Prompt: (Taken from Natalie Diaz.): Read or reread the story of Persephone and Demeter. Write a poem describing a parent or other family member’s grief. Then, write it as a myth. What happens to the earth, the weather, the sky? How does the landscape physically change?
Cathy Linh Che, Pt. 1 In the Underworld, / I starve a season / while the world wilts
For each day of National Poetry Month one of our fellows will explore the breadth of poetry in three ways: through a question from another fellow, through a poem and through a writing prompt, #writetoday.
[QUESTION]
Debbie Yee asks, Cathy, Are there real or virtual spaces you go to for research? What or where are they? What do they inform you?
Cathy Linh Che answers,
Thanks, Debbie, for the question! My answer is roundabout, but I do get around to it. Here it goes:
Like Paul Tran, and so many others, I was sexually molested as a child—and have felt the ripple effects into adulthood.
I write about my experiences because I’m uneasy with the silence. I’m uneasy with the abject and unfathomable horror surrounding the topic—as if sexual molestation is not something that happens to one in three girls and one in seven boys. At a table with ten folks, several people have been sexually violated at some point in their lives (whether we identify as victims, survivors, or something else), or are perpetrators. So, it’s not ‘unimaginable’—it’s lived experiences that we all share.
When I have a concept or an image I want to explore, I look up definitions and etymologies on the internet. I do Google images searches. I turn to different mythologies and origin stories. I buy books and read up on psychology and psychoanalysis. I go home and inhabit spaces where these incidences have taken place. I look at personal experiences again and again—after all “research” is about looking closely and looking repeatedly.
Type in the word rape into the Online Etymology Dictionary and you get:
late 14c., “seize prey; abduct, take by force,” from rape (n.) and from Anglo-French raper (Old French rapir)
When I learned that rape originally meant to abduct, or to carry off by force, I thought of the myth of Persephone in a new way.
I saw her abduction, then being carried off into Hades, as a kind of childhood rape story—and from there, I wrote.
Editor’s Note: If you are interested in information about support services as a sexual assault survivor, please visit RAINN.
[POEM]
Pomegranate
I open my chest and birds flock out.
In my mother’s garden, the roses flare
toward the sun, but I am an arrow
pointing back.
I am Persephone,
a virgin abducted.
In the Underworld,
I starve a season
while the world wilts
into the ghost
of a summer backyard.
My hunger open and raw.
I lay next to a man
who did not love me—
my body a performance,
his body a single eye—
a director watching an actress
commanding her
to scintillate.
I was the clumsy acrobat.
When he came, I split open
like a pomegranate
and ate six of my own ruddy seeds.
I was the whipping boy.
Thorny, barbed wire
wound around a muscular heart.
Originally published in Split (Alice James Books, 2014)
[BIO]
Cathy Linh Che would like to start a conversation with you. Email her.
Debbie Yee, Pt. 2 #writetoday
Use the following words in a sonnet as “rhymed-ends” in the bouts-rimés tradition, which is described as, “lists of words that rhyme to one another, drawn up by another hand, and given to a poet, who was to make a poem to the rhymes in the same order that they were placed upon the list.
- Snore
- Pragmatic
- Atomic
- Labor
- Pliers
- Conspires
- Article
- Swallow
- Fallow
- Cuticle
- Margarine
- Mold
- Told
- Tamarind
Thanks to Seattle poet, L.J. Morin for an introduction into the practice of bouts-rimés.
Debbie Yee, Pt. 1, There was a drift of sugar desire in a once-small town.
For each day of National Poetry Month one of our fellows will explore the breadth of poetry in three ways: through a question from another fellow, through a poem and through a writing prompt, #writetoday.
Debbie Yee’s Green Tea Cupcakes with Red Bean Paste Buttercream
[QUESTION]
Paul Tran asks, I recently watched Natasha Trethewey’s “Why I Write: Poetry, History & Social Justice” on YouTube. the 52-minute lecture led me to George Orwell’s essay by the same title. Both got me thinking about the importance of “messages” in Asian American poetry. I define “message” as an argument or observation of the world that compels new understandings or visions of human existence, its operations and struggles. What kind of messages do you articulate or reimagine in your work? Why these in particular? And if none, what might their absence say? Why the choice to “not say”?
Debbie Yee answers, I hadn’t, until recently, considered my writing as having a message other than addressing my version of an existential crisis that resonates with few to twelve imagined people. But Orwell is perhaps correct in having identified political purpose as a driver. Whether intentionally or not, I’ve been re-telling “women’s work” from a 21st century feminist perspective through poems couched in observation or fantasy. They tend to concern maternal desire and absence, employing images of domesticity and home life quite a lot, usually set around the kitchen, garden, and the body. Except for a poem or two vaguely in the context of the law, my profession as a lawyer is extremely absent. I’ve often hoped I could turn on the law-poem spigot, but haven’t so far gotten any traction. That area of my life may largely be resolved and non-controversial in an internal sense, so I then roam into different terrain.
