31 Dec 2023

25 Years of Poets Online


Closing out 2023 means that Poets Online has been online for 25 years. A significant number for any publication, especially one that features only poetry.

Our January issue will be the 316th prompt and issue of poems. I never referred to them as "issues" at the start back in 1998, but over the years as our audience and contributors expanded that became the label. 

The site started as an e-mail exchange among four poets taking turns at suggesting a prompt and then e-mailing our poems to each other. As more poets joined the group, it became an awkward mailing process, and the website was created. The following year we created a mailing list to remind people to check the latest prompt and read the poems. That list now has hundreds of subscribers.

By 20023, a free hosting website and free domain weren't enough, so I bought the domain poetsonline.org, purchased hosting, and created a new list and email using Google.

We still try to accept the best poems that respond to the current prompt in a serious way. We have always thought of the site as a place where poets of varying ages and experiences could get published. We have plenty of people who read and don't submit and a good number of teachers and students have written us to say that they find the site useful. More than a hundred other sites link to us. If your poem is published and you use it in a book later, Poets Online should be acknowledged as its first appearance. 

Although I never know how many more anniversaries we will have, I am thankful for all the poems I've read and poets I have made contact with over this quarter century. 

Ken Ronkowitz


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28 Dec 2023

"The Clock" - a prose poem for a lady

I am neither a big fan of the poet Baudelaire nor am I a fan of prose poems, but this one got my attention.

 I'll admit that the opening got my interest and I wanted to know how, But I too often find prose poems to be just prose. Like flash fiction. Poetic language? Perhaps, but many novelists have poetic language but I would call the novel a epic prose poem. 

I'm told that intent is key in making a prose poem a poem. That is a tough one to evaluate.

Feel free to educate me on this with a comment.


"L'Horloge" (The Clock)
a prose poem by Charles Baudelaire [translated by David Lehman]
– for a lady

How do the Chinese tell time? By looking at the eyes of their
cats. Here’s how.

A lost missionary, afoot in a sleepy suburb of Nankin, had
forgotten his watch and asked a little boy what time it was.

After a moment’s hesitation, this street urchin of the celestial
Empire said: ‘‘Wait, I will tell you.’’ A few seconds later, he

reappeared with a very fat cat in his arms, looked into the 
whites of her eyes, and said, ‘‘It is almost but not quite noon.’’ 
Which was the case.

As for me, if I favor my beautiful Feline, so felicitously named –

the honor of her sex, the pride of my heart, and the perfume 
of my spirit, day and night, rain or shine – in the depths of her
 adorable eyes I can always tell what time it is, and it is always
 the same time, an hour vast, solemn, limitless as space undivided
 into minutes and seconds – a lingering hour no clock observes, 
soft as a sigh, swift as a glance.

And if an intruder came to disturb my study of this enchanting dial,
if some malevolent genie, some demon of ill fortune, were to address
me as a vain and idle mortal and say: ‘‘What are you staring at?
What are you looking for in the eyes of that creature? Is time told there,
 and can you tell it?’’ I would reply without hesitation. ‘‘I know what time
it is; it is Eternity.’’

Madame, is not this a most meritorious bagatelle, and as full of vain
self-regard as your high and mighty self? Frankly, my dear, it has given me
so much pleasure embroidering this pretentious piece of puffery that I ask
nothing of you in return.

from the Summer 2019 issue of The Yale Review, in which four other prose poems by Charles Baudelaire appear.



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20 Dec 2023

Blake's Tyger and Lamb


Blake's illustrated version of the poem

William Blake's poem "The Tyger" is his most-read poem. It consists entirely of questions about the nature of God and creation. It asks how the same God that created vulnerable beings like the lamb could also have made the fearsome tiger. 

The tiger becomes a symbol for one of religion's most difficult questions: Why does God allow evil to exist?

I first read the poem in a high school class and my initial question was "Why did he spell tiger wrong?" Not the deepest of literary issues. In writing this essay, I did some digging for an answer since my teacher had no answers other than "It's what they did back then."

 William Blake intentionally spelled "tiger" as "tyger" in his poem that was in his collection titled "Songs of Experience" (1794). It is thought that changing the traditional spelling of "tiger" to "tyger" not only gave the word a unique. mythical and archaic quality. It also allowed Blake to exercise creative freedom about the creature he was describing. The tyger is a literal creature but also a symbolic force.

Blake was also known for his interest in the relationship between sound and meaning in language and tyger captures the phonetic qualities of the word.

"...What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
...Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?" 

The lamb refers to Blake's poem, "The Lamb," where God is associated with a gentle and innocent lamb. 

