Hi poets, writers and friends. When you subscribe to Your One Wild and Poetically Imperfect Life, (The Poetry Salon’s Substack) you are invited to our monthly Reading and Open-Mic on the 3rd Sunday of each month. Paid subscribers also get access to our extra drop-in workshops, with me and our guest poets.
Our featured guest poet for May is Sarah Browning, author of Killing Summer (Sibling Rivalry, 2017), teaching “The Republic of Motherhood.” Our co-featured reader for May is Alixen Pham.
Ever Hit a Wall with a Poem?
Well. We’ve almost made it through April. Some of us have been doing the 30/30 thing where we wrote 30 poems in 30 days. Some of us have made it part-way and written twenty poems or ten poems, or just one really, really long poem. And some of us, probably all of us, have at least a few poems we didn’t feel were working. So now feels like a good time to share a prompt I use whenever I am stuck on a poem that I just can’t get “right.”
The following is an excerpt from Method and Mystery, which you can buy here, or get on Teachable, here.
Meta Poems
At the end of every long-term workshop, I always give students what I call a “meta-poem.” Meta-poems are self-conscious about the fact that they are poems... written by writers... trying to communicate with a reader.
In my experience, meta-poetry prompts offer writers an opportunity to relax and get honest with themselves and their readers. After months or weeks of trying to come up with a great metaphor or “master” poetry techniques to impress their readers, a meta-poem allows a writer to emerge from the shadows and say, “Hey, I’m a writer. This poem was supposed to be about my mother, but now it’s about a salamander. What do you think?” or, “This poem isn’t working. It was supposed to be beautiful, but I can’t make it beautiful because the experience I’m writing about was actually very ugly.”
I often find that when a writer has been struggling with a poem, they may have locked themselves into an agenda that the poem won’t obey. Sometimes they’re unclear about their objective, or they’re lying to themselves about how they feel. Often, if a poet has been working on one poem, to no avail for several weeks, it is the meta-poem that will help them finally break through the pretention, anxiety, or dishonesty and finally hit pay-dirt. That’s why I save it for the end. It’s a Hail Mary, when nothing else will work. And, it’s usually a lot of fun!
Here is a sample prompt from the seciton on Meta Poems.
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Introduction to Writer’s Block (A Prompt)
A. Think of a poem that you have been working on that isn’t quite “there” yet. What images are in that poem? What images or imagery first got you writing that poem? For example, I’ve never written about my pet pot-bellied pig. When I think of her, I think of the straw she slept on, how she lived under a mock-orange tree, her black hooves…
B. What things have been preventing you from writing this poem? What other thoughts or images or imagery distracts you from it? For example, the traffic distracts me, the news, the thought that I need to go buy groceries…
Introduction to Writer’s Block
Jeannine Hall Gailey
It was right after they had taken a picture of my brain and showed me those dark shadows, called lesions. You said “You’ve lost your muse” and you took me to the movies, to museums, we walked along the ocean and in the mountains, and still I couldn’t write. “I’ve lost my words,” I told you, although technically we knew they were still in there, somewhere, teeming and crowding, but sometimes I would confuse one with another, another aphasia. You can write with just the words you have left, I told myself. Writers write, so you just sit down and do it. What stories are left to tell? My brain has been crammed full of riots and police beatings, bombings in distant lands that were the birthplaces of roses and pomegranates and apples, salmonella in the peanut butter, sunspots causing continental drift. You have to shove all that aside. Maybe listen to some music, that new band, something with dragons. Even at the end of the world, you can make fire. If you wait long enough, something inside you will ignite.
Originally published in Shenandoah, Volume 68, Number 1, fall 2018
Prompt: Write about the experience of trying to write poetry – this specific poem, or any others. What have you tried? What has gotten in the way? What do you do instead? What advice have you received? Use as much imagery from your first two lists as you can. For example, “The sound of traffic drowns out all of my memories. I forget the mock orange tree, the farm where I grew up, the pig who slept in the straw and how we used to pet her and feed her scraps from the…”
Do you have any tricks you use to help you with a stuck poem? Feel free to share in the chat. I’d love to hear from you.
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I think the poem that sticks with me the most, in the strangest way, is by ee cummings. I was living in New York at the time, quite young, and he was such an urban poet to me. He was also a painter with strange syntax, a playfulness with punctuation and treated the typewriter keys and page like a brush and canvas. At least, that is how I saw it at the time.
The poem is A Leaf Falls on Loneliness.
It is written in this way
l (a
le
af
fa
ll
s)
one
l
iness
It probably shaped how I could think about poetry, about letters, about painting. I think it is my favorite because of its influence on my own work. I think the first time I read it, I was devastated, in a sense. It kinda shook me.
Incidentally, here is a poem I wrote about not being able to write about my mom. "https://sheilanagigblog.com/poetry-archives/volumes-7-1-7-4-fall-2022-summer-2023/volume-7-2-winter-2022-the-poets/tresha-faye-haefner/