Prompt: Toys

Dolls by ErikaWittlieb

I have a new granddaughter and so I now have an excuse to play again with toys. It would be the rare adult who doesn't have at least a few strong emotional attachments to some childhood toys. Although I am a collector of things, I have very few toys from my childhood. There were some that survived to be toys for my two sons - such as my Matchbox cars - but the toys I have the fondest memories of have vanished - a stuffed lamb and dog, my "medical bag" for playing doctor (often on that lamb and dog).

Having your own children or grandchildren is a wonderful excuse to shop in toy stores, buy toys (perhaps ones you want more than the child) and play again.

My favorite toy poem is "Kinky" the title poem from Denise Duhamel's collection Kinky (Orchises Press, 1997). I thought of her poem recently after reading that Mister Potatohead is no longer a "mister." Now he can be Mr., Mrs., Ms. or whatever combination you want. Of course, it's not like kids haven't already playing gender games with this and other toys.

 In Duhamel's poem, Barbie and Ken dolls are brought to life and: 

...decide to exchange heads.

Barbie squeezes the small opening under her chin 

over Ken's bulging neck socket. 

It's not something I didn't see my older sister do with her dolls. It even shows up in the Toy Story film series both as villains who make hybrid dolls and as those hybrids come to life. Duhamel's dolls don't go in the direction of evil but rather to the kinky side.

The two dolls chase each other around the orange Country Camper 

unsure what they'll do when they're within touching distance. 

Ken wants to feel Barbie's toes between his lips, 

take off one of her legs and force his whole arm inside her.

You don't have to tell us (maybe tell your therapist) about any strange fetishes you may have acted out with your dolls or action figures, but this Barbie and Ken (who Duhamel reminds us have "only the vaguest suggestion of genitals") finally get to act out some of their repressed feelings.

Soon Barbie was begging Ken 

to try on her spandex miniskirt. She showed him how 

to pivot as though he was on a runway. Ken begged 

to tie Barbie onto his yellow surfboard and spin her 

on the kitchen table until she grew dizzy. Anything,

anything, they both said to the other's requests,

their mirrored desires bubbling from the most unlikely places.

But our writing prompt this month is not necessarily dolls or anything kinky but rather simply TOYS. What are your memories of them? What is your current connection to them? How did they fuel your young and now adult imagination?

Submission Deadline: March 31, 2021.  Please read our submission guidelines.

read more poems by Denise Duhamel

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Merwin and Neruda

Merwin reads his poem "Yesterday" in this excerpt of video from the Bill Moyers programs on poetry recorded at the Dodge Poetry Festivals. (You should watch it all - but Merwin appears at the 5:30 point in the video.) The poem is the model for our October writing prompt at Poets Online. 

But, lest you think Merwin to be a cold poet based on this one poem, I would also recommend his translations of Pablo Neruda's poetry. It's a collection that Neruda published at the age of 19 (in 1924) and that was considered scandalous then and, in this translation, the sexuality and sensuality is there.

I have gone marking the atlas of your body with crosses of fire.
My mouth went across: a spider, trying to hide.
in you, behind you, timid, driven by thirst.

One of his love sonnets: 

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me,
all day I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.
I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.
I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,
and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.

Prose Poems: I Sing the Mundane Erotic

"Which one of us, in his moments of ambition, has not dreamed of a miracle of poetic prose, musical without rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the jibes of conscience?"
~ Charles Baudelaire

This month is not the first time we have tried the prose poem form for a prompt. An earlier prompt (back ten years ago already) also featured poems by Nin Andrews.

The prose poem, as defined in The Glossary of Poetic Terms, is a genre in the poetic spectrum between free verse and prose. It is distinguished by the poetic characteristics of rhythmic, aural, and syntactic repetition, compression of thought, sustained intensity, and patterned structure, but is set on the page in a continuous sequence of sentences as in prose, without line breaks.

I had problems accepting prose poems as poems for a long time. It was bad enough that it seemed like so many "poems" wee just prose with line breaks already that prose poems seemed to me to be a further erosion.

I think that the poem that might have changed me is "A Story About the Body" by Robert Hass which I heard him read when it was new.

The young composer, working that summer at an artist's colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she made amused or considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, "I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you I have had a double mastectomy," and when he didn't understand, "I've lost both my breasts." the radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity--like music--withered, very quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, "I'm sorry. I don't think I could." He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl - she must have swept them from the corners of her studio--was full of dead bees.

I couldn't have told you then why that was a poem and not just prose, but I knew when he read it that it was a poem. I hadn't seen it on paper, and when I finally did find a copy it did not surprise me that it was in the form of a prose poem.

The second prose poem that changed my mind about the form was "The Colonel" by Carolyn Forché. It's a poem that is often used to talk about the form and often analyzed.

What you have heard is true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistolon the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was some talk of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.

Most poets who work in this form agree that a prose poem should exhibit the characteristics of poetry more strongly than prose. These poems may be thematically structured like a poem, have musicality (though not rhyme) and probably more extensively use imagery, metaphor and the tools in the poet's box. The lines in these poems break where the margin breaks. Stanzas, if they occur at all, resemble paragraphs.