THE TYGER

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat.
What dread hand? & what dread feet?


What the hammer? what the chain,|
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp.
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Compare that tiger to the lamb. Blake was clearly a religious person who saw visions of angels, but to me "The Tyger" is a poem that literally questions God. Can God be credited with both the good and evil in the world? I din't think you could give him the credit for creating the "lambs" of this world without also giving him responsibility for the "tygers" of this world.  That was my high school interpretation (which my teacher did not appreciate or agree with) and it remains my interpretation.

THE LAMB

Little Lamb who made thee 
         Dost thou know who made thee
Gave thee life & bid thee feed.
By the stream & o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice! 

         Little Lamb who made thee 
         Dost thou know who made thee 
         Little Lamb I'll tell thee,
         Little Lamb I'll tell thee!

He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb:
He is meek & he is mild,
He became a little child:
I a child & thou a lamb,
We are called by his name.

         Little Lamb God bless thee. 
         Little Lamb God bless thee.



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14 Dec 2023

Robert Frost's Christmas Cards


Our call for submissions for the January 2024 issue is about "personal" holidays which do not get on official calendars and probably don't get you a day off from work or cards and gifts. But I thought of how Robert Frost sent out Christmas poem “cards” from 1929 to 1962.

Each year, Frost would select a poem and often write an original piece for the occasion. he sent them to some friends and loved ones. Later they went out to his publisher’s friends and loved ones. If you were lucky enough to be on that list and still have them, they are collectors’ items.

They began as just his way to honor the winter season with a poem. One poem used was "Christmas Trees." (an excerpt below)

...He proved to be the city come again 
To look for something it had left behind   
And could not do without and keep its Christmas. 
He asked if I would sell my Christmas trees; 
My woods—the young fir balsams like a place 
Where houses all are churches and have spires. 
I hadn't thought of them as Christmas trees.   
I doubt if I was tempted for a moment 
To sell them off their feet to go in cars 
And leave the slope behind the house all bare, 
Where the sun shines now no warmer than the moon...
 

Frost, 1929 (by Doris Ulmann, national Portrait Gallery)

Joseph Blumenthal headed Spiral Press during those years. Without Frost's knowledge, while working on an edition of Frost’s poetry in 1929, he printed 250 copies for friends and colleagues of “Christmas Trees.” When the poet saw the publication, his first response was not to sue him but to request a few copies to send out to his own family members. And so, the annual tradition was born.

The last Christmas mailing contained "The Prophets Really Prophesy as Mystics, the Commentators Merely by Statistics” which went out with 16,555 copies. 

The collection would feature other classic poems by Frost, including “Birches,” “A Boy’s Will,” and “The Wood-Pile”

"Christmas Trees" is no Hallmark greeting card, but it ends with this Christmas wish:   

A thousand Christmas trees I didn’t know I had!
Worth three cents more to give away than sell,
As may be shown by a simple calculation.
Too bad I couldn’t lay one in a letter.
I can’t help wishing I could send you one,
In wishing you here with a Merry Christmas.

More about the cards at poets.org/text/robert-frosts-christmas-cards


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7 Dec 2023

Prompt: Personal Holidays


December is a big month for holidays both religious, pagan and secular. Many people love these holidays and spend a lot of time and money celebrating them. But not everyone is a fan of these "official" holidays.

In the poem "A New Law" by Greg Delanty, he proposes:

Let there be a ban on every holiday.
No ringing in the new year.
No fireworks doodling the warm night air.
No holly on the door. I say
let there be no more.
For many are not here who were here before.

I wouldn't propose that radical of a change in holidays, but I understand the sentiment.

For this December call for submissions in the 25th year of Poets Online, we are looking for poems about personal holidays. These are the holidays that perhaps only you celebrate. They are not on official calendars but they might be on your personal calendar. Not birthdays, anniversaries, national holidays, or religious holy days, not even Festivus.

In Galway Kinnell's poem "The 26th of December" he marks the day after Christmas not as being connected to that holiday but as" A Tuesday, day of Tiw, / god of war." Not exactly what most people would connect to the day after Christmas.

He celebrates the short day by

"talking by the fire,
floating on snowshoes among
ancient self-pollarded maples,
visiting, being visited, giving
a rain gauge, receiving red socks,
watching snow buntings nearly over
their heads in snow stab at spirtled bits
of sunflower seeds the chickadees
hold with their feet to a bough
and hack apart, scattering debris
like sloppy butchers"

It is a short holiday, one day and in a season of short days. And when it is over, " Irregular life begins" again, as with many holidays.

