9 figures of speech which are not.

1.

There is a moth that feeds on the tears of small birds. The moth visits the birds as they sleep. The moth lands on the sleeping bird’s head ever so gently before unfurling its proboscis and laying the tip just beneath the bird’s eyelid. But “to drink without waking the birds” is not yet a common expression or cliche. Is it a figure of speech?

And what do they dream, these birds whose tears are stolen?

2.

In September 2018, a biologist actually spotted the Gorgone macarea moth sitting on the neck of a black-chinned antbird in Brazil poised to drink the bird's tears. It was “the first time this behavior was reported in the country and only the third known case worldwide.”

Something we’ve never seen may be a miracle.

3.

“What do poets do? Slip
a wobbly syllable under

a microscope
so close to the lens
it cracks.”

- Martha Silano, “It was how a sentence” (AGNI)

4.

The difference between writing and willing isn’t always clear to me. Right now, for instance, I’m laying these thoughts down in my notebook for one reason, namely, to provide context for an event I want to see in the world. This event involves drawing attention to the first stanza of a poem by Rosmarie Waldrop:

“If, close to morning, you see the physical fact of language you may take a prophylactic
attitude. A figure of skating or speech. The scale is heavy flesh.”

5.

The heart cannot break. No matter how often we compare the heart to a breakable object, the human heart remains a quivering fist of pink jelly, a mass of pulsing tissue that is not quite machine.

Believe me when I tell you my heart busted wide as a cactus piñata after my mom’s sudden death. My heart was bat-broke open.

6.

The poem’s job is to make you believe it. If the heart can’t be broken, the poem’s job is to break the heart anyway.

There is nothing less forgivable than the poem who assumes it can speak of heartbreak without hurting anyone.

Or breaking things.

7.

I don’t know why hearts lie about breaking, but I read that moths and butterflies have also been observed feeding on the tears of crocodiles and turtles. They do this to obtain the salt which isn’t naturally available in nectar.

A moth drinking crocodile tears is a marvelous event in my head.

8.

In the poem that is an event, Rosmarie Waldrop lassos the dedication into the title: “The Material World (for Johanna Drucker)”. The poet is continuing a conversation with her friend and she wants to be sure we understand Johanna is not an afterthought but a part of the poem’s flesh.

Here’s what I can’t forget: the final phrase of the third stanza.

Which also happens to be the exact middle of the poem, something like it’s centerfold:

“Pressure just below the phrase level.”

9.

The bird dreamt of her single, unbreakable nest.

22 things to add to a poem that acts "as if" it feels neglected.

1. An unexpected acorn.

2. The movements of a mother’s face as she repudiates longsuffering.

3. A long-suffering velvet recliner.

4. An unexpected metaphor or description of joy. I’m thinking of when Ross Gay wrote that something “truly filled my heart with flamingos.”

5. A subversion of the word “rapacious”.

6. A hex.

7. A historic earthquake or volcanic eruption that family members have mentioned.

8. A Xerox copy of something.

9. An explicit reference to another poem in which you are referring to a poem by someone else. In the poem about colored pencils.

10. A furry mammal you haven’t anthropomorphized for the purpose of the poem or pleasure.

11. A tired O. The opposite of an ecstatic O. An O that generates suspense.

12. A line from a poem by Mary Jo Bang.

13. The word “syntax” in scare quotes. Possibly with reference to a body part.

14. A sin tax dressed up like a poll tax.

15. An I-statement that suffers from non-sequitur.

16. What Ross Gay calls “an event illegible except for its unfathomable beauty”. Which may involve fireflies.

17. An invented business establishment or office. Like the “Bureau of Sad Endings” that appears midway through a poem by David Berman.

18. The word “busted”.

19. A melting glacier. Or any effect of climate change that appears quietly, desperately, ominously in the background.

20. A risk management heat map.

21. A word from R. A. Villanueva’s “Sonnet 146”.

22. Something he said to you and never took back.

10 notes to self on memoir.

1.

“So the lies that my mama wants me to create a narrative about our family that ends with everything being great. And everybody valuing where we been, but not too much just looking forward. And I want to write that shit too. I just think that’s bullshit though. I don’t know what truth actually is, but I know what honest attempts at reckoning are. I’m not saying I’m writing honesty, I think I’m attempting to honestly reckon, which is the difference. At the end of that honest reckoning, maybe some people might call it truth. I wouldn’t call it truth but I would call it an attempt. I think sometimes we know when we’re honestly attempting to reckon, honestly attempting to remember, honestly attempting to render. As opposed to when we’re attempting to manipulate. And even in those honest attempts it can be full of lies.”

- Kiese Laymon on writing truthful memoir

2.

Carmen Maria Machado is currently working on “an experimental memoir told through a sequence of rotating narrative tropes.” The tropes provide a framework to explore specific aspects of memory. Questioning, revising, and complicating truth is an important movement in nonfiction. See Brian Blanchfield’s Proxiesis, Kevin Brockmeier’s A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip, Sofia Samatar’s essays in Monster Portraits, and Alice Bolin’s Dead Girls. See also:

1. Lia Purpura, “Autopsy Report” (The Iowa Review)

2. Jo Ann Beard, “The Fourth State of Matter”

3. Andrea Long Chu, “On Liking Women” (n+1)

4. Sarah Marshall, “Remote Control” (Believer)

5. Sofia Samatar, “Meet Me in Iran”

3.

Mary Roach loves memoir as a form. In The Memoir Project, Roach says "the beauty is that you can write about penises without completely under-stating them, making the penis another of the greater things to write about."

4.

Good revision can reveal the form the memoir needs to breathe. The way we think nonfiction is supposed to look may be irrelevant to what the material needs. Lucas Mann describes how Lord Fear ‘s form developed entirely from the revision process. “… the last time I got really frustrated with the manuscript, I just started stripping away the connecting scenes, extra exposition, anything that felt safe and palatable but also slow and flabby. After the purge, all that was left of the narrative was impressionistic little fragments.”

