Prompt: Kissing

There are many kinds of kisses and many forms of kisses. We get them from birth to death. Though they are generally associated with love and affection, there are examples that are far away from those associations.

In our model poem, "Kissing" by Dorianne Laux, (read and hear the poem read) she examines some of this range.

They are kissing, on a park bench,
on the edge of an old bed, in a doorway
or on the floor of a church. Kissing
as the streets fill with balloons
or soldiers, locusts or confetti, water
or fire or dust. Kissing down through
the centuries under sun or stars, a dead tree,
an umbrella, amid derelicts. Kissing
as Christ carries his cross, as Gandhi
sings his speeches, as a bullet
careers through the air toward a child’s
good heart.

As Laux writes, we probably prefer the "long, deep, spacious kisses, exploring the silence of the tongue" to the "kissing when the cars crash and the bombs drop."

For this prompt, write about a kiss or the act of kissing in any of its forms or in many of its forms.

And you can get a head start on a call for submissions from Terrapin Books for a forthcoming anthology of poems on the topic of kissing. (The submission period is February 12 through March 20, 2019.)  Publisher/poet Diane Lockward suggests "first kisses, last kisses, goodbye kisses, make-out session kisses, desired kisses, unwanted kisses, dangerous kisses, stolen kisses, romantic kisses, familial kisses, spin-the-bottle kisses, hot kisses, cold kisses, and metaphorical kisses."

On her blog, Diane offers as a model poem "When Sex Was Kissing" by Hunt Hawkins which begins:

In high school I was somehow able to kiss
for three hours continuously without consummation.
I still remember the underwater feel of the car,
how the windows steamed, the binnacle-glow
of the dash pointing us forward towards the trees,
the jerky light outside of a diver approaching
the wreck, pointing at this window, then that,
the policeman asking if we were okay. Sure
we were!

Our submission deadline is January 31, 2019

Dorianne Laux's Family Stories

I will be attending a workshop and reading on April 6, 2013 with Dorianne Laux at The Poetry Center in Paterson, NJ where she is receiving the 2012 Paterson Poetry Prize for her collection The Book of Men.

I first found her poetry after reading The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry which she co-authored with Kim Addonizio. That book with its brief essays on the elements of poetry and writing prompts and exercises was one of the things that encouraged me to start the Poets Online website and later this blog.

Recently, I saw this poem of hers on the American Life in Poetry site. I think it is a good example of her poetry which Publishers Weekly described as being in a "descriptive, storytelling vein: the at-hand, the matter-of-fact, the day-to-day are rendered in an earnest tone both sensuous and nostalgic"

Family Stories

I had a boyfriend who told me stories about his family,
how an argument once ended when his father
seized a lit birthday cake in both hands
and hurled it out a second-story window. That,
I thought, was what a normal family was like: anger
sent out across the sill, landing like a gift
to decorate the sidewalk below. In mine
it was fists and direct hits to the solar plexus,
and nobody ever forgave anyone. But I believed
the people in his stories really loved one another,
even when they yelled and shoved their feet
through cabinet doors, or held a chair like a bottle
of cheap champagne, christening the wall,
rungs exploding from their holes.
I said it sounded harmless, the pomp and fury
of the passionate. He said it was a curse
being born Italian and Catholic and when he
looked from that window what he saw was the moment
rudely crushed. But all I could see was a gorgeous
three-layer cake gliding like a battered ship
down the sidewalk, the smoking candles broken, sunk
deep in the icing, a few still burning.




Dorianne Laux's most recent book of poems is The Book of Men, (W.W. Norton & Co., 2011)  "Family Stories" appears in Smoke, (BOA Editions, Ltd.)

Prompt: Dorianne Laux: Not Just The Facts

Our prompt for this month is to start a poem by first collecting a series of facts about a subject that interests you. It might be a topic, as, in our model poem, that is a bit of a current obsession. You will use the facts in your poem, but the poem will also need to leap, like many poems, to another place. I came upon the poem and the idea for this prompt when I was reading Brian Brodeur's blog, How A Poem Happens where contemporary poets are interviewed about the making of one of their poems.

Laux mentions that she had been reading James Wright's book ABOVE THE RIVER and that it may have been an unconscious source for the leap. "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota" is a good example of a Wright poem that leaps, particularly in its final line. (Read that poem and listen to him read it) 

In the blog post (which reprints the poem), Laux talks about how a dinner conversation about the solar/lunar system led her to become somewhat obsessed with finding out facts about the moon.

Among the many facts I learned that night the one that stuck was the fact that since the expansion of the universe, the moon has been steadily and significantly backing away from the earth, which meant the moon once appeared much larger in the past and would only appear smaller in the future. I couldn’t get over it. I went to bed trying to imagine it and woke up thinking about it. I was obsessed.

That obsession led her to seek more information about the moon and was the prewriting for the poem. 

I also read everything I could get my hands on about the moon. That fascination has been long-lived as I’m still reading about the universe and am just now I’m finishing up Timothy Ferris’ Coming of Age in the Milky Way .

The second aspect of the poem is that my extended family was going through a life-crisis, a not uncommon state of affairs for them, so that was in the back of my mind. I was in the process of working to pull away from them. Maybe I became obsessed with the moon as a way to curb my obsession with the latest family crisis. But the tug of the family is tremendous. Even a crazy family can seem better than no family. The poem is two obsessions in collision.

This idea of two obsessions or ideas in a collision is also something we would love to see in your poem.

Laux's original intent ("That the listing of the facts was in some way interesting was my only concern.") took that leap in another direction that led to the poetic collision.

The leap from the planetary to the personal might have been a technique had I thought of it consciously, but I didn’t. It happened naturally, organically, without my being aware of it until I had finished the poem. I really thought the poem was about the moon, and these two people I had made up, the woman and her boy, strangers to me, but realized then it was my mother and my sister, or my sister and my niece, in disguise.

As I mention on the website, you could cheat on the prompt and work backward - start with an idea for a poem and then research the facts about a subject within the poem.
It might be difficult to "prompt" a leap in writing a poem, but I have the feeling that if you can put one obsession into motion, perhaps it will naturally collide with another and produce enough energy for the poem to move.