"Telephone calls,
Google searches, evasive letters,
complicated arrangements, faxes,
second thoughts, consultations,
e-mails, solemnly given kisses."

Give us a poem about your personal holiday. Why do you mark the day(s) and how do you celebrate? (If celebrate is even what you do.) 

Submission Deadline: December 31, 2023   Happy New Year!


Galway Kinnell was an award-winning poet best known for poetry that connects the experiences of daily life to much larger poetic, spiritual, and cultural forces. Kinnell was born in 1927 in Providence, Rhode Island and grew up in Pawtucket. A self-described introvert as a child, he grew up reading reclusive American writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson. After two years of service in the U.S. Navy, he earned a BA in 1948 from Princeton University where he was classmates with poet W.S. Merwin. He earned an MA from the University of Rochester a year later.

Of his first books, What a Kingdom it Was (1960), Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock (1964) and Body Rags(1968) which contains the bulk of Kinnell’s most praised and anthologized poems. Selected Poems (1982), for which Kinnell won the Pulitzer Prize and was co-winner of the National Book Award in 1983, contains works from every period in the poet’s career and was released just shortly before he won a prestigious MacArthur Foundation grant. Kinnell released the retrospective collection, A New Selected Poems (2001), focusing on poetry of the 1960s and 1970s, and his Collected Poems was published in 2017.
Kinnell lived in Vermont for many years. He died in 2014 at the age of 87.



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28 Nov 2023

The Visions of William Blake

Blake's illustration of angels guarding Jesus in the sepulchre 


November 28 is the birthday of poet and artist William Blake, born in London in 1757. He was four years old when he had a vision that God was at his window. A few years later, he went for a walk and saw a tree filled with angels, their wings shining. He had other visions, too: he saw the prophet Ezekiel sitting under a tree, and angels walking with farmers making hay.

While some aspects of his behavior and beliefs might be considered eccentric or even insane by conventional standards, it's better to approach the question of his mental state with some sensitivity and historical context.

During Blake's time (1757-1827), the understanding and classification of mental health were different from contemporary perspectives. There is no definitive evidence to suggest that Blake was clinically insane. However, he did experience visions and claimed to have mystical experiences, which heavily influenced his artistic and poetic creations. Blake's unique worldview and his incorporation of spiritual and visionary elements in his works are more often seen as products of his unconventional thinking and artistic genius rather than indicators of mental illness.

When Blake was 10 his parents sent him to drawing school, and at the age of 14, he was apprenticed to an engraver. After seven years, he went into business for himself, and a few years later he privately printed his first book, Poetical Sketches (1783 which was a total flop. The book wasn't even mentioned in the index of London's Monthly Review, a list of every book published that month.

Not long after that, Blake's beloved brother, Robert, died at the age of 24. Blake spent two sleepless weeks at his deathbed, and when he died, Blake claimed that he saw his brother's spirit rise through the ceiling, clapping its hands with joy. From then on, Blake had regular conversations with his dead brother. 

A year later, Robert appeared to William in a vision and taught him a method called "illuminated printing," which combined text and painting into one. Now known as relief etching, it was a huge breakthrough in printing. Blake printed his own Songs of Innocence (1789), Songs of Experience (1794), The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), and The Book of Los (1795). 

Blake died at the age of 69. He spent the day of his death working on a series of engravings of Dante's Divine Comedy. That evening, he drew a portrait of his wife, and then told her it was his time. A friend of Blake's who was there at his deathbed wrote: "He died on Sunday night at 6 o'clock in a most glorious manner. [...] Just before he died, His Countenance became fair. His eyes Brighten'd and He burst out into Singing of the things he saw in Heaven."

At the time of his death, Blake was an obscure figure, best remembered for his engravings of other peoples' work, or maybe his one famous poem, "The Tyger." Among those who knew more about his life's work, the consensus was that Blake was insane. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, which he had engraved and painted by hand, had sold fewer than 20 copies in 30 years. 

It wasn't until more than 30 years after his death that a husband-and-wife team, Alexander and Anne Gilchrist, published a two-volume biography of Blake that firmly established him as a brilliant and important artist.

Throughout his career, he continued to see visions — in addition to communing with the spirits of relatives and friends, he claimed to be visited by the spirits of many great historical figures, including Alexander the Great, Voltaire, Socrates, Milton, and Mohammed. He talked with them and drew their portraits. He was also visited by angels and once by the ghost of a flea, whose portrait he drew. 



Blake wrote:

"I assert for My Self that I do not behold the outward Creation [...] 'What,' it will be Question'd, 'When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?' O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host."

