Prompt: Ideal Day

My friend Laura Boss died this year. She was a poet who taught me many things. One thing that I love about her poetry is that there is often humor interspersed with seriousness. The first time I ever heard her read, I remember laughing. And now, though she has left us, I still hear her voice when I read her poems.

This prompt uses her poem, "Ideal Day,"(from her posthumous collection Family Promises 2021, NYQ Books)) which is a list of a number of possible ideal days for her. They are all-but-one impossibilities. (Had I known, I would have brought her a big box of Kit Kat candy bars and fulfilled that one ideal day.)

Her poem's ideals are serious. Her reality caveats for some of them are parenthetical, as her humor often was indicated, either by ( ) or by her voice.

Our prompt this month is a simple one - at least on the surface. What would be your ideal day? Is it a possibility or impossibility?

 Submission deadline July 30, 2021

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Jim Morrison, 50 Years Later

I can summon the dead.  

I can perceive events on other worlds,

in my deepest inner mind,

and in the minds of others.  

James Douglas Morrison was born December 8, 1943 and died 50 years ago on July 3, 1971, at 27 in Paris. 

It is arguable whether he should be considered a poet or a singer/lyricist or both. That is for readers to decide.

He earned a bachelor’s degree from UCLA’s film school in 1965. His fame comes from being the lead singer for The Doors, formed in 1965. From their first album, The Doors (1967) to their last, An American Prayer, (released posthumously in 1978, with new music that the three surviving Doors set to spoken-word recordings Morrison had made prior to his death) interest in Morrison has continued.

Morrison's first book of poetry was The Lords and The New Creatures, originally self-published as two volumes in 1969.

The Collected Works of Jim Morrison: Poetry, Journals, Transcripts and Lyrics was published this month and is a comprehensive, 600-page book with a foreword by novelist Tom Robbins. The book was inspired by a posthumously discovered list of his entitled “Plan for Book.”

“I thought Jim would be a poet, like one of the Beat poets in San Francisco. That’s what I was expecting. And I was worried! Because I thought he would never make enough money as a poet to get by,” says Anne Morrison Chewning, who wrote the prologue for the book and is the co-executor of her late brother’s personal estate.

The book intends to be definitive with a lot of unpublished material. It includes handwritten excerpts from 28 of Morrison’s recently discovered notebooks, recorded and unrecorded lyrics and many photos and drawings (including rarely seen family photos).

Stoned Inmaculate
by Jim Morrison

I'll tell you this...

No eternal reward will forgive us now.

For wasting the dawn.

Back in those days everything was simpler and more confused.

One summer night, going to the pier.

I ran into two young girls.

The blonde one was called Freedom.

The dark one, Enterprise.

We talked and they told me this story.

Now listen to this...

I'll tell you about Texas radio and the big beat.

Soft driven, slow and mad.

Like some new language.

Reaching your head with the cold, sudden fury of a divine messenger.

Let me tell you about heartache and the loss of god.

Wandering, wandering in hopeless night.

Out here in the perimeter there are no stars.

Out here we is stoned.

Immaculate.

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Mini-Prompt: American Sentences

Ginsberg  via Flickr

If you're looking for some more inspiration this month, I always suggest taking a look at Paull Szlosek's Poetry Playground blog. There are many forms and examples, both traditional and invented forms.

One of those is the American Sentence, a poetry form that was invented by Allen Ginsberg and popularized by Paul E. Nelson as a variation on traditional haiku. 

American Sentences also consist of 17 syllables, but the 3-line format and 5-7-5 breaks are dropped. The 17 syllables are written as a single line or sentence. They may have a title. 

Is it one complete grammatical sentence? Sometimes, but feel free to do several short sentences or even phrases., while others have written them as two, three, or four or even just as series of phrases. 

There are some other slightly haiku-ish conderations. Nelson feels they should focus on concrete images. Ginsberg said you should mention either a time or place (or both) and the use of articles such as “a” and “the” should be avoided. But neither adhered to their own suggestions all the time.

I have also seen poets write multi-line poems composed entirely of American Sentences which gives the poem a kind of Japanese-American "meter."

Here are four of the original American Sentences by Ginsberg:

Nov 1991 N.Y.

Put my tie on in a taxi, short of breath, rushing to meditate

 

Tompkins Square Lower East Side N.Y.

Four skinheads stand in the streetlight rain chatting under an umbrella

On Hearing the Muezzin Cry Allah Akbar While Visiting the Pythian Oracle at Didyma Toward the End of the Second Millennium

At sunset Apollo’s columns echo with the bawl of the One God

 

Approaching Seoul by Bus in Heavy Rain

Get used to your body, forget you were born, suddenly you got to get out!