5.

Jill Talbot: “How long do we live in the fictions of our past? And how do we convince anyone that who we write is not necessarily who we are?”

6.

The list essay form is especially useful when you have a close chronology to track, or a sense of externalized momentum.

7.

We want the thickness of shameless subtext. Or, if there must be shame, we want to see every cringe and be allowed to ask questions. I think of Virginia Satir's "nominalization," a communication strategy in which someone who fears emotion replaces a process of being (a verb) with a static event (a noun). Rather than saying I'm angry, the person claims to "experience anger."

It’s taboo to expose or interrogate unspoken boundaries (see patriarchy). In many cases, setting a boundary does not leave us feeling empowered but guilty. We are socialized to defer ethics to Sunday school classrooms and Bible study groups rather than wrestle with the meat ourselves. 

Sometimes it isn't the anger or strong emotions that destroy your life--it's the fear of feeling them. Viriginia Satir, again, compares two types of relationships, namely, the "closed system"--relation dominated by neurotic dependency, obedience, conformity, and guilt— to the "open system"--both can honestly express full range of hopes, fears, loves, angers, mistakes and appreciate each other for them. How does this look in text form? How are these contrasting systems sometimes mixed in the air like muggy weather?

I am talking to the persons in the memoir, and the writer that avoids a messy page. You should both be able to ask for what you want without asking for permission to want it. You should be able emote without being rejected for emoting.

8.

The Secretary Bird of Africa hunts lizards, snakes, and other small reptiles by stomping about in the grass. Foot stomping serves as a means of self-preservation for bird species. What rituals do we practice in self-defense? Why not write the baroque of them?

9.

“The structure of the miracle has a similar form: out of another time, from a time that is alien, arises a ‘god’ who has the characteristics of memory, that silent encyclopedia of singular acts, and who, in religious stories, represents with such fidelity the ‘popular’ memory of those who have no place but who have time—‘Patience!’… But all these variants could very well be no more than the shadows—enlarged into symbolic and narrative projections—thrown by the journalistic practice that consists in seizing the opportunity and making memory the means of transforming places. … In short, what constitutes the implantation of memory in a place that already forms an ensemble? That implantation is the moment which calls for a tightrope-walker’s talent and a sense of tactics; it is the instant of art. Now it is clear that this implantation is neither localized nor determined by memory-knowledge. The occasion is taken advantage of, not created. … Like those birds they lay in other species’ nests, memory produces in a place that does not belong to it. … Memory derives its interventionary force from its very capacity to be altered—unmoored, mobile, lacing any fixed position…” (From Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life)

10.

Sandra Doller begins her collection of mini-memoir, Memory of the Prose Machine (Dusie Press) with the long quote above. She does this thing with budding phrases that she drops and brings back as refrains, and sets up a sort of mini-memoir about family life in the Reagan years (and the demonization of Amy Carter) by jumping but not saying. So it feels silenced. Yet said. An undercurrent. And I love it.

The playlist poetry challenge: "You Being Boss of the Playlist."

It just sort of happened as I was doing small, mindless tasks in the house while listening to old playlists my hubcap made when we in some wild dalliance that wasn’t legit.

The thing is: this taught me to love Bruce Springsteen…. he sort of rug-burned Bruce into my skin and I never got over it. So here’s what I did.

I made a list of all Bruce’s songs and then wrote a poem that incorporated the titles on our old playlists. And then fiddled like a fresh-rain-licked fern with all the tiny pieces…

The Playlist Poetry Challenge is so easy and fun—a perfect excuse to sit around and listen to nostalgia-inducing music on a muggy Saturday.

1. Pick an old playlist (or just pick a favorite music artist) and make a list of song titles.

2. Tell the song titles that you plan to use them as a word bank for a poem you will write. Don’t be sorry or apologetic. The songs want to be felt. You are doing those titles a favor.

3. Write a poem that makes use of those titles. You can capitalize the titles (see above) to make it clear when you’re referencing the song. Alternately, you can putz around in italics. You can even use white space to draw lines in the sand between your words and what music makes of them.

4. Title it with a name that hints at the artist or the playlist conceit.

5. If the final result is HORRENDOUS, email it to family members who think you’re a terrible poet that is wasting their time in profit-less vocation. Make sure to preface the poem with a note saying something like: “OMG tonight I wrote this poem that was just SO INTENSE. I had to share it with you because I’m really proud of it and I hope it wins a prize. Maybe someone will read it on their talk show. Family, I think this is IT.”

In Defense of Asymmetry: Or how mechanical failure leads to poetry.

1.

When the dishwasher breaks, I tear a few vines from the side of the house and re-read Mary Ruefle's "Short Lecture on the Brain" (collected in Madness, Rack, and Honey).

There is no connection between the act of tearing and the act of reading except chronology, which is both the most artificial and actual connection that can exist.

2.

Let me begin by adding that I am neither a practical nor a “well-rounded” person. The kindest thing that can be said of me has not changed since my second grade teacher told my parents: “Alina is creative and she may have potential.”

Let me unbegin by subtracting the things people say from the fascination that leads me to poetry. See, I don’t just appreciate the sunset—I marvel at the way it burns down the day, curdling cloud-breaths into colors of exhaust.

I don’t just admire the moon—I have a relationship with the moon that outlasts all the mammals I’ve laid in her pale light.

I don’t just worry about melting glaciers—I hear them cracking, groaning, shifting before finally giving up on sleep and running upstairs to google “glacier noises”, “density of Arctic ice”, “cold-hearted human snakes”.

To quote from Mary Ruefle's "Short Lecture on the Brain”:

"I don't think there is anything balanced about artistic creation at all, I think it's a lopsided way of being, an obsessive and off-balance way of perceiving and being in the world; I mean most people when they see a baby fox playing with butterflies don't have to write a poem about it, especially a poem where the baby fox winds up dead on the side of the road with butterflies gamboling around its splayed intestines."