"First the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged: this I shall do by printing in the infernal method by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away and displaying the infinite which was hid."

 "Without minute neatness of execution, the sublime cannot exist! Grandeur of ideas is founded on the precision of ideas."





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9 Nov 2023

The Romance of That Little Notebook in the Cafe



















Moleskine. There is something about using that little black notebook and knowing all the writers and artists who have used it before you - Hemingway, Picasso, Van Gogh (that's one of his over there on the right), Bruce Chatwin, Matisse, Neil Gaiman...

Sketches in words or lines, notes, stories, poems, ideas, overheard dialogue.

You see it in films. Isn't that Amelie holding one? And even Prot (and he's from K-PAX - the other planet I want to visit) has one.

Sometimes it's used as a generic term for little soft black notebooks, the real Moleskine (pronounced mol-a-skeen-a) is a brand of notebook now manufactured by Modo & Modo, an Italian company.

Bound in oilcloth-covered cardboard (the "Moleskin"), it has an elastic band to hold the notebook closed and a sewn spine so that it lies flat when opened. It comes in several sizes, with lined or unlined papers.

Bruce Chatwin used them in his travels and in the mid-1980s when his Paris source ran out, he discovered that they were no longer being made by the original manufacturer. They are back though and made in the same shapes and styles.

I'm a sucker for notebooks and journals. I always felt an optimism for the new school year with that fresh notebook in hand. Give me a Moleskine and put me in a street cafe or bar (even a Panera or Starbucks will do it) and I feel some ex-pat writer being channeled through me. Now, I'm not saying that it creates great writing, but it creates mood.

As readers of this blog already know, I have small books for small poems but I have a number of these notebooks from their catalog for different purposes.

If you have never owned one, drop by a little bookstore or Amazon, buy one, and give it a try.


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3 Nov 2023

Prompt: Love Poem to Yourself


Woman at Mirror by Gerard ter Borch 1652

Louise Glück (pronounced ɡlɪk) died October 13, 2023, at the age of 80. She was a highly praised and awarded American poet and essayist. She won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Bollingen Prize. From 2003 to 2004, she was the Poet Laureate of the United States.

Despite all those awards, I will admit to not being very familiar with her poetry. I never heard her read in person and I don't have any of her books on my shelf. After her death, there were many posts online about her and copies or links to her poems and interviews.

The poem of hers that caught my attention is a short one titled "Crossroads." I read it as a love poem to the self, written at an advanced age when one is considering their own death. 

I watched an interview with her and learned a lot more about her life and work which made the poem richer on my next reading. 

 “Crossroads,” originally published in her 2009 book A Village Life, so she was still 14 years from her death. maybe she was contemplating death. Maybe she had an illness. In the poem, she looks at her body - not uncommon as we age - but also at her soul. She says that " it is not the earth I will miss / it is you I will miss."

"Self love" sounds selfish. But so many people don't love themselves. Therapists deal with that every day. 

Listen to her read the poem and look at it on the page. Then, consider writing a love poem to yourself. What is it that you love about yourself? What will you miss about yourself? Do you already miss something you once loved about yourself?

     


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The Alarming Spread of Poetry



P.G. Wodehouse is Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE (1881 – 1975) and he was an English author and one of the most widely-read humorists of the 20th century. wrote "The Alarming Spread of Poetry."  Do you think he was being sarcastic?
To the thinking man, there are few things more disturbing than the realization that we are becoming a nation of minor poets. In the good old days, poets were for the most part confined to garrets, which they left only for the purpose of being ejected from the offices of magazines and papers to which they attempted to sell their wares. Nobody ever thought of reading a book of poems unless accompanied by a guarantee from the publisher that the author had been dead at least a hundred years. Poetry, like wine, certain brands of cheese, and public buildings, was rightly considered to improve with age; and no connoisseur could have dreamed of filling himself with raw, indigestible verse, warm from the maker.



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16 Oct 2023

Prompt: Surprise

"Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota" by James Wright is our model poem this month. Wright's short poem is primarily a description of a country setting. He sees a farm, viewed from a hammock. It is a pleasant, relaxing scene.

The poem is a single stanza, free verse, in simple language. It has 13 lines - one short of a sonnet. But like a sonnet, it has a "turn" - a quick one in its final line. It is almost like the poem is a sonnet without the final concluding heroic couplet. That final line is a surprise ending - a twist that seems to undo the previous 12 lines.

My reading of the poem is that the person in the hammock is a visitor to Duffy's farm. It is not where he lives and different from where he does live. The scene around him is pleasant and the visitor's conclusion comes from that scene, but in an unexpected way.