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Prompt: Birthday Connection

When I was a teen and first interested in writing poetry, I noticed in an almanac that I shared a birthday with the poet Arthur Rimbaud. I thought that perhaps because we shared a birthday (October 20) even though I was born 99 years later, perhaps we were similar. 

I looked up Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud. Right off, I realized that I had been pronouncing his name in my head incorrectly - not rim-baud but ræmˈ-boʊ. He was a French poet known for surreal themes, though he prefigured surrealism. He started writing at a very young age, was an excellent student, but abandoned formal education when he was my age and ran away from home to Paris during the Franco-Prussian War.

He was described as an enfant terrible of poetry. He was a literary bad boy, and became a mercenary arms dealer. He produced most of his writing in his late adolescence and early adulthood. He completely stopped writing literature at age 20, after he had put together assembling his last major work, Illuminations.

I was not a bad boy. I never dealt weapons. He wrote a lot of prose poetry and his poetry is nothing like mine.

Rimbaud

Years later, I discovered that the American poet Robert Pinsky also shares my birthday. Not only was he born on October 20 but we share a birthplace (New Jersey) and both received our BA at Rutgers College. Robert was born during WWII and I was born during the Korean War but at least we were born in the same century. 

I like Pinsky's poetry, but it is not like my poetry. He was our Poet Laureate (1997-2000) and he is the author of nineteen books. I met him twice when he gave readings at the Dodge Poetry Festivals. I mentioned our shared birthday and he reminded me that we also share the day with NY Yankees legend Mickey Mantle. Mantle was my birthday inspiration as a kid. I wanted to become a Yankee. I was a decent ballplayer, played the outfield like Mickey, but though I got lots of hits and stolen bases, I could not hit those long balls.

Pinsky

Did I learn anything about poetry from my poetry birthday buddies? Yes. First off, I looked up their poetry which I had not read earlier. I learned some other things, but that brings us to this month's prompt.

Do some research and find out who was born on your birthday. (Just search on Wikipedia for the date to start.) See if you find a poet. Any connections to your own life or poetry? You could also choose a writer or really anyone that interest you or you feel some connection to as the inspiration for your poem.

Postscript: I could not find a model poem for this prompt, (If you know a poem that fits, post it in a comment.) but I did find that Pinsky and Rimbaud both have poems titled "Antique." Are they connected? Did Pinsky know Rimbaud's poem and was he influenced by it? (Got any answers? Post that in a comment.) Give them a read: "Antique" by Robert Pinsky and "Antique" by Arthur Rimbaud. 

  

 

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A Christopher Marlowe Murder Mystery

Two things I learned about the playwright Christopher Marlowe in school that I remember was that he might have written some (or all?) of Shakespeare's plays and that he was killed in a tavern brawl. 

He died on May 30, 1593. There was a fight in a London tavern and Marlowe was stabbed in the eye after a dispute over the bill. That I will never forget. He was 29 years old. He is best known for the plays Hero and Leander, Tamburlaine the Great, Edward the Second and especially The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. 

There are plenty of mysteries about authors of that time, especially Mr. Shakespeare. The records just don't exist. tab, no less. I don't think it is really a mystery about the authorship of Will's plays, though much has been written and conjectured about their authorship. I am of the belief that he wrote them but that he may have collaborated with other writers on some, but his name on them guaranteed an audience. If Will was alive in this or the last century, I'm sure he would have gotten into writing for movies and TV and attached his name to projects or adaptations.

It turns out that there is some mystery about the circumstances of Marlowe's death. One theory is that he was assassinated under orders from Queen Elizabeth I because he was a very public atheist. Marlowe was out on bail when he was killed and if he had gone through an inquisition there was a good chance he would have been executed. You may have learned that Shakespeare was careful about writing or saying if he was a Protestant or Catholic in order to not offend, to get his plays approved by the court, and to protect his life.  The Queen gave orders to silence Marlowe and "prosecute it to the full,” and she pardoned Marlowe's murderer, Ingram Frizer, a month later. 

Young, handsome Christopher "Kit" Marlowe had his enemies. Friend of Elizabeth, Sir Walter Raleigh, was supposedly worried about being implicated if there was an inquisition of Marlowe, so he would have liked to have him out of way before that time.

Marlowe’s former roommate was Thomas Kyd. Kyd was also a playwright, the author of The Spanish Tragedy, and an important name in Elizabethan drama. Like Marlowe, Kyd's plays were overshadowed by Shakespeare's works. Kyd is sometimes credited with a play titled Hamlet that was written and performed before Shakespeare's version. About a month before Marlowe's death, Kyd had been arrested and tortured for his connection with Marlowe. Kyd died a year later at the age of 35 unknown and in debt.

