Rick Barot

This May, in celebration of APIA Heritage Month, we have asked several respected teachers and writers of Asian American poetry to share writing exercises with us in lieu of our regular Friday Prompts. This week’s installment was contributed by Rick Barot.

Once, I mentored a graduate student who had been obsessively reading the stories of survivors of the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombings in World War II.  These stories were horrifying and moving by turns, and my student was consumed by them.  Because she was a poet, it was inevitable that her engagement with the stories would manifest itself in her work.  But here was the problem: she was a comfortably situated Caucasian woman who didn’t feel she had the right to write about this subject matter.  Even more complicated: she wanted to write poems directly in the voices of these survivors, making her use of the material doubly problematic.  Part of me, of course, wanted to advise the student to step away from the project, because it was simply too fraught with pitfalls that would make the project insurmountable at worst, and awful at the least.  But a larger part of me wanted to advise the student to move forward, which is what I did.

We artists get on a tightrope when we tackle subjects that are beyond the merely personal.  But far from ever trying to dissuade anyone from writing about these subjects, I urge them to head straight into those subjects.  The risks that come with any writing project are in fact the opportunities of that project: they are what make the project worth doing in the first place.  In poetry, there is no such thing as hands-off material.  A poem never fails because of its subject matter—it fails because the poet has inadequately given depth and shape to that subject matter.  Dramatic historical periods, natural disasters, grand personal wounds—writing about these subjects raises the stakes tremendously high when you have to write about them inventively, feelingly, thoughtfully.  You have to be ingenious to avoid failure—or, at the least, ingenuity will allow you to fail well.

To my mind, when a poet deals with a subject that is apt to be simplified by polemic or sentiment, it’s contingent on form to prevent those reductions.  By form I don’t necessarily mean traditional forms like sonnets and sestinas, though those forms are as viably powerful today as they ever were.  I mean a shapeliness—whether it is the rapturous listing of Garrett Hongo’s “Nostalgic Catalogue” or the symphonic multiple sections of Adrienne Rich’s “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children”—that asks the reader’s understanding to work at multiple levels.

Obviously, what I’m saying here is arguable: after all, for every poem that has to be as complicated as “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children,” there’s another poem that needs to be as formally restrained as Robert Hayden’s sonnet, “Those Winter Sundays.”  The real point is this: there’s no limit to the work poetry can do—or that it should do.  We live in a free verse world—which is to say that in poetry now, what we can do is thrillingly unfettered.  On the other hand, given the painful state of things in the world, it seems also the case that the things poetry should do has grown larger.  The poet has never had more freedom and more obligations.

In creative nonfiction, a genre that has been blossoming in recent years, there is a formal technique favored by lyric essayists that I’ve found fascinating: the hermit crab essay.  A hermit crab is a species of crab that inhabits abandoned seashells, moving from shell to shell as it grows.  In the hermit crab essay, the writer co-opts the shell of another textual genre—the restaurant menu, the instruction manual—and uses that form to organize his or her essay.  It’s an exciting form in that the merging of incongruous elements—practical structure and lyrical utterance—leads to unexpected discoveries for both the writer and the reader.  Of course, the hermit crab technique is wonderfully suited to poetry, as evidenced by this poem by Janice Mirikatini:

RECIPE

Round Eyes

Ingredients: scissors, Scotch magic transparent tape,
Eyeliner—water based, black.
Optional: false eyelashes.

Cleanse face thoroughly.

For best results, powder entire face, including eyelids.
(lighter shades suited to total effect desired)

With scissors, cut magic tape 1/16” wide, 3/4”-1/2” long—
depending on length of eyelid.

Stick firmly onto mid-upper eyelid area
(looking down into handmirror facilitates finding
adequate surface)

If using false eyelashes, affix first on lid, folding any
excess lid over the base of eyelash with glue.

Paint black eyeliner on tape and entire lid.

Do not cry.

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The prompt is a simple one.  Write a poem that utilizes the structure of another text: one page of a screenplay, a multiple-choice quiz, an entry from the Oxford English Dictionary, and so on.