[POEM]
There was a drift of sugar desire in a once-small town. Sun-sweetened trees bore a load of pear-shaped children. The single-story buildings mottling the topography were gummy and edible, nestled along highways and footbridges paved in fruit leathers. The people gardened. They were simple and diabetic. They dreamt the way giants do. Their hearts wrestled with vast plots of untilled acreage. Their arms were fit to host suppers, could carry two seasons of bounty. Those who did laid the groundwork for a nest of kittens and bucks to fawn over. Those trees dipped and swayed in melodious day and continued this way well into the night, capturing in rhythm the town’s inhalations, exhalations, sighs and whistles. Underneath constellations, in a lunar rabbit year, the children snapped off from their birth branches arched over moonlit yards, slung rope and plank over their ancestors, fashioning swings for play, motion, inertia. The town was mid-breath in its history, conjectured a future by hand shadow puppetry as its talent at the county fair, its pies and cakes near-baked, its fruity, flavorful offspring at the ready.
[BIO]
Debbie Yee is an attorney, poet, mother, baker and crafts enthusiast living in San Francisco.
Paul Tran, Pt. 2, #writetoday
Chinese sociologist Fei Xiaotong said America is “a land without ghosts.” Choose a ghost you know. A ghost, perhaps, this country has killed or been responsible for killing. Call it back. Ask it, “What killed you? What will you tell me?” And begin your poem with the answer. Begin your poem from the perspective of the ghost.
For each day of National Poetry Month one of our fellows will explore the breadth of poetry in three ways: through a question from another fellow, through a poem and through a writing prompt, #writetoday.
Editor’s Note: For today’s post, Kundiman Fellow Paul Tran discusses details of his experience with child abuse and sexual assault. A video of his performance above also includes a a poetic address of those issues.
[QUESTION]
Janine Joseph asks, I’ve been thinking recently about some of the first poems that shook and prompted me to respond. In the spirit of Nazim Hikmet, I want to ask you: What are things you didn’t know you loved?
Paul Tran answers, My father started molesting me when I was four.
I remember it all: a hand opening the shower door; my stomach pressed into a car seat; Terminator 2 playing over my screams in an apartment by Montezuma Road. It’s a nightmare that returns to me even now.
When he disappeared in 1999, my mother cut his face from our family photographs. She gave them to me in a grocery bag and said bo thung rac. Throw it away. Nho lam gi? Why remember? Nho chi co lam con them kho thoi. Remembering will only make you suffer.
I still know what his body looks like—how his mouth curled right before coming. How even his cum smelled like Heineken. But I didn’t know I could forgive him. I didn’t know that years later, after I’d grown up and been raped by other men, after the memory and nightmare became indistinguishable, saying the violence’s name aloud—Rape. Incest. Almost murder.—was, in fact, my gesture of forgiveness.
And what do we forgive but a thing we didn’t know we could love?
[POEM]
The video above is of Paul performing “Ice Cream Man” during the 2013 College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational.
[BIO]
Paul Tran is an Asian American historian, activist & spoken word poet from Providence, Rhode Island.
Janine Joseph, Pt. 2, #writetoday
I recently was introduced to Nance Van Winckel’s Pho-Toems. In whatever you write today, please—please—get these Edward Gorey-esque puffer penguins in there.
Janine Joseph, Pt. 1: Can you smell the burning mustard plants, the foxtail and foxglove weeds on my skin?
For each day of National Poetry Month one of our fellows will explore the breadth of poetry in three ways: through a question from another fellow, through a poem and through a writing prompt, #writetoday.
[QUESTION]
Eddie Kim asks, From speaking with friends and my own personal struggles, it seems that those of us who have gone the MA/MFA/PhD route experience difficulty transitioning into life after school. There seems to be an existential ennui or existential panic that accompanies graduation. What were your experiences like post MFA? Post PhD? What helped you through that transition? If you feel you haven’t transitioned out of it yet, with what aspects do you specifically struggle?
Janine Joseph answers, Here’s the truth: when working on my MFA and, later, my PhD, I kept one foot out the door. It was a preparedness I had developed when putting myself through college. I wrote the poems that got me into NYU after closing. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a job or had a job in place. What I struggled most with was prioritizing school—prioritizing poetry—over the very experiences that fed my writing life. The “real world” was where I felt indebted, where I never needed to be reintegrated. Even when I was working on my MFA I’d sit at the computer and, while messing around with the lines on the screen, be preoccupied with the progress of the DREAM Act.
