The NaPoWriMo prompt for today asked poets to scroll through the photos posted on the Liminal Spaces Twitter feed and choose one to write about. There are many interesting and strange photos there, but this is one that sparked something for me. The poem is still a bit liminal too…on the verge…and not yet arrived here.
Working today from the 30/30 prompt “cold sweat.” I frequently have nightmares, including last night! Even so, I love reading about the origins of the word and artistic depictions throughout history.
If it’s just a bad dream then why is it that the worst ones don’t leave the chest even after you’re awake? You might breathe fine throughout the day, cold sweat dried, racing heart slowed, but still it presses, a burrowing worry that drinks air and reason through its blackened roots.
Mixing two prompts today: the first being “ambient light” and the second being a challenge to write a Robert Frost-inspired poem about a road not taken.
You Are Probably Telling This With a Sigh Imagine, if you can, a man with the deepest voice you’ve ever heard sitting at a strangely firelit table, intimate in an otherwise teeming bar, looking at you in way you will remember 23 years later, on a random Wednesday, while you’re folding a pair of your daughter’s leggings and waiting for a second pot of coffee to finish brewing. Imagine, if you had left that night, away from the strangely firelit table, and ventured into something less sure. Perhaps deeply contenting. Perhaps disastrous. Where you might sit again, 23 years later, across from a man, running your finger around the rim of a coffee cup, counter-clockwise, in some subconscious spell of time reversal. Imagine, if there were only two roads, in a calm yellow wood, and not the tangled many-paths of options, like an intricate burst of blood-vessels pulsing life to places you can’t control, but might try to, or at least hope to look all the way to the end of a shady track, beyond the protective undergrowth to see not what but who is waiting.
Today’s NaPoWriMo.net prompt called for a way to “derange” yourself by experiencing something strange, like this animated version of “Seductive Fantasy” by Sun Ra and his Arkestra, and then writing the poem. What resulted for me is, still in progress, so I’m not sharing yet. It’s already more abstract than normal, but half the fun of poetry month is experimentation.
I have barely written a single creative word since last April. Yet here I am, on the eve of National Poetry Month, feeling something like…enthusiasm?…to tackle another poem-a-day challenge. As in previous years, I plan to use prompts from both NaPoWriMo.net and my local poetry group’s 30/30 challenge in order to generate the poems. I aim to write something every day, though not necessarily post here every day. If pandemic life has taught me one thing, it’s the importance of embracing both uncertainty and flexibility.
The prompts traditionally begin on March 31st in preparation for a productive April. Today’s “early-bird prompt” asked writers to spend a few minutes looking for a piece of art in the online galleries of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. After finding something that piques interest, study the photographs and the accompanying text to inspire your poem.
I chose this photo, more for the title of the piece and the description than the actual image. Then a draft came out. Whether or not I will ever shape the poem into something more is a six-months-from-now decision, after the words have settled.
Cosmetic Vessel in the Shape of a Cat
Where cosmetic implies to beautify
improve the face not just of the body
but of things as they seem
impress with transformation
superficial dusting that somehow
makes me feel more here
the shape of a cat is some classic ideal
grace unmatched but mystery too
the way the lithe muscles of a back
in motion, toward prey or affection
convey a power I have yet to hold
how a vessel is a place to contain
something utilitarian, necessary
or simply coveted and kept
a swift vowel switch and
vassal I become to perfection
After a hard, long winter, what better thing to reveal itself in the melting snow than this affirming found poem at a nearby school park?
I decided to take stock this morning and look back at what I wrote this month. 36 poems and 7 starts (that may turn into poems at some point). I even like 4 of them! Most of the poems I’ve gone on to publish in journals or anthologies have started from seeds planted during these poem-a-day challenges.
I recently submitted a revised version of my poetry manuscript, and the majority of poems in it also started from the monthly challenges I’ve completed in previous years. I realize prompts don’t work for every writer, but they have been an amazing motivator for me, and also help me explore writing in new forms or about different topics than I’m normally drawn to.
All of this to say, even in the midst of one of the most stressful and disorienting months I’ve ever experienced, poetry has been a respite. I know it always will be.
To anyone who has read or commented on my work this month, thank you! I am grateful. I always write for myself first, but it’s encouraging to know something I’ve created and shared resonates in some small way with someone else.
Next comes editing and revising. A different kind of fun! But not until June. The words need time to age and settle a bit. First I plan to read more of the poems others have created this month, and dig in to the MANY poetry books I’ve purchased in the last several weeks. I firmly believe every day is better with poetry, but never has that seemed truer than now.
Photo by Engin Akyurt on Pexels.com
For the final day (woohoo!) of Poetry Month, I followed the NaPoWriMo prompt asking for a poem about something that returns.
What Comes Back
Some returns require nothing —
geese, poplar leaves, sunrise —
but our attention.
Other returns demand such faith:
phone call from a doctor
child taking their first solo bike ride
teenager late home from a party
lover gone away on business, mid-winter
cat, escaped out the door left carelessly open
A sense of safety,
normalcy,
oblivion to danger.
A feeling, warm in the chest,
that just as the grass greens,
the apple trees blossom
happiness will come home to its heart.
Photo by Wendy Wei on Pexels.com
Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt called for a paean to the stalwart hero of the household: your pet. I know there are people out there who write meaningful poetry about their cat, dog, or goldfish, but I am clearly not one of them. I adore my cats (Isaac, today’s poem star, and Jean-Guy, the shy guy of my house) and probably take more photos of them than I do of my kids. Yet it was difficult to put that affection into words.
Isaac
We worried
that your penchant for hissing
when you’re touched not just so,
that your sharp claws
which you refuse to have trimmed,
that your insistence on jumping
up and on anything,
that your preference for being
on a lap, no matter the welcome,
would cause lashing out of
a bruised cat-ego
once the baby arrived.
What a happy surprise
when you jumped into the crib
to nap with the newest member
of the family you believe you lead,
purrs audible over the baby monitor.
What a beautiful gift
to see you still take every chance
to cuddle next to that child,
ten years later.
Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt asked poets to describe a bedroom from their past. It served as a good prompt to combine with the Poetic Asides call for a “look back or don’t look back” poem. The first place my mind looked back to was the room I slept in when I visited my grandparents as a child.
Visiting
Four of us
crammed in the small bedroom at the Cook Street house,
afterthought lined with wood paneling.
Adjunct to the crowded porch where Grandpa kept his freezer full of meat
and Grandma kept her boxes of unused Avon products,
bought to appease her persistent neighbour.
My brother, notorious snorer, got the living room couch,
but Grandpa and Grandma thought they were treating my sister and me
to the thin mattress on the floor, giving Mom and Dad the luxury
of the spare double bed in the very same room. A small window
that opened halfway, only deliverance from the stale space.
I couldn’t stay on my side of the mattress, so my sister kicked. We both yelled.
Mom scolding us to be quiet, while Dad slept on. Oblivious.
They lived too far away to make quick trips,
so we’d spend a week of nights in that tiny space, darker than my dark
at home, I was even a little grateful for my sister’s closeness.
In the morning, awoken by chickadees in the caragana shrub,
the scent of Grandpa frying last night’s ham, I liked being the first
one to open my eyes. To sneak off the mattress, navigate the
tiny path, strewn with off-cast blankets, my Dad’s slippers,
to make it to the door. Opened it slow as syrup, to quiet the creak.
National Poetry Writing Month
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