3.

The un-cuteness of a dead fox does not prevent it from holding the poetic imagination.

What could be more asymmetric than a carcass on the side of the road? What is less orderly and well-arranged than wild animal death?

4.

I think about symmetry whenever I see an American teen with a mouthful of metal or the billboard that promises to “even out lopsided breasts.” I think symmetry makes it easier to know where you are going in a shopping mall, or what to expect in an operating room. And heaven forbid a day go by that we aren’t reminded of the relationship between perfect symmetry and beauty.

5.

What is poem-worthy about perfection?

Perfection is like unconditional love in that it is static, unchanging, unaltered by events. I’m not interested in unconditional love.

A poem about perfection would have to focus on subverting the perfection in order to be interesting.

6.

Maybe the difference between advertisement and poem parallels the difference between the promise of perfection vs. interesting asymmetry.

Poets break promises. We spend hours chasing a shadow around the room just to watch it break our hearts up close. Then, between terrors, we force ourselves to bring that shadow to the page so others can see how it feels to be haunted by the way a patch of darkness moves across the hardwood.

7.

Fascination is more interesting than beauty. I believe this as surely as I believe a gap between front teeth is the most disarming dental position in the world.

Fascination asks more from us than a relationship of admiration, which is, at best, a spectating relationship that affirms a platitude.

Give me the hooked nose, the chipped tooth, the Mona Lisa smile anyway. Give me a style icon that destabilizes the platform with her natural, unremarkable breasts.

Asymmetry is where poetry wanders... into the lopsided, the near-miss, the mysterious tenors of imbalance. 

8.

I'm thinking of complex, numinous way in Kayleb Rae Candrilli ends "You've Heard This Before, The Only Way Out Is Through" (American Poetry Review):

there is a razor in the apple
and the apple is the earth. Listen,
my nightmares are dreams in which
everyone walks in the same direction--
that rhythmic lockstep. Both of my
grandmothers considered abortion.
And can you imagine?
Being so close to nothing?

9.

I’m thinking splayed intestines can be used to make ice cream.

I don’t know if someone has made ice cream from roadkill.

I don’t know what part of this has actually happened but I know everything is happening now and I want to taste it.

10 poems I'm studying this month.

10 poems I keep needing to read again. To mine the sinews. To feel the way motion moves through the flesh. In no particular order.

“Wittgenstein in the Palisades” by Maya C. Popa in No Tokens Journal

“Work Boots: Still Life” by Jim Daniels in Poetry

“Then” by Stephanie Ford in The Volta

“The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” by Morgan Parker in Paperbag

“Diorama of the Uninhabited Yes” by Ann Lauterbach from If In Time

“All The White Boys On The Eastside Loved Larry Bird” by Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib in Evening Will Come

“The Butter Festival” by Mary Ruefle in Poetry Review

“Genesis” by John Sibley Williams in River Heron Review

“Full Moon” by Kim Addonizio shared by Caroline Bird

“Dead Stars” by Ada Limon in Poets.org

25 poetry prompts and exercises for summer travels.

1. Write a chaconne.

2. Try this fantastic poetry-in-scene writing prompt by Yona Harvey (inspired by the sistuh voice of Sonia Sanchez).

3. Rejection may begin with a tendril of resentment coiled inside a color. Glacial. The way some words carry the weight of what we fear saying. Distant. Detached. The way a word that gets overburdened becomes an object, a bough. An objectification. A false innocence that depends on diminishment of something external. She’s a bitch is the hoarseness voice of not saying I’m hurt. Refusing to own the emotion. The confusion of first-generation immigrants as a descriptive tag that denotes both non-naturalized citizens, refugees, and those born to immigrant parents in the US. The melting pot of identity hunger. Write a poem that makes use of words that enact rejection.

4. The most powerful ideologies are the invisible ones, the shirts we wear to breakfast. Write a prose poem that includes all the shirts you wear to breakfast—the assumptions, the unspoken hurts, the secret biases, the imperfections, the honest rot.

5. C. D. Wright: “I love the particular lexicons of particular occupations. The substrate of those activities. The nomenclatures within nomenclatures. I am of the unaccredited school that believes animals did not exist until Adam assigned them names. My relationship to the word is anything but scientific, it is a matter of faith on my part, that the word endows material substance, by setting the thing named apart from all else. Horse, then, unhorses what is not horse.” Write a poem that uses a “particular lexicon”. For example, see Heather McHugh’s poem, “Hackers Can Sidejack Cookies”.

6. Read Czeslaw Milosz’s “Conversations with Jeanne.” Notice how Milosz breaks the stanzas and makes use of patterned white space. Think about the effect of cutting that one line alone in the middle of the poem. Now think of friends or family with whom you maintain an ongoing disagreement about a specific ethical question (maybe divorce, abortion, end of life, etc.). Write a poem addressed to that person. Try to nurture the same level of distance that Milosz deploys in his titling of the poem as a “conversation.” As you write, think about the difference between a conversation and a dispute.

7. Write a poem about the afterlife of an object. For example, “The Afterlife of Sunscreen” or “The Afterlife of Pink Cocktail Umbrella.”

8. Read Amaud Jamaul Johnson’s favorite poem by Gwendolyn Brooks and use his prompt to angle into a sonnet. So much gorgeousness here.

9. Read Alice Walker’s “S M”. Then write a poem in response to it. Or write a poem in tandem with it. Or write a poem that bystanders it.

10. Bernadette Mayer: “Using phrases relating to one subject or idea, write about another (this is pushing metaphor and simile as far as you can), for example, steal science terms or philosophical language & write about snow or boredom.”

11. Write a poem about an awkward moment, but do so lightly, with the loosest touch, with a special attempt to apply Paul Celan’s attention to breath.

12. Tod Marshall has a poem titled “Describe Custody to an Omelet.” Following Marshall’s lead, write a poem in which you describe an abstraction to a noun.

