Prompt: The Last Time

George Bilgere opens his poem "Tar Pits" with the line "The last time I saw my father..."

He is not alone in using that phrase for a poem or perhaps as a prompt. It is a wide open line that could inspire a very sentimental poem like "The Last Time" by an author unknown, or the brutally powerful "The Last Time" by Rachel McKibbens.

Bilgere takes a day from a child's memory of a trip to the La Brea Tar Pits which is a still-active paleontological research site which is somewhat oddly located in urban Los Angeles. The tourist attraction surrounds a group of tar pits where natural asphalt has seeped up from the ground for tens of thousands of years, and over many centuries, the bones of trapped animals have been preserved. He not only remembers this day with his divorced father, but in adulthood he connects the preserved remains with his father and wishes that his father "could rise from that black pit and emerge into light."

This call for submissions for our September issue is for poems that begin with or use the phrase "the last time." Perhaps it is the last time you saw, or did, or said, or tried, or felt, or any one of a myriad of other possibilities.

George Bilgere came to my attention via the then U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins who chose his collection The Good Kiss for the University of Akron Poetry Prize, and via his appearances in Garrison Keillor's The Writer’s Almanac and on A Prairie Home Companion.
He has won the May Swenson Poetry Award, the Society of Midland Authors Poetry Prize, the Devins Award, the University of Akron Poetry Prize, the Cleveland Arts Prize, and the 2023 Rattle Chapbook Prize for Cheap Motels of My Youth which is the latest in his poetry books that now total nine.
In 2024, he launched a daily poem website, Poetry Town. He is Distinguished Professor of English at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio, where he lives with his "lovely wife and two fine little boys." His website is georgebilgere.com

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Workshopping in Poetry Town

Poet George Bilgere has started a website called Poetry Town with a daily poem and a brief answer by him about "Why I Chose This Poem."  There are other daily poem sites but I subscribed in the hope of discovering new poems and poets.

That was the case with this poem and poet, both of which were new to me. I just did a poetry workshop, so the poem resonated.

"Fellow poets, it’s summer, which means it’s poetry workshop time. Many of you are at one of the many writing workshops scattered here and there around the country. A magical time! Some of the happiest summers of my life have been spent at these wondrous retreats from daily reality. And you’re going through exactly what Norman Stock describes so memorably in this poem. But fear not! Cocktail hour is at 7 p.m., down by the lake. Casual attire!"

Every workshop has its tools

Thank You for the Helpful Comments 
by Norman Stock, from Buying Breakfast for My Kamikaze Pilot

I sit quietly listening
as they tear my poem to shreds in the poetry workshop,
as each one says they have a “problem” with this line
and they have a “problem” with that line
and I am not allowed to speak
because that is the etiquette of the workshop
so I sit listening and writhing
while they tear the guts out of my poem
and leave it lying bleeding and dead,
and when they’re finally finished
having kicked the stuffing out of it,
having trimmed it down from twenty lines
to about four words that nobody objects to,
then they turn to me politely
and they say, well, Norman
do you have any response.

Response, I say,
picking myself up off the floor
and brushing away the dirt,
while holding on for dear life
to what I thought was my immortal poem
now dwindled to nothing,
and though what I really want to say is
can I get my money back for this stupid workshop,

what I say instead is…uh…thank you
for your helpful comments…while I mumble
under my breath, motherfuckers
wait till I get to your poems.

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org