Rick Barot was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He attended Wesleyan University and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Artist Trust of Washington, the Civitella Ranieri, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer. He has published two books of poetry with Sarabande Books: The Darker Fall (2002), and Want (2008), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and won the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize. His poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, The Paris Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Threepenny Review. He lives in Tacoma, Washington and teaches at Pacific Lutheran University, and in the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Andre Yang | Photo by Mary Yang

Andre Yang is a Hmong American poet from Fresno, California. He is a founding member of the Hmong American Writers’ Circle (HAWC), where he actively conducts and participates in public writing workshops. He completed the Creative Writing (Poetry) MFA program at California State University, Fresno, where he was a Philip Levine Scholar, recipient of the Academy of American Poets-sponsored Ernesto Trejo Prize, and the Graduate Dean’s Medalist of the College of Arts and Humanities.  Andre is a Kundiman Asian American Poetry Fellow, and has attended the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, and recently completed an artist residency at the Ucross Foundation.  He co-edited How Do I Begin – A Hmong American Literary Anthology (Heyday, 2011), and his poetry has appeared in Paj Ntaub Voice, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and the chapbook anthology ‘Here is a Pen’ (Achiote Press).

For APIA Heritage Month 2012, we are revisiting our Process Profile series, in which contemporary Asian American poets discuss their craft, focusing on their process for a single poem from inception to publication. This year, we’ve asked several Lantern Review contributors to discuss their process for composing a poem that we’ve published. In this installment, Andre Yang discusses his poem “Why I Feel the Way I Do About SB 1070,” which appeared in Issue 3 of Lantern Review.

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In a way, I have been writing this poem all my life, and considering all the things I discuss in the poem, it really does span my life.  The poem was written to express my feelings about the inception and implementation Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070, though I also wanted it to capture my thoughts on the interconnectedness of humanity.

I might not have written “Why I Feel The Way I Do About SB 1070” had I not met Francisco Xavier Alarcón at his Ce Uno One book launch in Sacramento, California.   I overheard Francisco saying he was attending the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference later that year in Washington D.C. (2011), and since I too was planning to attend the conference, I used that as a conversation starter and approached him.  He mentioned that while in D.C., he would be organizing two off-site Floricanto readings based on his Facebook page, “Poets Responding to SB 1070,” and that well-established poets like Martín Espada would be taking part in the reading.  Five minutes into the conversation, he asked, to my complete surprise, if I wanted to participate in the readings. I said I’d be honored, and told him I’d contact him when I felt I had a poem worthy of the purpose.

Months passed and I hadn’t written a thing.  When a friend and poet, Anthony Cody, emailed me a CNN article link that discussed the saola, a rare “Asian unicorn,” an intrigue arose from me.  I’d never heard of the saola, but I did some research and learned that it lives only in undeveloped, remote regions of Southeast Asia, and avoids areas touched by humans, to the extent that no biologist has ever seen it in the wild.  The article mentioned that villagers in Laos once caught a saola and held it in captivity while awaiting the arrival of scientists, but that the animal died shortly after the scientists arrived.  There has never been a successful case of anyone keeping a saola alive in captivity.

Learning about this saola and its death reminded me of another article I’d read a few weeks earlier about an elderly (and sickly) Hmong man from Visalia, California, who filed a lawsuit under the pseudonym John Doe Xiong.  Because of his deteriorating health, Mr. Xiong wanted to return to Laos, where his wife and children still lived, to die amongst his loved ones and be buried in the land of his birth. Because his Laotian passport was taken from him by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency when he took refuge in the United States, however, he was unable to make that journey back.  I couldn’t help but relate his struggle with the captive saola, how their fates were determined by another’s decisions.  As a member of the first generation of Hmong people to be born in the United States, I’m always aware of my Hmongness.  How my people lived in the highest regions of the mountains of Laos in order to not be subject to the rules and laws of other lowland (and foothill) peoples.  How we’ve no place left on this planet to run to to avoid living amongst others.  How, considering all we’ve been through (the diaspora, the immersion into modern societies), so many of our elders are still so resistant to change.