13. Read Naomi Shabib Nye’s “Famous.” Notice how the poem is structured around the definition and circling of the title word. Write a poem that turns on the reframing of a certain word. Use that word as the title.

14. Experiment with poetic sub-genres using this prompt by Eric Pankey, inspired by W.S. Merwin.

15. The Line Break.: Play Etymological Rotisserie. First go back in time & find an Indo-European root word. (They are all in the back of the American Heritage Dictionary). List all its derivative words, & then try to get all those words into one poem. For instance, kailo-, which means “whole, uninjured, of good omen.” Its derivatives (words that came from it) are: whole, hale (as in “free from infirmity or illness”), wholesome, hail (as in “to salute or greet”), wassail, health, heal, holy, halibut, halidom, holiday, hollyhock, hallow, Allhallowmass, & Halloween.

16. Write a poem immersed in place with help from this prompt by Susan Tichy.

17. C.D. Wright once wrote: “It is a function of poetry to locate those zones inside of us that would be free and declare them so.” Find your zones. Explore them on the page. Don’t be surprised if you discover that it was you who authored the zoning restrictions. Write why. Reveal the barbed wire.

18. Read these three prose poems by Beth Bachmann. Think about the lack of punctuation. Consider the syntax. Use Bachmann’s technique as a scaffold or model to experiment with sparse form.

19. In “The Poetics of Disobedience”, Alice Notley writes: I've spoken in other places of the problems, too, of subjects that hadn't been broached much in poetry and of how it seemed one had to disobey the past and the practices of literary males in order to talk about what was going on most literarily around one, the pregnant body, and babies for example. There were no babies in poetry then. How could that have been? What are we leaving out now? Usually what's exactly in front of the eyes ears nose and mouth, in front of the mind, but it seems as if one must disobey everyone else in order to see at all. This is a persistent feeling in a poet but staying alert to all the ways one is coerced into denying experience, sense and reason is a huge task.” Find an “old poem” and rewrite it with a baby in it. Give credit to the original author.

20. Write into this quote from Clarice Lispector: “What is the weight of light?”

21. Invent places and institutions to populate a poem. Or to place it. The Room Where She Left Me. The Ferris wheel That Ate Children. The Shittiest Fair. Or David Berman’s “Bureau of Sad Endings”.

22. Read Anthony Hecht’s “Double Sonnet”. Mess around with the double sonnet form until you find a way to bend the notes just right. Listen to Lightning Hopkins as you write it.

23. Study Laynie Brown’s fascinating “Epigraphs”. Be fascinated. Write your own version in this form.

24. Now write a poem for each epigraph in previous exercise. But make sure the last line of each epigraph poem becomes the first line of the next one so that something like a sonnet corona conceit enters the picture.

25. Think about the tweet from Todd Kanecko at the top… and write or journal into it. Collect a few bones. Make them dance.

Song and poem sandwich: Joan Osborne and Haryette Mullen.

Because music and poetry mine the same vein in me.

“We’ve been together so long
I hope it wasn’t just the drugs
What happened to the energy we had
The morning glories and the rodeo hugs
And I know you like the back of my hand
With a stamp that says I paid to get in
And yes I am your television show
And you’re the nicest place I’ve ever been ”

— Joan Osborne, "Let's Just Get Naked"

Wipe That Smile Off Your Aphasia

by Haryette Mullen

as horses as for
as purple as we go
as heartbeat as if
as silverware as it were
as onion as I can
as cherries as feared
as combustion as want
as dog collar as expected
as oboes as anyone
as umbrella as catch can
as penmanship as it gets
as narcosis as could be
as hit parade as all that
as ice box as far as I know
as fax machine as one can imagine
as cyclones as hoped
as dictionary as you like
as shadow as promised
as drinking fountain as well
as grassfire as myself
as mirror as is
as never as this

(Poem source: Contemporary Poetry)

The cool girl prompt (and a bouquet for Robin Richardson).

I still remember the moment when I opened an email from Robin Richardson that accepted my story, “Toketwat”, for publication in Minola Review.

I remember the jolt of gratitude—the thrill of knowing a difficult female voice had found a home outside the perfect-mommy publishing industry. Robin’s validation encouraged me to keep writing in that raw, minor key that wound into Every Mask I Tried On.

When the print collection of Minola Review showed up in my mailbox, I sat down and literally snuggled it. Count me among the horrified, anti-cool-girl cotillion. Count me among the women who wanted to rip every seam in the garment fashioned to sell cool-girlness to a consumer society of desperate, hungry women groomed for the male gaze.

Cool Girl Writing Prompt

This prompt is simple. Read the excerpt from Robin’s introduction to the anthology (see image). Read the excerpt that defines Flynn’s “cool girl”. Then write into or about a space in which you (or someone you love) enacted her cool-girlness. Don’t write about someone you hate or resent—that’s too easy, too gratuitous, too invulnerable. Look in the mirror. Now tell us what you’ve done.

A few of the prose pieces I can’t get out of my head…

• “If You’re a Girl and You’re Going to Have Sex with Another Girl, But You’re on Your Period and You’re Wearing a Tampon, Can You Still? Do People Ever Do That?” by Kara Vernor

• “Lullaby” by T. Kira Madden

• “When My Father Left My Mother” by Meghan Rose Allen

• “This Is Not a Short Story” by Jill Talbot

• “Memory Palace” by J. A. Pak

• “Runny Young Folks” by Mariah Stovall

• “Acting Womanish” by Gay Pasley

• “Liber Monstrorum” by Sara Patterson

• “The Many Sick Mothers of My Heart” by Margeaux Feldman

• “All memories start with a bird slamming into a window which is an omen” by Sara Patterson

• “Perform” by Marianne Apostolides

And the poems that haunt me….

