Prompt: Torn from the Headlines

Newspaper headlines writers often have a flair for puns and other wordplay. Jay Leno made a regular crowd-sourced segment on The Tonight Show from reading headlines and ads that were sent in by viewers.

Sometimes it's intentional, as in a story about creating unique holiday sweatsuits called "Fleece Navidad." Sometimes the writers are having fun with innuendo as in "Summit ski area gets first decent dump." Sometimes you wonder what they were thinking, or if they were thinking: "Home sales up, despite fewer homes sold" and "Abe Lincoln played key role in 'Lincoln.'"

But headlines as poem titles can serve the same purposes as most titles for poems; they offer a way into a poem and they can offer more than one way to view the poem.

Headline poems are frequently quite serious. They use an actual headline as the title. The poem may address directly the topic of the headline, or it may offer another perspective where the headline seems more ironic.

This month, for the first time, I am using one of my own poems as a model for a prompt. This is a poem that did come from an actual newspaper headline, but the story I chose to tell did not appear in the article. I was more taken in my thoughts with trying to put myself into the event that no one witnessed that occurred in a wooded area I knew as a place that deer often emerged from onto the road in front of my car.

Woman Found In Wooded Area

She ran through the woods
to escape him.
He followed the path
knowing he would reach
the same place.

She wore stockings.
The thorns tore at them
and she bled.

When she came out,
her breath was visible
and he could smell her.

Like a deer, she stilled,
hoping he could not see her.
But he could.

    by Kenneth Ronkowitz

Another example of a headline poem is one in the current issue of Crazyhorse by Amaud Jamaul Johnson titled “L.A. Police Chief Daryl Gates Dead at 83."

One of your two prompt options for June is to write a headline poem. Use the headline as your title. Grab a newspaper or click over to a newspaper site and start reading.

This month, since we have two possible prompts for your June writing, you may choose either or both and submit one or two poems. As a new submission requirement, we ask that you include in your email submission subject line both the word "submission" (which sorts it automatically to the proper mail folder) AND also the short title of the prompt - this month it will be "traveling" or "headlines." We always get poems submitted that don't have the correct subject line and also don't have anything to do with the current prompt, so perhaps this will help with the sorting process. 

Submissions are due by June 30, 2013.

Prompt: Traveling

I know of several new books out this spring and summer that offer prompts and inspiration for poets. One of those is Writing Poetry To Save Your Life: How To Find The Courage To Tell Your Stories by my friend and mentor, Maria Mazziotti Gillan.

Maria's book is all about how she writes and on some of her beliefs about poetry. First off, she says we all have stories to tell. Our stories. And those stories are best told and most universal when they are rich with the details and truth of the actual experiences.

Whether she is working with her graduate students as director of the creative writing program at Binghamton University-SUNY, or running a weekend retreat with old and new poets, she has her ways of helping writers get into that dark and frightening cave that holds our stories, and ways to get past that crow that sits above us and frightens us from saying what we know is the truth.

The book offers a series of short, readable chapters on ways to find those stories, make your writing stronger and get past the many fears that poets (including herself) encounter.

The chapters include model poems, generally her own writing with background on the situation, and exercises.

The final section is more than a hundred pages of short prompts in groups of five. They are often a phrase and rarely more than a sentence. In workshops, Maria will often call out a half dozen suggestions to a group and just ask you to choose one that resonates, or combine several.

I have chosen a group of Maria's prompts that share the theme of traveling.

Write about:
a train, bus or plane that you missed
riding on a school bus
leaving Penn Station, Canal Street or any specific location
a cab ride
running away from home
Start with "I have driven highways..." or
"on the street where we lived..."

For a sample traveling poem to consider, look on the main site's prompt page for "The Bus Through Jonesboro, Arkansas" by Matthew Henriksen.

This month, since we have two possible prompts for your June writing, you may choose either or both and submit one or two poems. As a new submission requirement, we ask that you include in your email submission subject line both the word "submission" (which sorts it automatically to the proper mail folder) AND also the short title of the prompt - this month it will be "traveling" or "headlines." We always get poems submitted that don't have the correct subject line and also don't have anything to do with the current prompt, so perhaps this will help with the sorting process. 

Submissions are due by June 30, 2013. 

The World Drops By Poets Online

I enjoy looking at the widget on this page that let's you see the recent visitors to the blog and see that fans of poetry from around the world are visiting.

