🌬️ Poems
⭐️ 🌬️ #Make a Ritual of the Thing You Dread, after CA Conrad, poetry prompt #5
Poetry is spiritual. It’s where you can communicate to the dead. It’s where you can meet the duende, the angel, and the muse.
⭐️🌬️ September Prompt #2
#Build a Labyrinth like an Oulipian
Oulipians are “rats who build the labyrinth from which they plan to escape.“The lipogram, then, is one maze among the many Oulipo builds. But the technique is inert on its own. It becomes literature only under the Oulipian wager: that a constraint obeyed without exception stops being an obstacle and becomes a heuristic, yielding locutions the unconstrained ear would never reach. The discipline is not to negotiate the prohibition but to submit to it and let it do the thinking. The prohibition is not the poem’s cage. It’s the poem’s argument.
Read the full prompt → here
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Happy September! I love this month & the beginning of Fall. I figured I would do a poetry prompt series throughout the month of September. I’ve been writing a poem a day recently, and it’s because of prompts that have helped me find a (new) place to start rather than the blank page I am a little too familiar with at times. I hope you can find a piece of this prompt that is helpful on your own exploration! 💫 🔭
Read the full prompt → here
🌬️ What an example of a debut poetry collection! I am going to keep this one in my back pocket to recommend. Finished reading: Slow Lightning (Volume 106) (Yale Series of Younger Poe… by Eduardo C. Corral 📚
Attached is a poem Want from the collection and a excerpt of Variations on a Theme by José Montoya
🌬️ Beyond excited to read Elizabeth Metzger’s new poetry book, The Going Is Forever, where she writes very specifically and honestly about the death of her father, a dissolving marriage, and her sons illness. A friend just sent me a sneak peak to share. Can’t wait to get my copy.
An honest, intricate, and breathtaking distillation of love’s true nature, The Going Is Forever reminds us that our closest relationships contain endless mysteries, and that there is never just one version of a life.
Can pre-order here
🌬️ If you’re around Smith Street in Brooklyn this month, check out the store-front poems at Poetry Society of America (119 Smith Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201), my poem “And Even You, With Your Lucky Breaks” is up! 🎲
🌬️ In honor of his 99th, here is a John Ashbery marathon from me.
Below is a favorite poem of mine, titled, “From Estuaries, from Casinos” that leaves me so tearful, especially:
I wish I could tell the next thing. But in dreams I can’t, / so will let this thing stand in for it, this me / I have become, this loving you either way.
The full poem can be found here but a note that on the bottom of the page you can listen to the reading!
🌬️ Currently reading: The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imaginat… by Wallace Stevens 📚
Wallace Stevens correctly weighs that it is a poet’s duty to hold the interdependence of reality and imagination. Fully living in both, as a poet’s job and task, is to help people to live their lives.
Reality is things as they are, and imagination presses back against the pressures of that said reality.
>“This has to do with our self-preservation… the sound of its words helps us to live our lives. [A poet] cannot be a charioteer traversing vacant space, however ethereal, he must have lived all of the last two thousand years, and longer, he must have instructed himself, as best he could, as he went along… imagination gives to everything it touches a peculiarity, and it seems to me that the peculiarity of the imagination is nobility, of which there are many degrees.”
🌬️ Thoughts on Elisabeth Camp's "Metaphor and That Certain 'Je Ne Sais Quoi'"
In Camp’s essay “Metaphor and That Certain ‘Je Ne Sais Quoi'” she breaks down why Juliet is the sun brings up a kaleidoscope of emotions and stays in the collective Poetry memory. I specifically love that Camp thinks through why this open-ended, some might even call it vague, metaphor actually works differently than we usually assume.
Often in teaching poetry, or being taught it, it’s easy to say “make the metaphor more precise or, just make it stranger”. Truthfully, we are all in fear of cliché, and T.S. Eliot has scared us into staying clear from abstraction… Yet Camp argues that the open-endedness is closer to what she elsewhere calls a frame: the metaphor asks you to see Juliet through the sun, importing a whole perspective, an organizing lens rather than swapping in a checklist of shared attributes.
What I find most useful is her point that any literal paraphrase inevitably turns the metaphor into a list: beautiful, hot, life-giving, natural, central, orbital, and a list is closed the moment you finish writing it, while a lens keeps generating new observations the longer you look through it.
That’s is probably the sharpest argument against “precision” as the goal: precision is a property of propositions, not of ways of seeing!
She also talks about metaphor’s twofold quality, meaning, you’re suppose to hold Juliet is like the sun and Juliet is not the sun at once. I think that unresolved doubleness might be where real strangeness comes from, rather than from just picking a more surprising vehicle. And she notes the frame doesn’t let you cherry-pick the flattering parts, there is a darkness inside the frame, invoking the sun also drags in the danger of staring too long, whether or not Romeo meant to say that. Once you invoke a frame, it has a mind of its own!
🌬️ Still beaming to have been part of such a generous & kind group of poets. All thanks to the PSA and Lynn Melnick for stitching together a solid cohort. The goal was that we would stay connected and invested in each other’s work from here on out, and I have no doubt that will be so! Excited to see where everyone goes and what they do.
🌬️ New poem published! Thank you to the Poetry Society of America for selecting my poem, “And Even You, With Your Lucky Breaks” for their storefront prize & big congrats to the other poets selected. My poem will be on display for the entire month of August on Smith Street in Brooklyn.
You can read more about the selection, the other winners, and my poem here.
🌬️ Grateful to Brooklyn Poets for the finalist mention for their Summer Fellowship. Congrats to everyone! And I’m excited to see what work comes from the fellows!
🌬️ Excited and very into this visual poem by Eugenia Leigh in Poetry Mag: “Oh I Thought You Knew, She Said, Dad Is Alive”
🌬️ New poem published!
Thanks to Nadia and the whole Thimble Literary Magazine team for publishing in both print & on the world wide web my poem “Now and Later” in their summer issue (the cover looks amazing!!). Print copies are available next weekend but you can view the issue here.
Without spoiling the magic, I’ll say two things: one) this poem feels like it was given to me. Meaning, I needed it more than it needed me. And two) the last line was written first, which also makes it a certain type of given.
Finished reading: Obit by Victoria Chang 📚
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>“What if we call the waiter over and God comes instead?”
Excerpt from Letters to a Young Poet
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>“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
>“Do not write a poetry of rarity, or of rarification, but of never again.” - Kevin Young 🌬️
🌬️ Poem: Nothing in That Drawer by Ron Padgett
One of my favorite sonnets –
>Nothing in That Drawer
>Ron Padgett
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>Nothing in that drawer.
>Nothing in that drawer.
>Nothing in that drawer.
>Nothing in that drawer.
>Nothing in that drawer.
>Nothing in that drawer.
>Nothing in that drawer.
>Nothing in that drawer.
>Nothing in that drawer.
>Nothing in that drawer.
>Nothing in that drawer.
>Nothing in that drawer.
>Nothing in that drawer.
>Nothing in that drawer.