• “First Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” by Caitlin Cowan

• “Teeth Marks” by Laura Page

• “Palm Trees, Post-Rape” by Cade Leebron

• “A Scene From Proper Spite” by Leah Umansky

• “déjà voodoo” by Adebe DeRango-Adem

• “White Paper Birds” by Shannon Bramer

• “Were I To Prepare For Your Death” by Shannon Hardwick

• “Claude Thornhill Arrangement” by Lauren Hilger

• “The Actor” by Nicole Brooks

• “[if not for the space between]” by Madeleine Wattenberg

• “The Out of Bread Poem” by Emily Schultz

• “Self-Portrait As a Pink Dressing Room” by Jenna Clarke

• “Cool Enough to Sink a Ship” by Claire Kelly

• “Diacritics” by Emily Osborne

• “This Is Not An Epistrophe But An Epistrophe Without An ‘E’” by Tanya Singh

• “Maidenwifemother Maiden” by Kate Finegan

Read Minola Review.

Purchase the print anthology.

Donate to help keep the journal alive.

Chase it on twitter.

Support writers and editors who demand a space in which women hold hands and perform for each other rather than the usual, male-dominated script.

And follow Robin Richardson to learn more about the amazing ways in which she writes and rocks the poetry world.

“Reader, sometimes I go to write a short story and just end up writing you stupid whore over and over. I once debated an English professor who required a psychological analysis of sleep teaching in Brave New World. Nobody ever believed just hearing something over and over in your sleep actually causes you to believe it. I told a friend that what I miss most about my old life is never being disappointed. She said that was the saddest thing she had ever heard. It was too familiar to me to be sad or disappointing. It just was. And yet there is an Irish saying, the thing about the past is it’s not the past.”

— Jill Talbot, "This Is Not a Short Story"

“to put some in your mouth
and find it has gone sour.
Imagine everyone decided
to wear the blue of a J-Cloth
on the same day, but you wore pink.
I leave flour on my clothes so
it looks like I’ve been touched.”

— Jenna Clarke, "Self-Portrait As a Pink Dressing Room"

“She loves the man
who clears his throat
like the sea in Beowulf.
Into the neck of the gramophone,
she sputters housewife potency.
Have her feel like she is pushing up a bay from under.
Have her bow, and have NY pet her head.
As if it’s not enough to be alive,
she wants to be guided down a staircase.
The ring of bad news is in the outline of the tree branches.
Make up an excuse for them to talk.
Factor in the keyhole of the bedroom door. Factor in they have no key.”

— Lauren Hilger, "Claude Thornhill Arrangement"

Chaconne for My Lover's Hands.

A chaconne is a composition in a series of varying sections in slow triple time, typically over a short repeated bass theme.

"On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind."

- Brahms on Bach's Chaconne in D-Minor For Left Hand in letter to Clara Schumann, 1877

---

Chaconne for My Lover’s Hands

i.

Regret I wore raw

a silk dress, poured to follow
each fold & slouch of peridot flesh

that met the suede
touch of fingertips
nails nibbled down to nub

the unexpected flange
of a lover’s hands
conspiring to caress

or to crowbar me open
like neon, the unsettled buzz

of lust for ravish holds tempo

ii.

Terror I wore raw

into rooms without windows
the beauty of barbarism
being all ways it could have been
otherwise

nothing binds us
to what is brutal
but a choice

lust for ravish shears
the safe silhouette, the story of luggage
packed to leave him

semiprecious plagiarism
of affections past
unsecured from a boat

useless life rafts

iii.

Regret I wore nothing

swore the image
of his hands on my hips
would not stab me

like the dry stems of flowers
tucked into boxes, the death of over-admired
objects hurts to touch

or be touched
by such familiar thunder
when rain bruises us with kisses
because it must

let us rust
into lust for ravish
or what rushes me into chapels

where Joan of Arc once knelt
in a village named after a flea
and the itch of this hairshirt

is just longing
for me

---

The Warm-Up Routine: I listened to this chaconne and picked three words that kept whispering somehow from the melody and particular measures. Then I wrote into those words and their associations. I do things like this every day as exercises to loosen images and clumped thoughts before getting started on writing. For the most part, I don’t keep or use or even revisit these many warm-up poemings (my notebooks are full of them), but I appreciate when other poets share their practice routines so I thought I’d share mine from yesterday. Which started with googling Trifonov performances and then discovering this fascinating thing called a chaconne, and then using it as a bridge into my warm-up exercise.

1979, with little steps forward.

Video made by my dad of my first year in Romania, just before my parents defected.

My dad made these video on film reels before defecting from Romania the following year. My parents left me in the care of the my grandparents, who also kept film reels safe.

The day before they ran, my parents invited family over for dinner and told them they were leaving early in the morning. There are no words for the fear they left on their loved ones’ faces. And no words for the fear they carried over borders when leaving their baby behind.

Maria Tanase remains.

Where words leave us.

I need to talk about words, the ruse of them, the huff and whiff, the bracket.

How words use me as they resist being used, as they scale a wall and seep beneath a window to ruin a room, to sketch fangs on the whispers encircling a bed.

The fear of words,

And how they hurt us. How a connotation can inflame a room, claim ownership of a womb. The difference between a baby and a fetus is how we feel when it’s said. How we choose the word to use based on what we want from it.

*

The wrong word.

“A word is chosen and put into position, for particular effect. It is tantamount to hauling a big rock, carrying it a great distance, and setting it down, only to realize it should not be occupying that spot in this circumstance. It is dead on arrival although you barely have the reserves to move it again. But if not moved, and best before darkness spreads, it will create a hole commensurate with its heft, and it will encroach on the tender shoots of words nearby.”

*

Words that enact rejection

May begin with a tendril of resentment coiled inside a color. Glacial. The way some words carry the weight of what we fear saying. Distant. Detached. The way a word that gets overburdened becomes an object, a bough. An objectification. A false innocence that depends on diminishment of something external. She’s a bitch is the hoarseness voice of not saying I’m hurt. Refusing to own the emotion.