I suspect now that it was the self-sentence of five years that helped me fully transition into a life, not just of school, but also of poetry. Committing to the PhD helped me to acknowledge the world around me—its possibilities and uncertainties—and then refocus. It’s not so much that I had to compartmentalize all of the distractions and obligations, but that I looked, too, and with greater intensity, at what needed the most of my attention. At the field where I could best do meaningful work.
[POEM]
Leaving the Non-Profit Immigration Lawyer’s Office
2001
When the car drifted from the Santa Ana winds, I switched off the radio
and pointed at the street poles swaying over the two-way stretch like palms.
All night the wind brushed dry the hills with fire, and I kept driving,
his hands steady out the window, taking snapshots of the red, whipping rings.
I power-rolled the windows down and let the smoked-grass scent seep
into the upholstery, circulate coyote and birdsong through the air vents.
Can you smell the burning mustard plants, the foxtail and foxglove weeds on my skin?
I asked, hands open, the wheel orbiting under my palms.
Watch when I let go, I demonstrated, finger knuckles loosening around the leather,
the car coasting left with pollen and butterfly debris.
We’d be pitched into the brushglare, I warned, if I let go
completely. We’d grate the chain link fence and itch the ashen shrubs
Eye shuttered slow at tumbleweeds storming the under-
carriages storming the road, B. said: Right, like you’d let go.
Previously published on Kenyon Review online.
[BIO]
Janine Joseph has new work forthcoming in The Journal, Hyphen Magazine, Eleven Eleven, and The California Journal of Poetics.
Eddie Kim, Pt. 2 #writetoday
Write a list of clichés - they can be hated or favorites. Pick two and use them to write an intentionally sentimental poem, 20 lines minimum. Hit the sort function. Pick your favorite couplet or tercet to create a new poem.
Eddie Kim, Pt. 1: "Food is essentially how my family communicates."
For each day of National Poetry Month one of our fellows will explore the breadth of poetry in three ways: through a question from another fellow, through a poem and through a writing prompt, #writetoday.
Jason Bayani asks, The poems I’ve read from you seem to bring up food a lot.If your collection of poems was represented by a buffet style spread at a family party, what could we expect to be feasting upon?
Eddie Kim answers, Food is essentially how my family communicates. It’s how we show affection towards one another and say what we’re often incapable of saying – or maybe unwilling to say. Which is why food is featured so heavily in my collection. The foods and poems revolve around family, place, nostalgia, past hurts and losses and an inability to express/discuss them. The poems have openness, but a sense of distance as well; they’re guarded. As such, Spam fried rice might be the perfect dish to represent my collection (what’s in Spam is also unspeakable/unknowable). For me, it’s comfort food, familiar; it holds history and a sense of conversation with family and the past. It represents the combining of two cultures – Spam having been introduced to Koreans by US soldiers during the Korean War. It encapsulates the cultural and generational mélange represented by my family and in my poems. Also, there would be kimchi.
[POEM]
The Whale
There was only one road out of town,
and it led to the dump. We went
shooting there, scaring off bears, birds
and barrels. A shore on one side
of the road, open tundra full of ptarmigan
on the other. Once, a whale lay beached
on perfect skipping stones. I watched as gulls pock-
marked its grey-blue skin turning it flesh.
Crowds of people stood watching.
Cemetery Hill wrapped just around the corner.
We went sledding there, just off
Dead-man’s Curve, landing in bush
and snow. The tundra offered blueberries,
cranberries. I can still remember the taste
of dirt speckled sweet. Back then,
I set booby-traps in the bush to protect
myself from bullies, and my brother and I
shot arrows at each other. In summer,
we avoided lost lures as we swam in the bay.
[BIO]
All for freedom and for pleasure, nothing ever lasts forever… everybody wants to rule the world.
Jason Bayani, Pt. 2, #writetoday
(Inspired by Warsan Shire’s poem, Backwards)
What are some of the most significant moments in your life. Good, bad, and all things in between. What are the moments you feel define you? What stands out? What images, symbols, and landmarks do you associate with yourself? Now make a list of what you would change and what you would keep the same, then rewrite the story of your life.
Jason Bayani, Pt. 1
For each day of National Poetry Month one of our fellows will explore the breadth of poetry in three ways: through a question from another fellow, through a poem and through a writing prompt, #writetoday.
[QUESTION]
Roberto Ascalon asks, "What’ve you got in your hands?"