For our November issue, we are looking for poems with a surprise ending, a twist, or a poem that ends in a way that flips the poem's meaning.

Submission Deadline: October 31, 2023

  


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Conversations About Poetry

"Tell all the truth but tell it slant" wrote Emily Dickinson. I have heard recited it or read it many times, but I realized that I'm still not really sure I understand it completely.

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —

Maybe that's the thing about good poems - that as much as you like hearing them and getting some meaning from them, they offer you the chance to revisit them and get even more from them.

I enjoy having conversations about poetry. You could post a comment about Emily's little poem on this post.

Poets Online has been a website asking you to write to a prompt since 1998. I enjoy receiving and reading poems submitted and occasionally I develop an email connection with a poet. I know a few poets who have written on the site in real life, and just a few times someone has approached me at a reading to introduce themself as one of the poets published on the site. But that is the rare exception.


In 2005, I started this blog and added Poets Online to Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest - not so much as promotion, but so that readers could connect with me. It happens sometimes, but not often.

There is also a Poets Online discussion group on Facebook where people sometimes post poems they have written, or ones that touch them, or links to things poetic. 

Twitter is not as good at conversations (and has a tarnished reputation since I entered us there in 2005) but it still has value. 

I hope you will join the conversation.


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4 Oct 2023

Tennyson

"The Poet Laureate", caricature of Tennyson in Vanity Fair, 1871

Do people still read the Victorian poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson? I'm not sure if he is even read in K-12 English classrooms these days. I read him in high school and had a course in college in the 1970s that assigned us Idylls of the King. I enjoyed the cycle of twelve narrative poems which retells the legend of King Arthur, his knights, his love for Guinevere and her tragic betrayal of him, and the rise and fall of Arthur's kingdom. I was taking another course on Arthurian literature and it all made sense.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) was the Poet Laureate from 1850. Idylls of the King was published between 1859 and 1885.

Tennyson was born in Lincolnshire, England in 1809 and showed early promise as a poet. I don't know how good it is but he wrote a 6,000-line epic when he was only 12. He published a book of poetry with his brother when he was only 17. 

He had to leave Cambridge because of his father's death. He published some poetry and got some particularly negative reviews. Then, his best friend died and Tennyson fell into a period of depression. "I suffered what seemed to me to shatter all my life so that I desired to die rather than to live," he said of that time He refused to publish anything for ten years. 

When he finally put out his next book, simply titled Poems, it established his career immediately and brilliantly. He went on to succeed William Wordsworth as Britain's poet laureate, and Queen Victoria conferred on him the title of baron, arguably making him the first poet ever to sit in the House of Lords based solely on the merit of his verse. His fame at the time was probably only eclipsed by that of the prime minister and the queen herself. 

But I don't think he is read much anymore except for some anthologized poems that turn up in a high school Brit Lit course or in a college survey class.




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23 Sept 2023

Oppenheimer, John Donne and the Bhagavad Gita

July 16, 1945, Trinity, the first nuclear weapons test.


The film Oppenheimer was a big hit this summer and if you saw the film and especially if you read the book it is based on, American Prometheus, you know that there are some literary references. Two that influenced him were the poetry of John Donne and the Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita.

Both were important to him during the Manhattan Project and at the Trinity test. In 1962, Manhattan Project leader Gen. Leslie Groves wrote to Oppenheimer to ask about the origins of the name Trinity. Oppenheimer said, “Why I chose the name is not clear, but I know what thoughts were in my mind. There is a poem of John Donne, written just before his death, which I know and love.” 

Oppenheimer quoted the sonnet “Hymn to God, My God, in My Sickness” which is about a man unafraid to die because he believed in resurrection.

Oppenheimer continued, “That still does not make a Trinity, but in another, better known devotional poem Donne opens, ‘Batter my heart, three person’d God.’ Beyond this, I have no clues whatever.”

That second poem,“Batter My Heart,” expresses the paradox that by being chained to God, the narrator can be set free.

Oppenheimer wanted to read the Bhagavad-Gita in the original Sanskrit, the primary sacred language of Hinduism. Before Los Alamos, when he was a professor at Berkeley, he audited Sanskrit classes with Arthur W. Ryder, who had published an English translation of the Bhagavad-Gita.

The "Bhagavad-Gita" expresses a life structured by action. One should detach from desired outcomes and work. Preparing for Trinity, Oppenheimer’s thoughts were on the success of the test and the impact of the bomb on his life and the world. 

