Prompt: The Personal and History

In a poetry workshop I had with Thomas Lux, he said "All poems are ars poetica." I know Lux didn't mean that literally, but many poems are about poetry in some way. Former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky said, "All of my poems are about history." I wonder how literally he meant us to take that statement.

History can mean the whole series of past events, but those events are always connected with someone or something. Look at some of Pinsky's poems, such as "Shirt," or "From The Childhood of Jesus," and you know those poems are about that larger history.

Stanley Kunitz at age 95 became our tenth Poet Laureate in 2000. I have heard him read his poem " Halley's Comet," with the energy of that young boy who is thrilled and frightened on the rooftop. The poem takes us from the ground, up the stairs, onto the roof and, as he calls his father, the reader rises into that starry sky. (Kunitz's father committed suicide before Stanley had the chance to know him.)

What I like about Kunitz's poem is that it mixes the historical appearance of the comet in 1910 with his personal history and also some of his family history. (Halley's comet will next appear in the night sky in the year 2062

For this month's prompt, select a historic event as the starting point for a poem. Do not write only about the event, but also on your personal history and your connection to it. Is there an event that triggers a personal history because of when it occurred? The history lesson here is personal.

Watch and listen to this video where Kunitz talks about history and his poetry. This Bill Moyers video was recorded at one of the Dodge Poetry Festivals in New Jersey where I heard him read "Halley's Comet" and many of his other poems.

Submission Deadline September 30, 2020

---

Visit our website at poetsonline.org

---

Prompt: Reimagining the Myths

Peter Paul Rubens - L’enlèvement de Proserpine (The Rape of Proserpina, 1638)
 Proserpina is the Latin name for the Greek goddess Persephone.

Recently, I listened to the NY Times Book Review podcast with Stephen Fry on Reimagining the Greek Myths.  Fry's latest book is a second about the Greek myths. In Heroes: The Greek Myths Reimagined , a sequel to his Mythos, Stephen Fry moves from the exploits of the Olympian gods to the deeds of mortal heroes.

What interested me in Fry's sequel is that these are not the stories of the gods but of the mortal humans who sometimes live in the favor of the gods and goddesses, and sometimes are punished by them. Some of their names are also well known: Perseus, Jason, Atalanta, Theseus, Bellerophon, Orpheus, Oedipus, Theseus and Heracles.

When I first encountered the myths as a young student, I took a liking to Prometheus who stole fire and gave it to the mortals on Earth. That really pissed off Zeus who saw this as the beginning of the end for the gods.

"...Prometheus himself – the Titan who made us, : befriended us and championed us – continues to endure his terrible punishment: shackled to the side of a mountain he is visited each day by a bird of prey that soars down out of the sun to tear open his side, pull out his liver and eat it before his very eyes. Since he is immortal the liver regenerates overnight, only for the torment to repeat the next day. And the next.

Prometheus, whose name means Forethought, has prophesied that now fire is in the world of man, the days of the gods are numbered. Zeus’s rage at his friend’s disobedience derives as much from a deep-buried but persistent fear that man will outgrow the gods as from his deep sense of hurt and betrayal.

Prometheus has also seen that the time will come when he will be released. A mortal human hero will arrive at the mountain, shatter his manacles and set the Titan free."

Who saves Prometheus from this torment? The Greek hero, Heracles, frees him (though with Zeus's permission). Saved by a mortal.

The podcast and book got me thinking about how myths are used in poetry.

One poem I thought of is by Alicia Ostriker:

"The Encounter with the Goddess" 

    There is one story and one story only

    That will prove worth your telling

        —Robert Graves, “To Juan at the Winter Solstice”

That one story worth your telling

Is the ancient tale of the encounter

With the goddess

Declares the poet Robert Graves 

You can come and see 

A sublime bronze avatar of the goddess

Standing in the harbor holding a book and lifting a torch

Among us her name is Liberty

She has many names and she is everywhere

You can also find her easily 

Inside yourself—

Don’t be afraid—

Just do whatever she tells you to do

In that poem, the goddess seems to come to Earth as the Statue of Liberty.  In "Selfie with Pomona: The Goddess of Abundance" by Alexandra Teague, we also encounter a goddess as a statue at the Pulitzer Fountain in New York City.

She has all the advantage. Two sculptors

for her single body. Bronze prepossession. Bare arms

muscled as if she plucked each apple in her basket, 

then scythed the reeds to weave the basket—heaping on peaches

and pearls of snow. What seasons? 

What death? She’s seamless as light...
Where’s the best light to look human?

But the book of poetry I thought of is Mother Love by Rita Dove who takes Demeter and Persephone out of the Greek myths and sets them into Arizona, Mexico, and a bistro in Paris. She retells this mother-daughter story in our world. 

Rita Dove has said that she thinks of her verse-cycle as a "homage and as counterpoint to Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus.”  You could choose almost any one of the poems from the book as a model for this month's prompt, such as "Persephone, Falling." 

I chose "Hades' Pitch", in which the god of the dead and the king of the underworld that bears his name makes a pitch to Persephone.

If I could just touch your ankle, he whispers, there

on the inside, above the bone—leans closer,

breath of lime and pepper—I know I could

make love to you.  She considers

this, secretly thrilled, though she wasn’t quite

sure what he meant...

Persephone is the daughter of Zeus and Demeter, goddess of the earth. Hades abducts the young goddess one day as she is gathering flowers by a stream. Demeter goes in search of her daughter but is unable to find her. Demeter’s grief causes the earth to die — crops fail, and famine comes upon the land. Zeus intervenes and commands Hades to return Persephone. Reluctant to release her, Hades forces Persephone to eat a pomegranate seed, food of the dead. As a result, she can spend only six months out of the year with her mother, and the other six months she is destined to spend in the realm of Hades. To the Greeks, the return of Persephone from the underworld symbolized the return of life in the spring. 

