Realizing that our February call for submissions is somewhat of an anti-Valentine's Day prompt, we remind you that we have done Valentines in the past. We offer you this video of Naomi reading a Valentine poem that we used and suggest that you look at our Valentines issue after you watch and listen to her poem.
The stores are full of red hearts for Valentine's Day. It is a day for love, romantic dinners, gifts, champagne, and engagements. It is also a day for some people to feel even lonelier. It's even a day for breakups.
Not to be totally unromantic but there are plenty of love poems already, and they're tough to write without sounding corny or like a young hormonal teen poet.
This February we are asking for poems about breakups, which is also a poetic tradition.
I was looking in a big anthology for other kinds of love poems. I found in the older poets John Clare’s "The Secret" where that love never even happens. That may be the worst kind of love poem but that's one way to avoid a breakup. "I loved thee, though I told thee not," says John.
I found Edward Thomas' poem "Go Now" about a woman parting ways with the male speaker and the effect that her simply saying "Go now" had on him.
Like the touch of rain she was
On a man’s flesh and hair and eyes
When the joy of walking thus
Has taken him by surprise:
With the love of the storm he burns,
He sings, he laughs, well I know how,
But forgets when he returns
As I shall not forget her ‘Go now’.
Those two words shut a door
Between me and the blessed rain
That was never shut before
And will not open again.
I quite like this poem by Scottish poet Vicki Feaver titled "Coat" which uses that coat as the metaphor for the relationship. That's a nice mini-prompt.
Coat
Sometimes I have wanted
to throw you off
like a heavy coat.
Sometimes I have said
you would not let me
breathe or move.
But now that I am free
to choose light clothes
or none at all
I feel the cold
and all the time I think
how warm it used to be.
The poem I landed on for our model this month is by Stevie Smith. She was born Florence Margaret Smith in Hull, Yorkshire in 1902. She is somewhat deceptive in her sometimes nursery-rhyme-like cadences. (She also had whimsical drawings with which she illustrated poems.) But she is a sophisticated poet, whose poems often dealt with suffering and mortality. She also has a dark sense of humor. Her most famous poem is “Not Waving But Drowning.” Give it a read too.
Our model poem is her "Pad Pad." Think of "pad" as walking with or as if with padded feet, like a cat or tiger.
The short poem's opening stanza"
I always remember your beautiful flowers
And the beautiful kimono you wore
When you sat on the couch
With that tigerish crouch
And told me you loved me no more...
Of course, breakups are not relegated only to lovers. Families break up. Companies break up. The choice is yours.
We have been down that 14-step road before here, so if you want some sonnety ideas take a look at our bed sonnets, phone sonnets, sonnenizios inspired by Kim Addonizio and some more traditional sonnet forms.
The deadline for submissions is February 28, 2023.
Charles Simic, a former Poet Laureate, died this month from complications of dementia at the age of eighty-four.
A winner of the Pulitzer Prize and countless other accolades, he was also a longtime teacher at the University of New Hampshire and co-poetry editor of the Paris Review.
Born in 1938, Simic was a prolific writer of both poetry and nonfiction. He wrote often about war-torn Belgrade, where his childhood was overshadowed by the Nazi invasion. He immigrated to the United States in 1954.
His work considered the mundane, the minuscule, and melancholy, but could also be funny.
From his “Promises of Leniency and Forgiveness”:
Incurable romantics marrying eternal grumblers.
Life haunted by its more beautiful sister-life—
Always, always … we had nothing
But the way with words.
In his essay “Poetry and Experience,” Simic wrote "At least since [Ralph Waldo] Emerson and [Walt] Whitman, there’s a cult of experience in American poetry. Our poets, when one comes right down to it, are always saying: This is what happened to me. This is what I saw and felt. Truth, they never get tired of reiterating, is not something that already exists in the world, but something that needs to be rediscovered almost daily."
Read some poems by him at poets.org
Our December prompt for the January issue asked for poems about places where what gives that place some emotional sense has been removed. Our example poems included a playground without children playing, an empty city, and an object that seems out of place in its space.
But we have no January issue.
Blame the end of the year holidays, or poetry fatigue or the prompt, but we received very few submissions and only "accepted" three poems. Not enough to merit an issue. We considered a new prompt but instead we are just going to let this prompt have some more time.
Let's rethink this idea of place. An empty building or even a room is a space, but what makes it a "place" in our poetic sense is that it has a... personality, a connection to a cultural or personal identity. A child's nursery without a child. Schools without students. A stadium without players or fans.
I have participated in writing workshops that focused on the poetry of place. Usually, we were writing about a particular place and focused on the details, sensory descriptions and the emotions someone attaches to it. Your grandmother's kitchen. Your childhood basement. The first classroom you were ever in as a student.
What happens to these spaces when they are empty of things and people?
I thought of Exit 13 poetry magazine which is a small publication focused on travel, geography and places where we live, work, and explore. What makes this submissions call different is that we want you to write about a place where what makes it that place is removed from it. This process of subtraction can make us reexamine how the place is defined.
This theme is one of the oldest in poetry. Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s poems about farms and farming, Dante’s Inferno, Wordsworth's poems of the English Lake District, T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, Elizabeth’s Bishop’s Nova Scotia, Robert Hass’s California, and the southern New Jersey poems of Stephen Dunn of some of the many examples of poets who brought place into their poetry. I found a poetry atlas online that puts poems on the map, literally.
We used a poem by Margaret R. Sáraco from her new collection If There Is No Wind as our main example. In fact, the book's title itself suggests that kind of subtraction. In her poem, "Autumnal Stroll," we know immediately that this space lacks what makes it a place.
the playground, austere
in darkness, out of
place without children,
Does this mean that the place is empty and lonely? A beach in the off-season or covered with snow and without beachgoers can be ideal for some people. In Sáraco's poem, the empty playground is ultimately enjoyable.
The time of day or the season can literally subtract people from places. In "February Evening in New York" by Denise Levertov, it is the usually busy city emptied.
As the stores close, a winter light
opens air to iris blue,
glint of frost through the smoke
grains of mica, salt of the sidewalk.
As the buildings close, released autonomous
feet pattern the streets
in hurry and stroll; balloon heads
drift and dive above them; the bodies
aren't really there.