As you see in the film, at the Trinity detonation, Oppenheimer was said to have  recalled the line from the book, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” 

However, some critics have said that the quote has been widely misinterpreted. Oppenheimer is not Krishna/Vishnu, not the terrible god, not the ‘destroyer of worlds’ — he is Arjuna, the human prince who didn’t really want to kill his brothers, his fellow people but he has been enjoined to battle by something bigger than himself.

Historian James A. Hijiya wrote that Oppenheimer believed, “It was the duty of the scientists to build the bomb, but it was the duty of the statesman to decide whether or how to use it.”

Before the Trinity test, Oppenheimer sipped coffee, rolled smokes, and read French poet Charles Baudelaire. T.S. Eliot was another poet Oppenheimer admired. He met Eliot when he invited him as the director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Eliot wrote, “Do I dare / Disturb the universe?”



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14 Sept 2023

Prompt: Broken Off

This month's model poem is the shortest we have ever used as a writing prompt example for our submissions. Not even 17 syllables, it is shorter than a haiku.

Two Linen Handkerchiefs
How can you have been dead twelve years
and these still
   by Jane Hirshfield

The poem asks the reader to complete the thought, as poems often do. No ellipsis, no dash, just broken off.

It was in listening to a short interview with the poet, that I discovered this poem and her explanation of how it came to be.

"The poem is broken off in exactly the way a life is broken off, in exactly the way grief breaks off, takes us beyond any possible capacity for words to speak. And yet it also, short as it is, holds all of our bewilderment in the face of death. How is it that these inanimate handkerchiefs — which did belong to my father and are still in a drawer of mine, and which I did accidentally come across — how can they still be so pristinely ironed and clean and existent when the person who chose them and used them and wore them is gone? ... Some poems have a way of, sometimes quite literally, looking out a window. They change their focus of direction, they change their attention. And by doing that, by glancing for a moment at something else, the field of the poem becomes larger."

Jane Hirshfield is a poet I have used multiple times for prompts and she is a poet I have heard read in person multiple times. She seems to be a very gentle and compassionate soul, and that is often clear in her poetry. She is an ordained lay practitioner of Zen. ("I'm [also] a Universal Life minister, but that was just so I could marry some friends," she says, laughing.)

I think compassion, in a way, is one of the most important things poems do for me, and I trust do for other people. They allow us to feel how shared our fates are. If a person reads this poem when they're inside their own most immediate loss, they immediately — I hope — feel themselves accompanied. Someone else has been here. Someone else has felt what I felt. And, you know, we know this in our minds, but that's very different from being accompanied by the words of a poem, which are not ideas but are experiences."

I don't know if all that can be contained in her two-line poem. And we don't expect you to submit poems that are only two lines. 

Our call for submissions for the October issue is for poems about things "broken off." Your poem might be about a relationship broken off. Maybe your poem will literally break off at some appropriate point, as Jane's poem does. Maybe it is about an actual object that has a part broken off, or more figuratively, a person with something broken off. What do those two words mean to you?

Submission Deadline: September 30, 2023



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visit our website at poetsonline.org



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22 Aug 2023

A Poetry Prompt from Kurt Vonnegut

The doodle that Vonnegut sometimes used as a signature,
as with the letter below. His actual signature is that mess that
is the ear and hair on the doodle.


In this reply to a high school class, Kurt Vonnegut gives a poetry prompt that you might want to try. It's not one that would work well for Poets Online, but it makes a good point about the rewards of writing poetry.

Dear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lockwood, and Messrs Perin, McFeely, Batten, Maurer and Congiusta:

I thank you for your friendly letters. You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don't make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana.

What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow.

Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you're Count Dracula.

Here's an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don't do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don't tell anybody what you're doing. Don't show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?

Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash recepticals [sic]. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what's inside you, and you have made your soul grow.

God bless you all!
Kurt Vonnegut



via  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/14/kurt-vonnegut-xavier-letter_n_4964532.html


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3 Aug 2023

Prompt: Conversation


Whenever our call for submissions involves formal poetry, submissions decrease. I understand that. Forms - villanelles, sonnets, sestinas et al - can be difficult. They can also remind some poets of the kind of poetry that was pushed upon them in their early schooling and might have turned them off from reading and writing poetry. But there are other forms for poems that are far less "formal."

I was reading “Walking Home” from Magdalene by Marie Howe and it struck me that the poem is a conversation. It lacks the punctuation of dialogue but maintains the form.

This is the kind of poem that will sometimes make a reader ask "How is this a poem and not just a chunk of prose lacking punctuation?"   A fair question.

