inner sight.”