Although doing the PoetsOnline.org website since 1998 and this blog since 2005 has connected me to many poets, I have not literally met very many of them.

A few of the poets who submit poems and some of the featured poets are people I know from workshops and readings from the east coast of the United States.

I do feel like I know some of the regular contributors too. I have been reading their poems for years and have seen their writing change and grow. But, I will probably never meet them in person.

In this age of Facebook and social media "friends," I have a pretty wide circle of poetry friends. People follow us on Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest.

One of those virtual poetry friends is Mary Kendall who has been submitting poems for the past eight years. I know that she has been a familiar name in the submissions folder, but I know more about her because she has emailed me about "non-submission" topics, and because via those social networks, I discovered her own blog.

Mary is an American transplanted to London. She started blogging in 2012 when she was headed to the UK "for four months" but she is still there and I get to follow her European travels through her blog.

from Mary's visit to Monet's gardens and house at Giverney

She visited a place I have on my bucket list - Monet's gardens and home at Giverney.was

But the post that I enjoyed the most was one about her own poetry and Poets Online story. Those are the stories that I hope are out there, but I don't expect to hear.

Here is an excerpt:

In 2005 I discovered a website that I quickly grew to love: POETSONLINE (www.poetsonline.org). It is a website with an accompanying blog that never fails to interest me (the blog can be reached through the main website). I am very indebted to this site and blog. After a 20 year hiatus in writing, I slowly started writing again in 2001. It was a strange experience (to be saved for another time) to start writing once again after so long. So, how did this site and blog help? This site presents a poem as a prompt (often several poems) along with some carefully constructed thoughts about the works. This leads the editor of the site, Ken Ronkowitz, to present that month's prompt idea. The prompts are varied and always interesting. The blog adds many details and comments. I often write in response but don't send the poems in. This past month I spent days writing a poem about a willow tree to send in, but when the deadline came, I knew the poem wasn't ready. It is now, but it is relegated to my quiet folder of poems not shared with the world. Who knows where it will land. When I read the poems then published to the prompt, I realized mine was quite different and perhaps it was a good thing I didn't submit it after all. We writers are our best self-critics, aren't we?

Anyhow, starting in 2005, I've submitted and published a number of poems, some ok, some good, and one or two that have become some of my favorites. Occasionally I will get an email from someone who has read a poem and they make a private comment to me. Once, a composer, Paul Carey, asked to use some winter haiku he had read from the site. That was a lovely surprise. I never got to hear the resulting work, which was my only disappointment, yet the fact that another person wanted my words for his music is touching. 

My thoughts today made me think back to the first poem I wrote for poets online seven years ago. The prompt asked us to think about who our reader is and what they would be like, how they would read the poem, how they might respond. I'm going to share this poem with you here today because I have been wondering who my readers are in all I have ever written. They will always be anonymous just as I am a reader of poems, novels, blogs, etc. and unknown to so many authors, many of whom I love.

It's a nice bit of serendipity that her first submission was to a prompt about the reader you imagine when you write. I have several idealized readers for my poems. One is a radio voice - that of Michael Silverblatt. For some poems, I have a single person that I am writing to and for.  But for most of the poems I have written based on my own prompts, I imagine the poets like Mary who are out there also writing a poem to that prompt. I imagine that, like them, I want the other poets reading the poems that are in the Poets Online archive (and that's a lot of poems at this point) to like my poem.

Sometimes poets and readers will reach out by email, as Mary mentions, and connect because of a poem online. Most of the time that doesn't happen. Most of the posts here don't get comments. That is typical for most blogs and websites. I have been teaching for more than 35 years, so I know that most students won't tell you about a good experience they had in your class, but you do cherish the few that do.

Writing poetry can be a lonely craft. Doing the Poets Online site is also a quite solitary job. But when I do hear from poets, it makes it worth it.

I Ask My Mother to Sing

I Ask My Mother to Sing


She begins, and my grandmother joins her.
Mother and daughter sing like young girls.
If my father were alive, he would play
his accordion and sway like a boat.

I've never been in Peking, or the Summer Palace,
nor stood on the great Stone Boat to watch
the rain begin on Kuen Ming Lake, the picnickers
running away in the grass.

But I love to hear it sung;
how the waterlilies fill with rain until
they overturn, spilling water into water,
then rock back, and fill with more.

Both women have begun to cry.
But neither stops her song.

by Li-Young Lee

via The Writers Almanac
from his collection, Rose