I suspect that this conversation happened to Marie Howe and her daughter. Is it an exact transcription, a paraphrase or is it a poet's version of a conversation recalled. I think it is the latter. The opening "Everything dies" is a good poem opening but the poet doesn't recall how that came up as the topic of conversation. Was it something they saw on their walk?

The tone of the poem seems light, with laughter and joking, but the topic is one of the classic big and serious themes - death. If you're a reader of Howe's poems, you know that life and death are very much a part of her themes.

This month's call for submissions is simply a poem that is a conversation. How you format the dialogue, how much narration and commentary is contained and the topic or theme is up to you.

Though it is difficult to draw a clear line between this kind of prose and poetry, there are clearly poetic elements that can be employed that separate what you write from a prose passage.




   


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To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org



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30 Jul 2023

No Comment



"Anonymous" posted a comment here that said...

"I'm very curious about poets as bloggers. No doubt you know quite a few poets
and at least a few poet-bloggers. Poets Online is a wonderful site so many of us come to  in order to be inspired or simply to read some of the new (or older, archived) poems. Being a poet myself, I realize I need time to reflect a lot before committing to paper (or screen) while many of the bloggers I see around tend to be people who like to plunge in and get ideas out very quickly.
So here's the question: why is it so few of the poets who use this site
don't add their own comments to the blog? Any thoughts on this?"




Anonymous, I'm not sure if you're commenting on the lack of comments, the lack of comments identified as being from poets, or about why some poets don't respond in a timely fashion to a post or prompt. 

My hope in allowing comments (and it does open the door to abuse and spam) was that it would create conversations about poetry, especially relating to the current submissions. That has not really materialized in any big way. 

We also have a Facebook page and a Facebook discussion group where some conversations occur and people post their poems and poems of others that they want to share.

The comment that Anon had referenced was posted on August 4, and that particular blog post had 6 comments at that point, which is actually a good number of comments. Before I had a chance to respond, this lengthy comment/response came from oneyenoeye who wrote:
It's an interesting question--my guess is that not commenting allows one to retain a sense of complete detachment and invisiblity. Why are there more lurkers and leachers than content producers on the web?

You can spend lots of time posting responses to blogs, if that's your thing. If you're the "plunge right in type," and subscribe to the "first thought, best thought" school of spontaneity, it's no big deal to leave a comment. To comment implies a willingness to engage in a conversation that could lead anywhere. Whenever I post a comment, it feels as though some invisible hand has given me a hard shove between the shoulder blades, causing me to stumble forward out of the darkness into the light.

If you're like me, after I read a blog entry, the brain starts constructing a chain of associations that leads away from the page. Once that happens, I don't return to post a comment. Rarely do I jot down an intial thought or reaction to a blog entry.

Comments that provide a new slant on a subject or that nudge the conversation in an interesting or surprising direction are appreciated. An intelligent comment can take quite a bit of time to compose. I always check out reader responses to books listed on Amazon, for example. Many of those posts are better than the publisher's editorial remarks. Some readers have submitted hundreds of insightful reviews, as well as useful recommendations for further reading, and make up a pretty savvy group of unpaid book critics.

But if you're afraid of sounding stupid, it's probably better not to post your ideas for the world to read. Mindless comments are like litter on the side of the road--the kind of garbage you find posted on political blogs or under a UTube video.

Post a comment and you invite a response. I've seen rather innocent comments lead to some pretty heated exchanges. Poets are sensitive creatures, not really looking to stir up trouble. Most people, it seems to me, have learned to keep their heads down for fear of getting them blown off.

The question reminds me of the typical classroom situation where a few students actively participate in a discussion while the rest of the class listens but does not voice an opinion or offer any additional insights. It's not that those students are disengaged or disinterested; they're simply content to lie on the bank and watch the river flow without ever getting a toe wet. Maybe that reluctance to dive in serves as a kind of quality control that eliminates the dumb comment, the ill-considered remark. In that case, it's a good thing that most people don't feel compelled to add their two cents worth to the conversation. If all comments were thoughtful as well as thought-provoking, there would be no need to monitor what is posted to a site.

As for me, I'm content sitting on the sidelines as a spectator unless there is some overwhelming compulsion that makes me want to take the field. To comment or not to comment--it's a question of rechanneling energy and giving something back. Most of the time, I'm too lazy to do that.

Posting a comment entails a degree of commitment that most people prefer not to take on for whatever reason--limited time and/or distraction, most likely. But without comments, you don't get that sense of vital community, that feeling of being involved in a common endeavor.

oneyenoeye says he or she is "content sitting on the sidelines as a spectator unless there is some overwhelming compulsion that makes me want to take the field," so something overwhelmed about that comment.

