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The popular saying “you can’t go home again” refers to the difficulty of matching a confrontation of one’s childhood and home as an adult with the version that exists in nostalgia-tinged memories. This week, write a scene in which your main character has attempted to “go home again” and is in for a rude awakening. What expectations and memories did she have before arriving home? Do the shortcomings of home reveal something about her personality and identity?
Tamar Samuel-Siegel is the programs and outreach manager at the ARTS Council of the Southern Finger Lakes in Corning, New York. She received her BA in Creative Writing from SUNY Purchase in 2004 and has since worked and studied abroad, developed and delivered storytelling and ESL programming as an AmeriCorps service member, and, in addition to other public arts programming, carried out two poetry collaborative projects in her current position. Both were funded, and therefore made possible, by Poets & Writers.
As though it were a regular potluck arranged among intimates—that is how we begin to think of this new series of poetry readings called POETS in PLAY. In our rural community where a poetry reading might bring participants from an hour down the road, a reading is not a reading alone but, as my friend and fellow poet Mary sweetly names it, a gathering, a place for community.
The Tuesday before Thanksgiving, our second reader in the series, Bart White, arrives in town from Rochester, about two and a half hours from Corning. He brings his own camera. After Bart reads, he takes a first row seat for the inspired open mic that follows. A featured element of the series, the inspired open mic asks readers to respond to a prompt provided by the poet. As readers speak in some way to Bart's line, "I want it back, morning with miles to walk..." the room draws more closely around us.
We are, in fact, gathered: gathered by the images spoken to us by the featured poet, gathered by the resonance of his prompt line, gathered in sharing the ways in which experience and language marry in the unique cadences of our voices. But once the second portion of the evening closes, nearly every person in the room showing up to the mic a poet, Bart gathers us once more in a way that I have never seen a poet do at any other reading I have attended. He gathers us—familiars and strangers—for a family photo.
Each poetry reading—even those bound within a series—has its own timbre. Some poets tell stories, as Bart did, from a place of such emotional immediacy that the room builds a silence on which the emotion may ebb. Others present cerebral motifs, revealing the chaotic turning mechanics of their thoughts—a production that leads to the simplest of surprises—a familiar feeling, a reflection of such precise incisiveness it cauterizes as it cuts.
What excites me, however, about this particular series POETS in PLAY is that the inspired open mic asks both the featured poet and the audience to take a step closer to one another—not only to hear one another’s lines, but to meaningfully, to intentionally, interpret them as related.
Here we are: stepping in.
For more on POETS in PLAY, visit the website.
Photo: Group shot at Bart White reading. Photo credit: Beth Bentley.
Support for Readings & Workshops in New York is provided, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, with additional support from the Friends of Poets & Writers.
The end of the year is often accompanied by the practice of looking back at the previous twelve months and drawing up “Best of” lists: best moments, best books, best songs. As the new year kicks off, browse through some 2015 lists and jot down words, phrases, and notes about the themes in popular songs and books. Then write a poem that encapsulates the spirit of the music and literature recognized in 2015.
What’s your greatest fear, your singular phobia? Is it heights, snakes, or spiders? Write an essay that investigates your phobia—not its subject, but the fear itself—across history, culture, and science. Can treatises on your fear be located in ancient texts? Or do you suffer a more modern affliction, one that says as much about you as it does about our present day? Treat the subject as a nucleus around which you can spin research, criticism, and personal perspective.
In Lauren Groff’s novel Fates and Furies (Riverhead Books, 2015), which President Barack Obama named his favorite book of 2015, a marriage is detailed first through the husband’s perspective, then the wife’s. His memories are fond, but hers, not so much. Take on that old adage about two sides to every story and pick a supporting character from a novel, film, or short piece, and rewrite a story from his or her point of view. You could even invent a character related to a famous one, as Sena Jeter Naslund did in her novel Ahab’s Wife (William Morrow, 1999). Experiment with how a scene or plot can be completely transformed just by a change of perspective.
Think back over the past year. What does the memory of each month feel like? What is its emotional tone, vibration, form? Write a poem in twelve parts that tries to capture each month’s abstract feeling in a single line or stanza. Like Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” you can repeat the same object or setting throughout the poem, or offer a different context for each section. Challenge yourself to avoid the clichéd images that are often paired with months (i.e. the beach and July, leaves and October), and instead, try to translate the ineffable into the visual. When finished, you’ll have a calendar of metaphor.
Call Me Ishmael is an innovative, multi-platform project founded by Logan Smalley and Stephanie Kent, and featured in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine. Readers can call a phone number, leave a message relaying a story of how a particular book has been life-changing, and visitors to a website can access over a thousand of these recorded stories. Write a personal essay you might want to record about a book that has changed your life in a small or big way. What was it about this book that impacted or inspired you? What was unique about your reading experience that you would wish to pass on to others?
Sometimes the gifts we receive may seem plain or simple at first—another book, bag, pair of pants, or electronic gadget—but end up changing our lives in unexpected ways. Write a short story in which your main character receives a gift that he is unimpressed with, but that turns out to be more than meets the eye. Does using the gift result in a domino effect of unforeseen consequences? Is something surprising revealed about the gift giver?
Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich has said, “I love how humans talk...I love the lone human voice. It is my greatest love and passion.” Write a series of short poems each written in the voice of a distinct first-person speaker using casual spoken language. You might try loosely connecting the poems by having the voices in dialogue with one another, or by using recurring themes or repeated phrases. Emphasize the uniqueness of each voice with different perspectives, speech tics, slang, and tone.
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has announced the thirty-seven recipients of its 2016 Creative Writing Fellowships in prose. Each of the fellows will receive twenty-five thousand dollars for writing, research, travel, and general career advancement.
This year’s recipients are:
Elisabeth Tova Bailey
Dean Bakopoulos
Bill Cheng
Diane Cook
Lucy Corin
Michael Croley
Meghan Daum
Peter Ho Davies
Jack Driscoll
Jerry Gabriel
Kaitlyn Greenidge
Rav Grewal-Kök
Paul Harding
Jamey Hatley
Kevin Haworth
Nellie Hermann
Vedran Husić
Laleh Khadivi
R. O. Kwon
Joy Ladin
Éireann Lorsung
Anthony Marra
Monica McFawn
David Philip Mullins
Lenore Myka
Dina Nayeri
Celeste Ng
Téa Obreht
Mehdi Tavana Okasi
Leslie Parry
Joseph Rathgeber
Amy Rowland
Alison Stine
Aaron Thier
Samrat Upadhyay
Melissa Yancy
Mario Alberto Zambrano
The annual grants are given to emerging and established writers and alternate between poetry and prose.
“Since its inception, the creative writing fellowship program has awarded more than forty-five million dollars to a diverse group of more than three thousand writers, many of them emerging writers at the start of their careers,” said Amy Stolls, the NEA’s director of literature programs. “These thirty-seven extraordinary new fellows provide more evidence of the NEA’s track record of discovering and supporting excellent writers.”
A group of twenty-three readers and panelists chose the recipients from 1,763 applications. The 2017 fellowships will be given in poetry; the application deadline is March 9.