Reading about the saola also triggered a memory of my meeting Sherman Alexie at AWP in Denver.  In a private conversation with Alexie, I mentioned that I was a Hmong American poet, to which he responded, “I know the Hmong.  The Hmong are the Native Americans of Asia.”  I somehow made it through the rest of the conversation without stumbling.  Afterwards I immediately called my wife (fiancé at the time) and, in a mix of tears and garbled words, expressed my surprise that Sherman Alexie, someone I didn’t expect to even know the Hmong existed, not only knew of us, but identified with us so closely.  To Alexie, our two peoples were metaphors for one another.  I considered this with the fact that many Chicanos/Latinos also have indigenous blood, and soon all these things converged, combined, and spilled onto the page as a poem.  I went on to workshop the poem at the Hmong American Writers’ Circle and in the Fresno State MFA Program, which helped me refine and reorder the material, but for the most part, it was my existence that guided the process.

Vikas K. Menon

Vikas K. Menon is a poet and playwright whose poems have appeared or are forthcoming in publications such as burntdistrict, diode, and The Literary Review, among others.  His poetry manuscript godflesh was a finalist for the 2010 Kinereth Gensler Award and a semifinalist for the Beatrice Hawley award, both from Alice James Books.   His poetry has been featured in Indivisible:  An Anthology of South Asian American Poetry and is forthcoming in The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry by Indians.  He is a board member of Kundiman, the first organization of its kind dedicated to supporting Asian-American poetry and is the Resident Playwright of Ruffled Feathers Theater company. 

For APIA Heritage Month 2012, we are revisiting our Process Profile series, in which contemporary Asian American poets discuss their craft, focusing on their process for a single poem from inception to publication. This year, we’ve asked several Lantern Review contributors to discuss their process for composing a poem that we’ve published. In this installment, Vikas K. Menon discusses his poem “Othertongue,” which appeared in Issue 3 of Lantern Review.

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My writing process is both fitful and fickle:  at the beginning of a writing session, I tend to move quickly among drafts to see which pieces pull me into further play.  This method has allowed me to elude the blocks that used to plague my writing life.  “Other Tongue” started in quick sketches; in this case, with a freewrite about my struggles with my parents’ ancestral tongue, Malayalam.  Malayalam is a Dravidian language that is outside of the Indo-European family of languages, and it is primarily spoken in the South Indian state of Kerala.  While I can comprehend Malayalam when it is spoken colloquially, I am otherwise illiterate in the language.  Since it was the language of intimacy used by my elders during my childhood, I am ashamed by my inability to speak it fluently.  But I can still revel in its aural pleasures and rolling cadences, its stark contrasts with English.  So I began writing into the texture of it, exploring the strangeness of its syllables in my mouth.  At the same time, I was working on a separate poem that explored my mother’s English, which is heavily inflected by Malayalam.  Finally, I realized that the two poems were linked by their exploration of the difficulties of articulation.  Despite that theme, paradoxically, the poem works quite well at readings: there is initial laughter at my mother’s malapropism that quickly turns to silent discomfort.  I like that sudden turn, something the poet and performer Regie Cabico does beautifully.

Manga Scroll by Christian Marclay | Gallery Koyanagi, Tokyo | Courtesy of Contemporary Culture Carousel

This week’s writing prompt asks you to think about the mashup, the remix, the “sample”–in short, the possibilities of the literary pastiche, a ground-up, reconstituted form of poetry that artfully (and sometimes not-so-artfully!) arranges found, borrowed and stolen language in innovative ways to make something wholly new.  The idea for this prompt (not a new one, admittedly, as we’ve written many times about poems that use “found language” and their less bashful cousins, the full-0n centos) comes from Daniel Zalewski’s profile piece, entitled “The Hours,” about collage artist Christian Marclay.  The article, which appeared last week in The New Yorker, discusses a broad array of Marclay’s work, the most famous of which is the twenty-four hour film “The Clock.”  By stitching together hours upon hours of raw digital material sampled from all eras, genres and schools of film, Marclay collaged a full twenty-four hours of film matched to the real-time passage of the hours.  In doing so, he

wondered if he could fashion from familiar clips a genuinely unfamiliar film, one with its own logic, rhythm, and aesthetics.  In his view, the best collages combined the “memory aspect”–recognition of the source material–with the pleasurable violence of transformation.

The pleasures and pitfalls of Marclay’s efforts are not unfamiliar to artists in other realms of the creative arts.  In literature, T.S. Eliot famously used pastiche in “The Waste Land” to issue a staggering modernist manifesto.  So did Robert Hayden (whose voice you can hear on the Poetry Foundation Website), who took up similar tools to orchestrate the complicated voicings of “Middle Passage.”  And today, postmodern poets, for whom sampling and “mixing” of high and low language (not to mention literary and non-literary influences) is so commonplace as to be a kind of convention, share this technique with a number of contemporary visual artists, filmmakers and musicians.