Jason Bayani responds, Well that is the question is it not? What truly is in our hands? Or we think about the question and somehow when you ask this, what is in our hands suggests the future, what will be, that’s what our hands can hold. Or what is in our hands is something that is in process, it is current. We speak current or future, but what is in our hands can be what has always been in our hands or what has been, so where are my hands engaging time? I think that’s the question. What is in my hands? An infinite set of possibilities, all of space/time. I have, not only a universe, but all of the universes.
Actually, it’s just my phone. I’m using it currently to send you beefcake photos of myself, Robert. Some of me doing some crossfit training, kettle bell curls, stuff like that.
[POEM]
Story
As I can recall, every bit of telling
memory is a certain fiction. The truth
as best as I can build it. The Philippines is hot; this is true.
Everyone looks at me and sees my father; this is also true.
When I leave the farm of the woman who helped raise him (when
the money was not enough), she: my grandfather’s sister
chases after me as I trod down the muddy pathway back
to our car. She cries and asks me not to leave her again. I feel
that this too is telling memory. The mist pulls into wide;
when the body reminds itself; learning her hands
outstretched to God; sun stumbling across
the palm canopy. Her hands, they say
the story. All of her tears
folding into the rain.
[BIO]
Jason Bayani is the author of Amulet, published by Write Bloody Press. He’s a graduate of Saint Mary’s MFA program and lives in the Bay Area. You can find him at www.jasonbayani.com
#writetoday
(h/t)
Today you’re stealing from screenwriters.
Before you write the poem use the three-act structure to create the outline.
If you want to add another step, think of the characters that will be in your poem-screenplay and write brief back stories for each of them.
To create the outline, use only 1-3 sentences for each item.
Act One (Set Up)
Inciting Incident:
Turning Point (PLOT TWIST!!):
Act Two (Confrontation/Development)
Midpoint:
Turning Point:
Act Three (Resolution)
Resolution:
Climax:
Roberto Ascalon, Pt. 1: to crunch bone like candy
For each day of National Poetry Month one of our fellows will explore the breadth of poetry in three ways: through a question from another fellow, through a poem and through a writing prompt, #writetoday.
[QUESTION] [POEM]
Mg Roberts asks, What can the honey badger teach you?
Roberto Ascalon responds,
What Can the Honey Badger Teach Us?
to believe in neither gods nor poisons
to lumber pretty, sashay and bite
to crunch bone like candy
to believe dirt is water
to thicken our skins
to roll the fat night
in our mouths,
ever in our
mouths
[BIO]
NYC born Roberto Ascalon is an award-wining poet who has teaches across Seattle. He is a Jack Straw and Kundiman Fellow, a two-time Seattle Slam Team member and the winner of the 2013 Rattle Poetry Prize. He lives in an old school building with a beautiful girl, a blackboard and a cat.
Mg Roberts, Pt. 2, #writetoday
A) You’ve just spent the night in a new apartment and find an envelope under your bed. This envelope contains a black and white photograph and a lock of hair. Neither are yours. How did it get there? Tell its story.
Adapted from a writing prompt posted to Facebook by Sueyeun Juliette Lee on March 18th 2014
Mg Roberts, Pt. 1: I begin again with omissions. I begin with the fragment,
For each day of National Poetry Month one of our fellows will explore the breadth of poetry in three ways: through a question from another fellow, through a poem and through a writing prompt, #writetoday.
[QUESTION]
Dan Lau asks, If an animal lives inside the spaces of your poem, what would it be and can you describe it?
Mg Roberts responds,
Through an excerpt of something yet to arrive:
The Earth is lengthwise.
Arriving like a dissolved star, a collection of sounds interpreted or divined through curvature.
Folded under now in gesture, a starfish’ hard exterior overshoots the break in the rocks.
Tomorrow is still March.
[POEM]
from UNEARTH
I begin again with omissions. I begin with the fragment, which will never occur again, even in repetition.
I begin as a series of small bones projecting towards articulation. Finding something to say, linking direction and nothing at the same time: a vertebra. I want to write a book that describes the end of the disk, a small hole through which the spinal cord passes. I want you to be able to see it as I do. Pulsing.
In the peripheral landscape each parallel line attempts connection, searches for correspondence in dirt. Occupying a strange place I find myself physically insignificant in black and white stills reworked, bending.
Endlessly looped, and silent.
[BIO]
Born in Subic Bay, Philippines, Mg Roberts is the author of not so, sea; and she’s about to have her third baby real, real soon.
