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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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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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

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Visit our website at poetsonline.org

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