But if I ever write my Marlowe murder mystery for the page or screen, I might use that theory, but the more interesting plot is that Marlowe actually faked his own death.

There are some who believe(d) that Kit faked his death and fled the country to avoid his impending inquisition. Once he was safe outside London or out of England, Marlowe would have continued writing and sending his works back to England to be performed. They would need to be attributed to someone else. 

Two weeks after Marlowe’s inquest, the first piece of writing to appear under the name William Shakespeare was published. Shakespeare was very likely influenced by Marlowe's plays as he was the popular writer of the time and Will's early plays seem more like Marlowe's writing. Was Will the name on the script while he was learning to write on his own? 

I once pitched my story idea to a Shakespeare professor and he said there was a book out there that also followed that idea. I did some digging and found The Marlowe Papers by Ros Barber. She points out that Shakespeare was rather fascinated with characters who were thought to be dead. 

There are 33 characters who appear in 18 of his plays that are mistakenly believed to be dead for some part of the story, including some deliberately staged deaths and three faked deaths done to avoid real death.

I guess I'll have to collaborate with Ros... or I might just work on my other literary murder mystery about the death of Edgar Allen Poe. We are still not certain what happened to him on those final days - and Poe had such an interesting life before that. 

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Ask a Poet

Poets get asked odd questions. They often come after giving a reading. There are the unanswerable questions ("Why do you write poetry? Can everyone be a poet?") and the ones you don't want to answer ("So, what is that last poem actually supposed to be about?") Some of the most unusual ones that I've heard come from students after workshops or readings. Younger students often ask "Do you make money writing poems?" I had a high school student ask me "If I say it's a poem, it's a poem. Right?"

I suspect a good number of poets have written about being asked a poet question. We did this topic as a prompt in 2014 using two poems by Aimee Nezhukumatathil: "Are All the Break-Ups in Your Poems Real?" and "Dear Amy Nehzooukammyatootill." I had forgotten that earlier prompt and was working on the same topic for our May issue. I found two poems as models, so I'm going to share them anyway.

Eve Merriam's poem, "Reply to the Question: 'How Can You Become a Poet?'" addresses one of those unanswerable questions. Well, there are answers "Get an MFA," "Just write," and "Read everything" are all ones I have heard. Merriam gives a more poetic reply.

take the leaf of a tree

trace its exact shape

the outside edges

and inner lines

memorize the way it is fastened to the twig

(and how the twig arches from the branch)

how it springs forth in April

how it is panoplied in July

by late August

crumple it in your hand

so that you smell its end-of-summer sadness

chew its woody stem

listen to its autumn rattle

watch it as it atomizes in the November air

then in winter

when there is no leaf left

      invent one

The second poem I remembered from is "Valentine for Ernest Mann" by Naomi Shihab Nye.

It begins:

You can’t order a poem like you order a taco.

Walk up to the counter, say, “I’ll take two”

and expect it to be handed back to you

on a shiny plate.

Still, I like your spirit.

Anyone who says, “Here’s my address,

write me a poem,” deserves something in reply.

You can see and hear Naomi read the poem.

Have you had a strange question asked of you as a poet? Share in a comment. Answers not required.

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Prompt: On the Anniversary of My Death

W.S. Merwin died on March 15, 2019. He died at home at the age of 91, in the house he built, among the thousands of palms he planted. In 1976, Merwin moved to Hawaii to study with Robert Aitken, a Zen Buddhist teacher. He married Paula Dunaway, in 1983, and settled on Maui. For over 40 years, they lived in a home that William designed and helped build, surrounded by acres of land once devastated and depleted from years of erosion, logging and toxic agricultural practices. Together, the Merwins painstakingly restored the land into one of the most comprehensive palm gardens in the world.

On the first anniversary of his death, I posted here a poem by Merwin titled "For the Anniversary of My Death" (from his collection The Second Four Books of Poems  

The poem begins: 

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day   

When the last fires will wave to me...

I found the idea in Merwin's poem of writing a poem that imagines what you would have to say on the anniversary of your death unique. It sounds like a depressing idea but there is the wonderful optimism in the poem of having passed that day every year without knowing it. 

Today might be the anniversary of my death, and considering that possibility, perhaps I should also be "bowing not knowing to what."

I have this quote on a card over my writing desk.

On the last day of the world

I would want to plant a tree

– W.S. Merwin

This month's writing prompt is to write a poem for the anniversary of your death. It could be the first anniversary or any year after. Who is the intended audience?  I think the prompt is more open to possibilities than the title might suggest at first. It could even be humorous.

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