Prompt: Burning the Year

A new year has begun. The end of the year is often a time of reflection on things done and undone, those new born and those lost, and lots of lists with opinions of the best things from the past year. Another page in the history book is finished.

In "The New Year" by Carrie Williams Clifford, the mood is optimistic.
The New Year comes —
fling wide,
fling wide the door
of Opportunity!

But for every person who views the new year optimistically with hope and opportunity, there is at least one other person who is glad to leave the old year behind.

In "Burning the Old Year" by Naomi Shihab Nye (from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems) we have a figurative fire that burns lists, notes and partial poems because "So much of any year is flammable... and so little is a stone." The burning is not in anger. I imagine the fire is not even intentional. Some things just burn themselves into the past and "only the things I didn’t do / crackle after the blazing dies."

I once loaded a pile of notebooks, letters, and poems into my fire pit on a snowy January day. They were things that after years I had never returned to, never revised or never really felt good about writing or keeping. There were letters from past girlfriends, unfinished stories and poems, ideas for projects, clippings that I thought would inspire me. They made a fast and furious fire. A friend was shocked that I did such a thing. I explained that some of those things were saved electronically and might be useful but most of it had to be left in the past and having them made them keep creeping into the present.

What would you put in your fire in this new year from the past year? What are you letting go of from the past year? Your fire might be figurative or literal, or not a fire at all.

Naomi Shihab Nye was born on March 12, 1952, in St. Louis to a Palestinian father and an American mother. During her high school years, she lived in Ramallah in Palestine, the Old City in Jerusalem, and San Antonio, Texas, where she later received her BA in English and world religions from Trinity University and continues to live.

Nye is the author and/or editor of more than 30 volumes, including Grace Notes: Poems about Family, 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East and Words Under the Words: Selected Poems. She is also the author of several books of poetry and fiction for children, including Habibi (Simon Pulse, 1997), for which she received the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award in 1998. Nye gives voice to her experience as an Arab American through poems about heritage and peace that overflow with a humanitarian spirit. She has traveled to the Middle East and Asia for the United States Information Agency (USIA) three times, promoting international goodwill through the arts.

Nye’s other honors include the National Book Critics Circle Lifetime Achievement Award, and four Pushcart Prizes. She has been a Lannan Fellow, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow. In 1988, she received the Academy of American Poets’ Lavan Award, judged by W. S. Merwin. In 2024, the Academy presented her with its Wallace Stevens Award. Nye served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2009 to 2014, and was the Poetry Foundation’s Young People’s Poet Laureate from 2019 to 2021. 

Everything Comes Next: Collected & New Poems by Naomi Shihab Nye

 

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Prompt: Postcard Poems

Recently, I received a postcard from a friend I have not seen for five years. The poscard message was in the form of a short poem. A postcard has a perfect little square for a poem. You probably have read epistolary poems in the form of letters. Edward Hirsch defines the form: "The letter poem is addressed to a specific person and written from a specific place, which locates it in time and space. It imitates the colloquial familiarity of a letter, though sometimes in elaborate forms. A few well-known letter poems are Ezra Pound’s adaptation of Li Po, “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” (1915) and Auden’s “Letter to Lord Byron” (1937). These poems are not like actual letters because they are not addressed to just its recipient; but are always meant to be overheard by a future reader."

Although a postcard poem is similar to the letter form, it is both shorter and written in a different style.The poem "Postcard from the Heartbreak Hotel" by John Brehm opens with a play on a classic postcard meme: "Wish you were here instead of me."

Though not a poem, a postcard from the poet Seamus Heaney briefly and humorously rejects a request to be a judge for one of the Academy of American Poets poetry competitions. Though he did not use intentional line breaks, the margin of the card created breaks - much like a prose poem. I am taking the liberty of giving his message line breaks.

“Since Purgatory has disappeared
as a concept —
a place or state of temporal punishment  -
mankind has been attempting to replace it,
and judging poetry competitions
comes high on the list of substitutions.”

Since this month's call for submissions is not about a topic but about a form, I chose a poem that would fit a postcard, but it also seems like it would work as a postcard message. In "Solstice in Truro" by https://amzn.to/4fSW92I Joshua Weiner, my teacher-student mind connects solstices to school years and semesters. The summer solstice in June was sometimes the last day of school for me in my K-12 years. Summer vacation! The winter solstice was the end of a marking period or the end of a college semester. A short break and then into the new year and a new term.

Weiner says it is a June solstice, but it could easily be the December solstice starting winter. Truro is a Cape Cod town near where I had stayed for several week-long poetry workshops in Provincetown on the Cape's tip. I can imagine the tides and restless sand. A summer solstice is the longest day of the year when the Sun "pauses" for a moment before shifting direction. But then there is the sudden entry of his grandfather into the poem. Those two final lines in this 2023 poem, hit me when I read them with today's news reports from the war in Ukraine and the sad winter prospects for that country.

Your task this month is to write a poem that can fit on a postcard. It should address someone specific, living or dead. If we would recognize the person's name (a historical figure, a celebrity, maybe a famous poet), you might mention it, but it might also just suggest the recipient. Very often postcard messages also mention or suggest the place where the sender is writing. The shortness of the postcard as a form encourages us to write down only the most vivid and essential details of what we are trying to say -- which makes the writing of postcards rather akin to the writing of poems.

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Born in Boston in 1963, Josh Weiner grew up in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. He graduated from Northwestern University in 1985, and then entered UC Berkeley, and received a PhD in 1998. Along the way, he served as the Writing Coordinator for three years at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA.

