The moderator for Monday is Abby!
Abigail Licad is an immigrant from the Philippines, a former editor-in-chief for Hyphen magazine, a full-on feminist, a diehard Tori Amos fan, a mediocre classical pianist, a dog mama, a chocolate fiend, a terrible cook, a succulent addict, a lover of sending care packages, and a poetry junkie through and through. She has no tattoos and lives in Portland, Oregon.
Prompt for Monday, September 25, 2023
"The Morning After the War Was Over" by Nguyen Duy
Translated by Kevin Bowen and Nguyen Ba Chung
(See in Distant Road, Selected Poems of Nguyen Duy published by Curbstone Press, 1999.
1. Incorporate or respond to one of the passages in your poem:
"Roads appear, disappear in haze/reality, illusion, a dream."
"A bomb driven deep in earth, a white mist hovering"
"easily, as if it were nothing at all..."
2. Write a "morning after" poem (whether after a mistake, a death, a life-changing occasion, shocking discovery, etc.). Following Nguyen's poem, detail your physical surroundings at the time, and project your emotional and psychic state upon specific details.
3. The speaker in the poem describes the very simple action of his love walking towards him. Do you have a similar memory of a very simple and unremarkable gesture, act, habit, or movement of a loved one that would usually be forgettable, but has somehow seared itself into your memory? Write about it, trying to bring out sensuousness in your expanding description of the one simple, ordinary action.
For example: a lover getting up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom (your poem would detail seeing their naked backs walking away from the bed), your mother taking off her earrings at the end of the day, the way your father flicked his cigarette, etc.
The moderator for Friday is Amy!
Prompt for Friday, September 29, 2023
Blueberries by James Lasdun
1) Write a poem to your future self. What message do you have now for the older you?
2) Write about an activity you love and explore its spiritual/existential context or impact.
3) Use this line as a springboard:
Weigh your heart against the feather of truth as the Egyptians did, and purge its sun,
but for your own sake, not your soul’s.
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