On the main Poets Online site, poets are invited to give their email addresses along with their submissions if they want to invite comments from readers. I have no hard statistics on how many poets actually get emails from readers, but my anecdotal evidence is that very few poets get responses. Do you think that lack of response comes from the same reasons as the lack of comments?

I've given poetry readings and attended many more readings and haven't noted all that many "comments and responses" after the reading to the poets.

Look at the comments here and on other blogs - lots on anonymous comments. Maybe those are comments from the poets who contribute to the site.

I have no answer to these questions, but it's great to get thoughtful comments on the blog. I had hoped in creating the blog to encourage some conversation about the prompts while they were active, and about the poems after they are posted. I can't say that has happened in any substantial way.

Want to comment about no comments? Here's the place...


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27 Jul 2023

Punctuation and Poetry


We used punctuation as part of a prompt in 2012 that featured a poem by Thomas Lux - see poetsonline.org/archive/arch_punctuation.html



PUNCTUATION: Some poets use it. Some don't.

Of course, there are many poems where punctuation is most definitely necessary, but there are also cases where it is not. Are there any "rules" for its usage?

Students have asked about when they should use punctuation - or should they use it or do they have to use it?

When lines are short - three words or less - punctuation (commas and periods) can look silly.

“Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke,”
 wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald may not have been a fan of the exclamation point, but the New York School of poets took a liking to it.

  • Walt Whitman liked... the ellipsis.  
  • Emily Dickinson was fond of using -  the dash. 
  • A.R. Ammons did things with: the colon.  
  • E.E. Cummings, besides his experiments with Upper and LOWER case, liked to make use of (parentheses).
Much of this has been studied and I'm sure there are more than a few graduate theses out there on related topics.

From the Poets.org Guide to Emily Dickinson's Collected Poems (pdf download)
A typical manuscript for a poem might include several undated versions, with varying capitalization throughout, sometimes a "C" or an "S" that seems to be somewhere between lowercase and capital, and no degree of logic in the capitalization. While important subject words and the symbols that correspond to them are often capitalized, often (but not always) a metrically stressed word will be capitalized as well, even if it has little or no relevance in comparison to the rest of the words in the poem. Early editors removed all capitals but the first of the line, or tried to apply editorial logic to their usage. For example, poem 632 is now commonly punctuated as follows:
The Brain – is wider than the Sky –
For – put them side by side –
The one the other will contain
With ease – and You – beside –

The Brain is deeper than the sea –
For – hold them – Blue to Blue –
The one the other will absorb –
As Sponges – Buckets – do –

The Brain is just the weight of God –
For – Heft them – Pound for Pound –
And they will differ – if they do –
As Syllable from Sound –

"E. E." Dickinson and E.E. Cummings may have more in common in this regard than you would expect. Cummings made his use of punctuation so much of a style that it may seem to be a parody at times. This poem about a grasshopper has just about everything happening in it.


r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r
   who
a)s w(e loo)k
upnowgath
  PPEGORHRASS
        eringint(o-
  aThe):l
         eA
           !p:
S                                      a
                 (r
rIvInG               .gRrEaPsPhOs)
                                   to
rea(be)rran(com)gi(e)ngly
,grasshopper;

He uses words, punctuation, and space to create a "concrete" visual image of a grasshopper jumping. The word and letter jumble makes more sense as we dig deeper and yet some of it is for pure visual rather than reader effect.

I have used some of his poems with children who like finding the hidden poem. They find the jumping-all-about grasshopper r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r who as we look up now gathering to leap leaps arriving...

They realize the poem is not just meant to be "read."

And then, there's the ampersand.  &  Not really punctuation, but an abbreviation of a sort. As I have written on another blog:.
The ampersand is a curious thing in our language that dates back to the 1st century A.D.

Originally, it was a ligature of the letters E and T. What's a ligature? In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes are joined as a single glyph. Ligatures usually replace consecutive characters sharing common components.

Suffice it to say, the ampersand is the most common one we use in English.

"Et" is Latin for "and" - as in et cetera, which is such a mouthful that we feel the need to shorten even that to etc. It can actually be further shortened as &c.
The & picked up traction in poetry with the Beats and the Black Mountain poets. (Ginsberg: "blond & naked angel") and e.e. cummings, Frank O'Hara, Amiri Baraka, John Berryman, and Nick Flynn. 


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The Cento

street wall collage   -   Photo:PxHere The cento is a poetry form that I used with students but that I haven't used myself o...