Even Wikipedia tries to define the form and can give you some history of its start in 19th century France.

Prose poems have their own journals - like CUE and Sentence.

On the main site, I used a poem by Kim Addonizio who has experimented in prose/poetry mixes in several books. You can read some of her erotic prose poem chapters on webdelsol.com.

Nin Andrews frequently writes in the prose poem form and "Aspirin" and "Sweet Tarts" are good examples.


Though this month's prompt is the prose poem form, we don't want you just running to your notebooks for a short story that you never finished and sending it off as a poem. So, I am lifting the prompt directly from Kim's book (with Dorianne Laux), The Poet's Companion, which contains some great writing exercises and examples.

"Brainstorm a list of some mundane activities not usually thought of a erotic - washing the dishes or car, mowing the lawn, going to the dentist. Now make a list of nouns associated with that activity. Then make a list of verbs and adjectives that you associate with sex. Stir everything together, and make the mundane activities sound positively orgasmic."

The Prose Poem: An International Journal states in its submission guidelines:

"Although we don't want to say that we can define "prose poetry," we do expect our contributors to at least know the difference between verse and prose poetry, so that they don't waste their time and postage. "

You should read some more prose poems before starting your own. The best way to define them is by example.

Try:

• The Prose Poem: An International Journal
• The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present edited by David Lehman
• Michael Benedikt
• Louis Jenkins

The Conversation of Couples: Robert Hass and Brenda Hillman

I first realized that there was a new poetry collection from Robert Hass when I read online that it had received the National Book Award for 2007.

Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005 is his first collection to appear in a decade. The book's title has a date range such as we might find on a "selected poems" and the idea of "materials" suggests the things we build our poems from that we have collected over time. I have heard Hass read some of these poems over the last 10 years, and the book seems to me to be a kind of selected poems.

His materials are familiar to those who have read him before - California settings, art and literature, nature, desire, history and historic figures, domestic life and parts of conversations. The forms of his poems continue to range from prose to broken stanzas. You might also know him for his translations (see bio at bottom).

Maybe I'm reading into the poems, but more poems in this collection seem to be about memory and the failure of memory, or perhaps it's the failure of language to describe the passage of time.

You can listen to an interview with Robert Hass and hear him read at UC Berkeley and judge for yourself.

I know that Hass has done readings together with his wife, Brenda Hillman. I don't believe I have actually heard them read together, though I have heard both of them at Dodge Poetry Festivals.

Here's a link to Brenda's comments on Robert's poem “A Supple Wreath of Myrtle.” I caught on the lines where she says:

"The poem suggests that the daily and the heroic are always intertwined... The poem is one to live with; it captures something very powerful about human life, about the brevity of conviction, and about the individual’s relationship to his own story, to history in general, to reputation.

For this prompt, I have paired poems by them. One is Hass' poem "Futures in Lilacs" from his new book, and the other is Hillman's poem "Male Nipples" from an older book of hers called Loose Sugar.

I am imagining that the "she" of Hass' poem is Brenda, and that the man in her poem is Robert - though it doesn't change our reading of the poem or the prompt if I am wrong.

What I like about these two poems is that both contain some of the erotic conversation of couples. Those conversations, in words or not, exist within a poem of the present world around them and also connect with the past.

He writes:

"Tender little Buddha," she said
Of my least Buddha-like member.
She was probably quoting Allen Ginsberg...
She was taking off a blouse,
Almost transparent, the color of a silky tangerine.

And she describes male nipples, maybe the motorcycle boy's

convinced him to take only
his shirt off. They were, well, one
was brown and one was like the inside of a story--

and then describes someone perhaps nearby-

--So I told the little hairs
around his nipple: lie flat! and they did,
like a campfire, without the stories--

I see this prompt as a window frame. In the glass I see reflected this couple, but I also see the world outside. The window is framed with the past.

Tell us what this couple is saying and doing. Tell us about what is outside that window and how the past has framed it.

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Robert Hass was born in San Francisco in 1941. He attended St. Mary’s College in California, and received both an MA and Ph.D. in English from Stanford University.

His books of poetry include Sun Under Wood: New Poems (Ecco Press, 1996); Human Wishes (1989), Praise (1979), and Field Guide (1973). Hass also co-translated several volumes of poetry with Czeslaw Milosz, most recently Facing the River (1995), and is author or editor of several other collections of essays and translation, including The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa (1994), and Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry (1984).

Robert Hass served as poet laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. He teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.





Brenda Hillman was born in Tucson, Arizona, in 1951 and attended Pomona College and the University of Iowa.

Some of her books include Cascadia (2001); Loose Sugar (1997 - a finalist for National Book Critic's Circle); Bright Existence (1993 - finalist for Pulitzer Prize); and Death Tractates (1992). She was also the editor of a collection of Emily Dickinson's poems published by Shambhala Press in 1995.

Hillman has taught at the Napa Valley Writer’s Conference and the University of California, Berkeley. She currently holds the Olivia Filippi Chair in Poetry at St. Mary's College in California. She lives in the Bay Area with her husband, Robert Hass.