Dan Lau, Pt. 2, #writetoday
Imagine you’re in a deli that’s been owned by a family for generations. There are heavy legs of cured meat on the wall and lots of halogen lights illuminating the cold cases. Above the cases stands a man. In the man’s hand is a cleaver. In his other hand is a rag. Tell me what the rag looks like then tell me how the cleaver feels. If the cleaver could be anything else, what would it be? Is there regret?
Dan Lau, Pt. 1:
For each day of National Poetry Month one of our fellows will explore the breadth of poetry in three ways: through a question from another fellow, through a poem and through a writing prompt, #writetoday.
[QUESTION]
Jane Wong asks, "April is the cruelest month" (Eliot)—How does poetry make April less cruel? Do you see poetry as an act of kindness?
Dan Lau resopnds, I actually don’t think poetry makes it less cruel. I think poetry makes it more bearable. The act of sharing, of presenting a poem to the world seems to me an act of kindness on the part of the poet but more of a courageous act to lay one’s self bare and and allow for appraisal so that we may feel less alone. April will always be April. We don’t always have to be dicks.
[POEM]
Chymos
I am a banker but my liver tells me no.
There is spring in my blood, some say too much.
I’ve exhaled all my arid discourse. I’ve thrown
the ledger to the kiln; the bright leaves shower from the throat
of its chimney. Something is missing.
Something has been removed. I’ve moved
my shoes to the right side of the door. The hens
only lay on Wednesdays. In the brightness of morning
there is only pollens’ yellow haze. Wet phlegm
slicks the marsh reed to my voice and yet I still sing;
this secret song. This song, a tear drop tainting the heart.
Mournful creation, I see it in my home. My city.
The bile rises through a tide of forgetfulness.
The preservation of practical dreams, the controlled
fire of a necessary camp ground. Sprinkle the civet
no one wants to bottle. Smear the thickness of ambergris
over my threshold. Where is the wrought desire for scent?
For the salt of cured pork shoulder? I will keep them with me;
the hyraceum, the resin of myrrh, a lamb’s belly wool.
These I keep for me and when they ask, I will show them
how to flay a beaver, how to watch the steam rise
from its open body and take what’s precious.
Dan Lau is a poet and educator that enjoys baking and fine drink.
Jane Wong, Pt. 2, #writetoday
I often approach poetry as a matter of bridging together phrases, images, sounds, etc. For this prompt, write a poem that includes the following, in order:
- A snail under a leaf
- An overturned cabinet
- Rush hour
- Forgiveness is not an option
- Wrecking ball
- Cooling down
Jane Wong, Pt. 1: To raise children with good legs and arms. / Isn’t this all we want?
For each day of National Poetry Month one of our fellows will explore the breadth of poetry in three ways: through a question from another fellow, through a poem and through a writing prompt, #writetoday.
[QUESTION]
Sally Wen Mao asks, Poetic windfalls are the best. Has there been a moment in your researching, drafting, writing, or revising stage where you found something (an experience, a new obsession, a curiosity, a discovery) that swept you toward renewing or invigorating your work or poetic practice? Describe for me what your poetic windfall is, and the adventure you had with it — if you can’t think of anything, then describe what your ideal poetic windfall would be!
Jane Wong responds,
My understanding of a windfall is something that knocks you off your feet, in such a way that you’re unable to see the world the way you did before. I have been windfalling for a while! I remember reading persona poems like Thomas James’s “Mummy of a Lady Named Jemutesonekh XXI Dynasty” and thinking: what if you could write from the position of someone close to you? Does the line between yourself and the person become blurry? I’ve always been curious about the lives of others, particularly my parents. Sometimes, I feel like I know nothing about them - especially my father, who’s absent from my life. I started writing poems as if I were my father (as in “The Good Work”) and my mother (I just started a series of poems that embodies a year in her life). This windfall feels energizing and a bit risky. The gap between the familiar and the unfamiliar is much harder to bridge.
[POEM]
THE GOOD WORK
I left the light on in the kitchen again.
A spider burned in the bulb. It was a morning
owl who joined me in the song of its burning.
To raise children with good legs and arms.
Isn’t this all we want? I worry about my daughter.
To be a good man. To be good?
Across the street, a family clears logs from their front yard.
Cedar smoke fills the air. My breath splinters, I hold
a rest note too long. Arrested, always. The sky
is an ice pattern I could break open. I could
have been a mathematician. I could have loved my daughter.
Saddle up to me, I’d say. Let this horse do the work.
(Previously published in The Journal)
The recipient of fellowships and scholarships from the U.S. Fulbright Program, Kundiman, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Fine Arts Work Center, Jane Wong’s poems can be found in places such as Hayden’s Ferry Review, Salt Hill, Linebreak, The Volta, Best New Poets 2012, and others.