The confusion of first-generation immigrants as a descriptive tag that denotes both non-naturalized citizens, refugees, and those born to immigrant parents in the US. The melting pot of identity hunger.

The most powerful ideologies are the invisible ones. The shirts we wear to breakfast.

*

Particular lexicons.

C. D. Wright: “I love the particular lexicons of particular occupations. The substrate of those activities. The nomenclatures within nomenclatures. I am of the unaccredited school that believes animals did not exist until Adam assigned them names. My relationship to the word is anything but scientific, it is a matter of faith on my part, that the word endows material substance, by setting the thing named apart from all else. Horse, then, unhorses what is not horse.”

Sailing words. Firefighter lingo. Administrative technology. Nonprofit development reports.

I think of Heather McHugh’s poem, “Hackers Can Sidejack Cookies”

*

Signature words.

What C. D. Wright calls the words some poets inhabit so completely that one rarely reads them without feeling those words near. She says W.S. Merwin uses rain. Cole Swenson uses hand. Robert Creeley uses here.

The way we wear a word into a poem as an introduction, a handshake that establishes how what we make of space in a room.

My signature words feel cheap, overly abstract. Maybe longing,
ruin,
rot.

*

Words that assume gestures.

Imagine Salome. Who would be nothing if not for the willingness to fan desire’s flame. Whose name comes from peace. Whose use of the body is both plot and characterization. Her words are simply the motion of seduction, the quick slip of a hip when it owns the horizon, the pitch of lust when it narrows the gaze.

Dance for me.

A dollar.

Rae Armantrout: "a silence that was a gesture". That must be a gesture in a world lacking natural silence. The estrangement of silence and our relation to it in consumer culture enfused with "ghostly messages from television, radio, billboards, etc..... a noise which requires no response so it may be received subliminally."

Rae thinks the impulse to respond remains.

"Words no longer come from silence, but directly from other words" in an ongoing dialogue with commercial culture and the terms set by connotation. Silence may "mark the legitimate bounds of certainty."

*

Single syllable words

“I like that a lone syllable names a necessary thing: bridge, house, door, food, bed. And the ones that sustain us: dirt, milk, and so on. What a thing, that a syllable—birth, time, space, death—points to the major mysteries with such simplicity, as with a silent finger.” (C. D. Wright)

A tandem story writing assignment.

“The difficulty is what happens in that instant between the moment before you even begin and the moment once you’ve begun, into which is inserted every vague notion you may have about what writing is, how it is done, who does it, and every conceivable fantasy you might harbor about being a poet or a novelist. Before you begin, the blank page or screen is in front of you, absolutely free of any irrevocable marks, literally virgin territory. Once you begin, however, you instantaneously discover yourself burdened with thousands of ghosts and beliefs about what writing is. It’s like trying to swim with a team of elephants on your back. The opportunities for drowning are immense.” (Ron Silliman)

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C. D. Wright, “In a Word, A World,” Evening Will Come: A Monthly Journal of Poetics, Issue 1, January 11.

Danielle Vogel, "Letters for Renee Gladman’s The Ravickians: an ekphrastic companion", Evening Will Come, Issue 23, November 2012

Ron Silliman, “Unlearning to Write”, Poetry, 15 April 2014.

To friends upset by disparagement of southern & red states as attacks on female bodies continue.

Me and mom in Bucuresti, circa 1979, in the month before they defected.

Writers Resist in Tuscaloosa, late 2016.

November, 2016.

In Birmingham.

I was raised in a state that taught me to sing its praises—to strive for its debutante corsets and bend my body to worship its purist ideals.

I was raised in a state that made it clear from the start how my being “foreign” kept me from being able to contribute to discussions that mattered. Starting with history and ending with culture.

I was raised to pledge allegiance to flags, to football teams, to men who mastered the fine art of killing foreign bodies in countries we never learned to pronounce.

As I grew older, I met more progressive-minded Alabamians that encouraged me to think outside the please-accept-me immigrant box.

I relished the moments of safety inside nice, liberal bubbles that made the majority of my state’s citizens feel so far away—and harmless.

When I became a naturalized citizen, I began the long journey of loving a country without making excuses for its crimes and cruelty.

I learned to stop defending the indefensible.

I know the history that prides itself on excluding me is also the history for which I am responsible.

I know the price of not being likable and not playing “the game” is exclusion from polite circles where power is concentrated. This is true for any leftist, anti-imperialist female in the south.

This is how the stakes are drawn.

This is how we line up to angle for influence.

This is how we commodify dissent into “acceptable” forms that keep others feeling comfortable.

To the friends who condemn me for staying here, you talk a good game of privilege that assumes I’d abandon other women to the mess in which I (as a voting, tax-paying citizen) am complicit.

To the friends who tell me to go back to where I came from, I’m sorry my poster upsets you but I’m not here to offer peace of mind that my silence or disappearance would give you.

To the friends who want me to say Alabama is just like the rest of the country, I can’t do that without selling out countless of humans who live in the gagged regimen of polite southern silence where we go along to get along. Which is what makes all of this injustice possible.

Should I critique the deep misogyny of southern life in a way that makes it seem like only elected officials are responsible?

Should I make it easy to say the gregarious mega-churches are innocent?

Should I pretend that so many people I love don’t support Trump in this state—and don’t support misogyny so deeply that we barely avoided voting a child rapist into office?

Why do you get to decide what Alabama means for me?

What about your life, body, or career enables you to be the expert on my experience?

And isn’t that the point, finally? My job. My role as good immigrant and southern girl. My commitment in the effort to maintain a cherished ideal of southern life that is warm and welcoming and hospitable and no more racist or xenophobic or self-destructive than states where the majority votes against xenophobia, racism, and misogyny.

I’ve spoken about this before. I will speak about it again. As an American. As an Alabamian. As a woman. As a citizen of this warming planet.

I will hold my state accountable for lies we are asked to live. Daily. Constantly. Without mercy or reprieve.

