Prompt: Epistles to the Poets

It is National Poetry Month 2015 in America. The Academy of American Poets has many special features on its website for this month. One is called "Dear Poet." It is a multimedia education project that invites young people in grades five through twelve to write letters in response to poems written and read by some of the award-winning poets who serve on their Board of Chancellors.

Poets Online asks you this month to join the students. You can read and watch a group of poets reading and discussing their poems. The students are being asked to write letters to the poets to express their thoughts, ideas, or ask any questions they may have about the poems. I wonder why they didn't ask students to write poems to the poets - which is what we we will do.

Epistles, or epistolary poems, comes from the Latin “epistula” for “letter," are poems that read as letters. As poems of direct address, they can be intimate and colloquial or formal and measured.

On our main site, the prompt includes two of the poems and poets from Dear Poets. One is Naomi Shihab Nye's "How Do I Know When A Poem Is Finished?" which itself is addressed to someone - perhaps a student who has asked the poet that question, though all poets ask that question to themselves.

The second example and video is for Edward Hirsch's poem "Cotton Candy" which looks back to the candy and a grandfather.

What would you write to Nye or Hirsch about their poems?

Our prompt is much wider. You can choose any poem on the Academy site or any poem at all. The only requirement is that you address the poet by name and that you include the title of the poem you are responding to in the poem.

Your poem might be titled "Dear Mr. Hirsch" or Dear Elizabeth" for a poem to Elizabeth Bishop, whose own epistle "Letter to N.Y." begins:

In your next letter I wish you’d say
where you are going and what you are doing;
how are the plays, and after the plays
what other pleasures you’re pursuing:

taking cabs in the middle of the night,
driving as if to save your soul
where the road goes round and round the park
and the meter glares like a moral owl

I might write to W. B. Yeats during this Easter week 2015 about his poem "Easter 1916" to let him know that this year:

I am sitting at the start of day
looking out the window
at my desk at a sky gray
above twenty-first century homes

that I have passed on my way,
like you, nodding and saying
polite meaningless words...

How Long Will You Revise a Poem?

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) was an extremely methodical  and downright slow writer. I was surprised to read that she only published 101 poems in her lifetime.

She worked on her poem “The Moose” on and off for more than 25 years. I have poems from 25 years ago that I still look at and revise, but I can't say that I have been "working on them" for all that time. For "The Moose," she had it tacked up on her wall so that she could rearrange the lines.

We all have our distractions. For Bishop, writing letters was one. (Perhaps today, she would be online and in email.) She once wrote 40 letters in a single day and said, “I sometimes wish that I had nothing, or little more, to do but write letters to the people who are not here.” A collection of her letters, One Art: Letters, was published in 1994.

I don't classify coming back to a poem written years ago and making changes as the same kind of revision as when I sit down every day for a week trying to get a poem to a place where I feel comfortable reading it to an audience or sending it out to the world.

I also have notebooks of typed and printed poems that feel unfinished that I rarely look at and even more rarely work on any more.

What is your revision process?


Here is the opening of "The Moose."

The Moose
For Grace Bulmer Bowers

From narrow provinces
of fish and bread and tea,
home of the long tides
where the bay leaves the sea
twice a day and takes
the herrings long rides,

where if the river
enters or retreats
in a wall of brown foam
depends on if it meets
the bay coming in,
the bay not at home;

where, silted red,
sometimes the sun sets
facing a red sea,
and others, veins the flats’
lavender, rich mud
in burning rivulets;

on red, gravelly roads,
down rows of sugar maples,
past clapboard farmhouses
and neat, clapboard churches,
bleached, ridged as clamshells,
past twin silver birches...

read the rest of the poem

Best Practices for Fair Use in Poetry

A resource that might be especially useful for teachers of poetry, but also poets, critics, and publishers, is available from the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute in collaboration with American University's Center for Social Media and its Washington College of Law. They have created the "Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Poetry."

Devised specifically by and for the poetry community, this best practices code serves as a guide to reasonable and appropriate uses of copyrighted materials in new and old media.

"This document," says project adviser Lewis Hyde, "brings wonderful clarity to the otherwise opaque world of poetry permissions. It is a useful tool that should serve poets, critics, and publishers alike."

It is available as a free free download (pdf) from the Center for Social Media.

Prompt: Shoveling Snow with the Buddha and Billy Collins

If you are in a part of the world covered with snow, you may identify in that way with this month's model poem: "Shoveling Snow With Buddha" by Billy Collins. Our prompt for February is writing about someone who is well known but in your poem "out of place."

I like that in Collins' poem the Buddha is out of place for several reasons. First, he is doing something and we are used to seeing him seated and meditative. We also usually find him in a nice temperate setting, not in the snow. Of course, he is also out of place because he is out of time, dropped into our present from his past.

Besides the idea that he is helping shovel snow, he is also quite interested in hot chocolate and playing cards after the shoveling - two rewards for his work, not unlike a child's rewards for helping clear the snow.

He is more Buddha-like in his mindfulness of the work.

He has thrown himself into shoveling snow
as if it were the purpose of existence,
as if the sign of a perfect life were a clear driveway

Collins is no real life Buddhist, though he is mindful, but the poem touches on several ideas in Buddhism. Like most of Collins' poems, the light, perhaps funny, surface of the poem is a way to slide into more serious points. In this poem, I am reminded about how often we forget that the journey is the destination, and how often we want to be anywhere but in the now.

This prompt asks you to place a well-known person (living or dead, real or fictional) somewhere out of place. There is the suggestion of something absurd in this, although Emily Dickinson at Starbucks is not as odd as if you made her a Victoria's Secret runway model, so the choice is yours when it comes to that aspect of the prompt.

Deadline for submissions: March 8, 2015