This month's prompt is to reimagine a myth or mythological character in our own world or in a modern situation. Is there a god, goddess or mortal from mythology that connects to your life?

Here, I have focused on Greek and Roman myths but you can look to myths from other cultures. And though I do like tales of the poor mortals mixed up with the immortals, the choice is yours. Include in your poem's title a clear reference to the character or myth you are reimagining.

Submission Deadline : August 31, 2020

     

---

Visit our website at poetsonline.org

---

Prompt: Undoing

Magritte's "The Treachery of Images" with its caption "This is not a pipe"

If only life had an undo button. 

In Linda Hillrinhouse's poem "Tatiana" (from The Things I Didn't Know to Wish For, NYQ Books, 2020), the speaker wants to go back to a time and undo one-by-one a series of related actions. 

Tatiana

I am twenty-five again 

and I am not

in bed with 

whoever you are.

I am not sleeping 

until noon or wearing

my nightgown inside out. 

I am not trying to sound smart

or make someone like me. Nor am I

getting stoned and painting happy

dead people with no eyes.

I am not telling some guy 

I just met on campus

that my name is Tatiana 

to sound exotic, to annihilate

the nobody in me.

When I first read her poem, I thought of other "not" poems I have read. There are the well-known poems that carry "not" in their titles, such as "Do not go gentle into that good night,"  "The Road Not Taken" and "Not Waving But Drowning" 

Hamlet says that the ultimate question is "to be or not to be."

There are other examples we can consider. "The Poems I Have Not Written" goes in a different direction. "This Did Not Happen" comes a bit closer to our model poem. 

I like Mark Yacich's poem that begins "You are not a statue / and I am not a pedestal. / We are not a handful / of harmless scratches on a pale pink canvas..." which makes me think of Billy Collins' "Litany" with its list of things that someone both are and are not.

That listing is also used in Dan Albergotti's "Among the Things He Does Not Deserve" which is catalogs things undeserved ranging from "Greek olives in oil, fine beer" to the final "soft gift of her parted lips." 

René Magritte's famous piece "The Treachery of Images" with its caption "This is not a pipe" is a commentary on artistic illusion. The pipe is not a pipe: it's a painting of a pipe.  Korzybski's "The word is not the thing" and "The map is not the territory" and Diderot's "This is not a story" live in the same place. And so it is with the "treachery" of images in poems - things are often not literally what the poet says that they seem to be.

Girl Behind Branches by Linda Hillringhouse

Linda Hillringhouse's poem takes this negation further. The voice of the poem not only confronts the truth of a time in her life that is painful to remember but finally tries to speculate on the driving force behind this truth that she wishes to undo.

Your poem for this month might use "not" in its title, or be a series of negations, but it should also try to address a particular subject and expose a reason for the undoing.

Submission Deadline: August 2, 2020 

---

Visit our website at poetsonline.org

---

Prompt: Once Upon a Time

I wasn't a big fan of fairy tales as a child and I didn't read many of them to my own children. They can be pretty cruel and violent. 

When I was a college student, a book by Bruno Bettelheim, a 20th-century child psychologist, was very popular in literature and education classes. That book is The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, a study of fairy tales and their universal importance in understanding childhood development. His examples include stories like "The Three Little Pigs,” “Hansel and Gretel,” and “The Sleeping Beauty.” Bettelheim admits that the tales are often cruel but that they do help teach lessons about finding meaning for one’s life.

Our prompt for June is a poem that tries one of these four paths through fairy tales:
based on a fairy tale, based on characters appearing in those tales, a new fairy tale, or a poem using the conventions of fairy tales. 

Here are some samples to consider. 

"Girl Without Hands" by Margaret Atwood is directly inspired by a Brothers Grimm's fairy tale.

 

...Only a girl like this

can know what's happened to you.

If she were here she would

reach out her arms towards

you now, and touch you

with her absent hands

and you would feel nothing, but you would be

touched all the same.

"Mermaid Song" by Kim Addonizio finds a fairy tale character lying on her sofa.

Damp-haired from the bath, you drape yourself 

upside down across the sofa, reading, 

one hand idly sunk into a bowl

of crackers, goldfish with smiles stamped on... 

Alicia Ostriker's poem "Utopian" is about a new fairy tale world created by a child that the poet then needs to interpret. 

My neighbor’s daughter has created a city

you cannot see

on an island to which you cannot swim

ruled by a noble princess and her athletic consort

all the buildings are glass so that lies are impossible

beneath the city they have buried certain words

which can never be spoken again

chiefly the word divorce which is eaten by maggots...

"From the Country Notebooks" by Geffrey Davis uses some fairy tale conventions - including "once upon a time" and some of that violence, but the tale is very real.

 

Once upon a time, my father was offered a shovel

and ten minutes alone with the prized stallion—Just don’t

kill him.    Once upon a time, I asked about the apple-

knotted scar on my father’s back shoulder, as he dressed

for work: That’s from when Sammy tried to kill me.

Remember?    Once upon a time, my father accepted a shovel

and the problem of answering violence without loosing

too much blood from Sammy’s chestnut body, nervous

in the stable.    Once upon a time...

 

Though we think of fairy tales are meant for children as a way to help them solve problems such as separation anxiety, oedipal conflict, and sibling rivalries, your poem will probably be meant for adults.

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: July 8, 2020

---

Visit our website at poetsonline.org

---