Of this poem, he has said,"‘Solstice in Truro’ is one of those poems that just slips out and finds its final form very quickly, in an attempt to respond to my immediate world of sensation. One line led to another, pretty much in the order in which they appear. The emergence of my grandfather in the final lines, and the war in Ukraine, too, was a discovery I wasn’t looking for. I had been reading a lot of Sung and Tang Dynasty poems, classical poems, over the previous few years, mostly in Red Pine’s translations. I think you can hear the influences of line and image in what I wrote.”

Josh lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, the novelist Sarah Blake, and two sons, and teaches literature and poetry workshops at University of Maryland, College Park, where he is Professor of English.
His website is joshuaweiner.com

 

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Poets Online's Pushcart Nominations for 2024

The Pushcart Prize is a prestigious literary award that celebrates outstanding writing published in small presses and literary magazines in print and online. It is not exclusive to poetry but also honors works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Each year, editors of small presses and literary magazines nominate works they published, showcasing voices that may not receive attention from larger publishers.

For poetry specifically, the award recognizes exceptional poems that reflect originality, craft, and artistic depth. Each publication can nominate up to six poems for consideration. Poems and poets who are nominated are a select group, and winning or being included in the annual Pushcart Prize Anthology often brings significant recognition and helps elevate a poet's career. 

The Pushcart Prize was founded in 1976 by Bill Henderson and being nominated, as well as being published in the annual, is considered one of the most coveted honors in the realm of small press literature.

Our nominations were selected by the editor and four readers from all poems published in 2024.

Poets Online proudly announces our 2024 nominated poems for the Pushcart Prize. 

"Sleep" by Seema Singh (February issue)

"You're Still the One" by Jo Taylor (September issue)

"Heart of the Grove" by Taylor Graham

"The Paper Fortune Teller" by Rob Friedman

"The Last Time I Ate Meat" by Rose Anna Higashi

"The World According to Wile E. Coyote" by Paul Hostovsky (October issue)

Poems and prose selected by the Pushcart Press editors will be published in The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses XLIX in Spring 2025.

The idea for the Pushcart Prize anthology was conceived in the early 1970s by founding editor Bill Henderson, a senior editor at Doubleday. “I was tired of the publishing industry turning writers into dollar signs,” Henderson says, citing the tendency for big houses to favor marketability over substance. After leaving Doubleday, he self-published The Publish-It-Yourself Handbook: Literary Tradition and How-To, a guide that advised writers on how to start their own presses.

To further champion the work of small presses and literary journals, Henderson began to conceive of a “Best of the Small Presses” prize and anthology to highlight poetry and prose being put out by indie publishers each year. 

Henderson used money from his book sales to get the anthology off the ground, and in 1976, he self-published the first annual Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses.

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Now Once: An Ekphrastic Poem

This past summer, I was selected to participate in a writing workshop that used dance and movement as the prompt for writing poems.

Writing poetry about the arts - paintings, sculpture, photography, music, dance, etc. - is called ekphrasic poetry. It is a vivid, often dramatic, verbal description of a visual work of art, either real or imagined. Famous examples include "The Shield of Achilles" by Homer, "Ode on a Grecian Urn" by John Keats, "The Starry Night" by Anne Sexton and one I have written about, "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" by William Carlos Williams.

This workshop was sponsored by Arts By The People, a New Jersey nonprofit organization with a mission to establish, operate, promote, and conduct educational programs, opportunities, classes, and sessions in the creative arts for the public. With the support of The Santiago Abut Foundation, this project and all parts of The Writing LAB are free and open to the public.

The participants' writing collected in like waves through flesh represents the work of the 3rd annual Writing LAB Summer Residency. This year's ekphrasis workshop included a unique collaboration between Arts by the People and students from the dance graduate program at The Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance. Photographic stills from, and QR code links to, the dancers’ films are printed in the anthology alongside each writer's final creation.

During the full-day workshop, the participants went through a series of writing exercises as well as movement exercises. The writing portion was led by poet Michelle Ortega. The movement portion of the program was led by dancer Oksana Horban. Paul Rabinowitz is the Founder and Executive Director of ARTS By The People.

Watching the dancer's video that I selected to write about, I initially had a difficult time finding a center. After several attempts, I realized what I was focusing on was the setting - a stone ground and wall that looked like a desert. Because the dancers were from Jerusalem, I decided to research what kind of stone it would be. It turns out that "Jerusalem stone" is what it is called and it was used for many buildings in the city being that it could be quarried from the surrounding land.

Realizing that the stone was once a sea floor, I became fascinated by the idea that this modern man was moving upon this ancient sea floor that had become a desert, but that life was still embedded in that stone.

The best thing about writing workshops and writing prompts is often that they get you to go in directions that you would not have tried on your own. My poem is quite different from most of my poetry which tends to be narrative and more personal. "Now Once" is more focused on language and place.

NOW ONCE
Once a sea, then a lake, now
evaporated to limestone, dolomite, broken into blocks
to make a road, or a wall
one allowing movement, one to prevent it
once coral, mollusks, a swan, a ship,

a lone shadowless figure moving on what
was once deep water, animated and overflowing,
now sedimentary, fossilized, unable to move
waiting to be resurrected by winglike movements
that lift million-year-old memories from the stone.

Can you see it? Look closely with
ancient eyes, this wall of Jerusalem stone,
life preserved below, life renewed upon it,
the figure unfolds, like an oyster or
a swan – but no, a man, hearing

a carnival of animals from deep within.
Can you hear it? The voices begin,
andantino grazioso, slow and graceful, the vibrations
sound like waves through flesh and time
what is now and what was once.

To view the video that inspired the poem,
scan the QR code below.

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
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