My voice is NOT the problem. My criticisms of patriarchal life in the south are NOT the problem. The problem is a system so deeply rooted in allegiance and loyalty that even my liberal friends find themselves invested in its appearance.

As for those whose experience in the south is different from mine, believe me when I say that I am glad. This is a place where everyone should feel welcome and seen. This is a state with room enough for all kinds of humans beings with varying hopes and dreams.

If I didn’t believe goodness was possible, I wouldn’t fight to expose the seams where cruelty dwells, and nests, and breeds.

Gladness aside, I hope that we all hold our government and communities accountable for the laws and the culture that punishes humans for their birth.

I hope that our energies are focused not on rescuing the mythologies of “a good south” or a “liberal south” but on dealing with the reality of a merciless south where the institutions of justice and social aid are as complicit in racist, sexist outcomes as the laws that keep them that way.

I stand in the Customs Line with “nothing to declare” on my lips.

Inside that “nothing,” however, is a struggle between the need to belong and the need to tell the truth.

I hope you find it in your hearts to forgive me.

Peace,
Alina

One Week Before Congress Voted That XX Bodies Were Intended as Vehicles for Male Stories

An activist broke her heart. The girl whose heart broke was not a feminist. She stayed away from politics and male-dominated tropes.

When asked to describe herself in a freshman essay, Heartbroke used the word traditional three times. Listed dreams that involved a good husband, a beloved wife, a safe suburban family likely situated in the suburbs of a thriving southern metropolis. She has pastel tshirts and bumper stickers and a B- minus in freshman composition to prove it.

Heartbroke can't help thinking her embrace of femininity has been held against her. As if any living human should sacrifice their dreams to a frat boy that bought her a drink at the Row Row Row Your Kappa Alpha Boat party.

And then left her in alley behind a warehouse.

On a street she didn’t recognize.

In the sprawl of a boy whose name she didn’t know.

Who isn't in the right frame of mind to be anyone’s loving Daddy.

She thinks the very nice church-lady understands. The church-lady promises that we are all sinners.

The church-lady clutches her hand and presses it to her chest while swearing that we are all sinners. There is no need for shame. Things happen. Satan attacks a man's mind and forces the man to attack a female.

Heartbroke carries tiny morsels of hope into this church. She becomes an official visitor. Her name appears on the prayer list. During prayers, she tongues the word sanctuary like a lozenge.

When Heartbroke gets distracted from the sermon, she imagines being saved, maybe marrying the blue-eyed fellow that places checks into the silver tray.

A few guys in a nearby pew turn their heads from her bloated belly.  

Rode hard and put up wet, she hears one guy whisper.

She can't erase the tandem drum-whirr of snickers.

She can’t stop wondering if she is. Or what she is. And who made her that way.

Heartbroke wonders how much more they will ride her to please a man they don’t know. She knows that to please any man requires effort and dedication.

How many more months of being ridden, and then—into motherhood, forever?

Near the restroom, Heartbroke sees the poster. It says no body is innocent. Not since that girl in the garden. No girl gets blamed without a cause. No man escapes losing his mind to lust every so often. The culture warns us. The man takes the fruit. The woman offered.

*

When she sees the kind church-lady at the clinic waving a sign, Heartbroke’s feet freeze into icicles or stalagmites or whatever those things that grow in caves up from the ground due to a single drip drip drip.

Has the church-lady seen her? Did the church-lady get her name from a list and then invite her to the church? Did the church lady hug her and introduce her to her husband, three sons, and single daughter for a reason that wasn’t casual?

“Emma!” The church lady shouts in a wrung-clean voice. “Jesus loves you! Don’t murder his baby!

A man to the left calls her “Jezebel”, his tongue forking into a hiss.

She thinks when a girl is pregnant her name must not matter. She is whatever a lousy fellow screams in a gravel parking lot.

She thinks about how the activist said her job was saving lives. There was money in saving lives. The activist received a paycheck for bringing God’s love into the world.

She thinks the lives saved by the activist do not include her own.

Jezebel.

Child of Satan.

She forgives the rapist, a nice middle-class boy, driven by the sudden urge to have her. She remembers how his eyes gleamed when she cried, when she said it hurts. He liked it. She forgives him for the terror. But she will never forgive the activist who breaks her heart. She will never forgive the woman who knew her name in that clinic parking lot and said nothing, nothing, nothing.

AWP 2019, let's do this.

I have this quote from James. J. Gibson running through my brain, namely: “Events are perceivable but time is not.” Meaning we can only perceive time when something happens—our experience of time is event-dependent. And the way I feel the breath of AWP is both dizzying and terrifying. I am grateful, afraid, and absolutely small in the face of all this.

Writing prompt from a Galway Kinnell poem.

Or really, writing prompt from a poem you can’t stop reading, loving, admiring, and needing to engage. I’ve been challenging myself to write a poem in response to a poem that haunts me. It’s a challenge that frames my morning and ruins my placid coffee-guzzling routine.

I learn so much from the prompts and possibilities posted by fellow writers, so I’m going to share this Wait/Don’t Wait experiment in full knowledge that nothing I write in a morning compares with Galway Kinnell’s poems. This statement is both particular and general in its scope. This poem will never be submitted, published, collected, or read. It is a poem for the compost. It is critical to produce a steady stream of poems one is willing to bury. A poet’s task is to feed the flowers, which includes grinding old bones into soil.

Because I love Galway Kinnell’s “Wait”—from the way he touched depression to the way he wove a melody to free it. Kinnell wrote this poem for a student who wanted to die after a love relationship went wrong. Because it is one of my favorite poems and yet—I feel a hollow space in its promise, a sort of positivity that promises we will learn from the suffering of life. I’m not sure I believe this anymore. I’m not sure I need to believe this in order to love living—or to bear the implacable parts.

The Rub: Subvert Your Idol

Pick a poem that you adore, a poem by a famous poet, a poet you admire and emulate. You should have a fear of profaning their poems. This fear is important—it’s where the poem gets its energy.

Start by playing with the title, reading it, feeling its relationship to what the poet wants from the poem. Then subvert it. Flip it. And write into what happens.

(My example in response to Kinnell’s “Wait” is below.)

It’s worth watching the poet read this beautiful poem aloud—because watching adds layers to listening, and layers thicken the bed, broaden the available brushstrokes.

And what’s funny to me about this poem is I went in thinking I wanted to argue with Kinnell about whether we “recover” from broken hearts in the context of romantic love. As I wrote into the titular subversion, I discovered my mother—and how I needed to think about love and loss in general, how the intensity of love can attach to unromantic relationships, including parental ones.

The point of this post—the point of my daily subversions—is to schedule time for failure. To slot in a space where I write to fail, and then feel through that failure to new subjects. So I wrote the poem above (which is compost) and then discovered the poem I needed to write (which is not compost and not shared here but hopefully appears somewhere someday, ptuie ptuie).

In this way, writing “Don’t Wait” led me to a tension that I probe in a poem I do not plan to compost. But I’m not sure I would have resolved to write into the uncertainty of this space if I hadn’t first discovered its parameters through this writing exercise.

And that, friends, is the risk I need to bring to the page. Alongside the reminder that, if we are writing, then we are producing reams of nonsense alongside a few moonflower vines. And producing those reams is a good thing. A shameless thing. A facet of practice and commitment. Don’t wait.

Prose poems that teach and humble.

I taught the most AMAZING group of writers this past weekend in an online weekend workshop hosted by Bending Genres. I really can’t recommend these humans enough—and I encourage fellow writers to look at Jonathan Cardew’s forthcoming workshop on character as well as Sara Lippman’s.

On that note—and partly as a bookmark for myself as I share and study prose poetry—these prose poems have influenced the permission I give myself in understanding (and bending) the form.

"32 Views from the Hammock" by Lance Larsen (Kenyon Review): for list poem

3 prose poems by David Shumate (Mad Dog Blues blog)

"[9]"by Yoel Hoffman (Tikkun)

"A Land Governed By Unkindness Reaps No Kindness" by Terrance Hayes (McSweeney's)

"Among the Prophets" by Essy Stone (New Yorker): for language

"Childhood" by Brenda Hillman (Kenyon Review Online): for an "essay in rhyme"

"from Curriculum Vitae" by Yoel Hoffman (Poetry)

"Describe the Situation in Specific Detail" by Emma Bolden (So To Speak): for great use of conceit

"Domestic" by Jenn Givhan (Adroit Journal): for interesting use of white space

"Eventide" by Ray Rasmussen (OJAL): for an example of the haibun form

"Final For" by Ron Silliman (Double Room): for example of long prose poem that inches close to flash

"He Said Discipline Is the Highest Form of Love" by Beckian Fritz Goldberg (Blackbird)

"How to Sit In A Cafe" by David Shumate. From High Water Mark (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 2004). A prose instruction poem that uses directions to describe feelings in a backward manner-- what you wear when you feel X, how you look, etc.

"In A Sunday Kitchen" by Dina Relles (Pidgeonholes)

"Information" by David Ignatow (New Yorker): for factoid prose poems

“Instructions for Banishment” by John Sibley Williams (Figure 1)

“Minotaur // Dylan Roof” by John Sibley Williams (Figure 1)

"Past Immaculate" by Beckian Fritz Goldberg (Blackbird)

"Prayer for What I Do Not Want" by Amorak Huey (Third Point Press)

“Repast and future” by Bob Hicok (Blip Magazine)

"Stereo" by Ann Waldman (Poetry): for use of parataxis

"Subtraction" by Maxine Chernoff (KYSO Flash)

"Teaching A Child the Art of Confession" by David Shumate. From High Water Mark (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 2004). A prose instruction poem that starts with what not to do and frames it in the negative admonitive voice.

"The Drag Queen Inside Me" by Denise Duhamel (Web del Sol)

"The Fire Cycle" by Zachary Schomberg (Poetry)

"the other word for thesaurus" by Maurice Kilwein Guevara (Guide to Prose Poetry, Rose Metal Press.)

"The Problem with Sappho" by Charles Rafferty (New Yorker)

"The Sound" by Maxine Chernoff (Jacket):for a dialogue between lovers about the sound of an orgasm

"The Tale-less Hoffman" by James Wallenstein (Tikkun)

"from Whereas" by Layli Long Solider (Poetry): for its amazing and innovative form and the spell it casts

"Year of the Dig" by Danielle Mitchell (Cease, Cows): for use of the aleatory voice in prose poems

Dicktat and the dick-tater-tot.

A few years ago, Mount Analogue (a small press in Seattle) ran a submissions call for political pamphlets. My brain was one big list of events, marches, protests, direct actions, and possible pamphlets. I was thrilled when MA decided to publish this precious little fellow named dicktat (which you can download for free below).

The title was a word that came to mind which described the Trump POTUS scenario, namely the etat of dick. Or the dick-state. Or the dicktatertot.

I’m grateful to Mount Analogue and Paper Press Punch for producing political pamphlets in a historical tradition that reaches into what is best about the printing press, namely, its use as a engine for dissent. And I’d love to learn more about how to support these efforts locally in Birmingham, Alabama.

For more from Mount Analogue, see their Instagram at @themountanalogue.

How I Am Not Like Donald Trump

In response to a poem that unsettled me.

Yesterday, I kept quiet
as a mouse inched

careful pink claws across
our kitchen floor.

I did not speak
or say Grand Canyon things

that forced doors open
into postcards. I left

gluttons of the grotesque
to the business of making noise,

peddling majesty.
And as the mouse came so close

to my toe, I did not lay
her small wonder at the hem

of a G-d or a nation.
Instead, I watched the fur

on her flanks pulse fast.
And sped my breath

to meet the terror
of the tiniest.