Ironically, though collage may appear to privilege–above all other things–the fragment or shard, what Zalewski’s article reveals is that the “key to [Marclay's] video projects was the artfulness of the transitions, which reassure the viewer that a tactical intelligence controlled the flow of imagery.”  At least for this artist, what distinguishes the mediocre from the truly artful is the quality of the “shaping,” or authorial impulses that guide the organization of the material, particularly at moments of transition.

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Prompt: Write a literary collage of your own, drawing from a range of sources (the dictionary, an encyclopedia entry, tabloid magazine articles and/or classical works of literature) to find language that startles, especially when juxtaposed against one another.  Focus particularly on the “seams” of the artifact, staging the appearance of each new linguistic element a way that reveals your overarching narrative or rhetorical intent.

For related prompts (from which this exercise “samples” unabashedly), check out the following writing prompts: The Cento, Semi-Cento or Found Poem | Borrowed Signs | Stealing

1. AWP Bookfair: LANTERN REVIEW and the “Asian American Literary Collective”
This year we’ll be sharing a table at the bookfair with Kartika Review under the name “The Asian American Literary Collective.” This will be the best way to connect with us–so do drop by and say hello! Our table number is S16 and we’ll have information about an exciting new project (see below!) and as well as a number of other Asian American literary organizations and publications.

2. Pocket Broadsides: A Joint Project with KARTIKA REVIEW
If you come by our table, you’ll see that we’ve collaborated with Kartika Review this year to produce a series of 50 unique miniature (pocket-sized) broadsides containing micro-poems and -prose by contributors to both magazines. We’ll be giving them to people in exchange for completing a small writing task, or as thank you gifts for donations. Come by our table to find out how to participate!

3. Panels & Readings
Finally, though this is mostly going to be a “bookfair year” for us, we still hope to check out a few panels throughout the conference. Below, we’ve assembled a list of events that we feel may be of interest to Lantern Review readers, contributors and staff… especially given that a number of you are scheduled to be presenters!

Thursday, March 1 | 9:00 AM
R123. Who Can Say Who Are Citizens? Poets?
(Lytton Smith, Brian Teare, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Sarah Gambito, Melissa Castillo-Garsow)
State Ballroom, Palmer House Hilton, 4th Floor

Thursday, March 1 | 12:00 PM
R163. A Face to Meet the Faces: Five Poets on Persona, Empathy, and Race
(Stacey Lynn Brown, Eduardo C. Corral, Cornelius Eady, Patricia Smith, Jake Adam York)
Waldorf, Hilton Chicago, 3rd Floor

R166. Writing the Middle East, Crossing Genre, Crossing Borders
(LeAnne Howe, Matthew Shenoda, Jim Wilson, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Hayan Charara)
Wiliford C, Hilton Chicago, 3rd Floor

Thursday, March 1 | 4:30 PM
R225. Agha Shahid Ali, the Ghazal, and the Destruction of Kashmir
(Paul Breslin, Stephen Burt, Raza Hasan, Ravi Shankar)
Continental A, Hilton Chicago, Lobby Level

Friday, March 2 | 10:30 AM
F135. Experiments in Individual Solace and Collective Safety: Five Days of Crafting Poetry at the Kundiman Writers’ Retreat
(Sarah Gambito, Cathy Linh Che, Myung Mi Kim, Patrick Rosal, Prageeta Sharma)
Lake Ontario, Hilton Chicago, 8th Floor

Friday, March 2 | 12:00 PM
F160. Works in Progress Mix Tape
(Ken Chen, Nami Mun, Don Lee, Prageeta Sharma)
Marquette, Hilton Chicago, 3rd Floor

Friday, March 2 | 3:00 PM
F215. Shifting Intimacies: A Reading by South Asian Diasporic Writers
(Roksana Badruddoja, Ravi Shankar, Leena Pendharkar, Vidhu Aggarwal, Nirmala Nataraj)

Friday, March 2 | 4:30 PM
F230. Arab and Arab American Feminisms
(Nadine Naber, Youmna Chlala, Susan Muaddi Darraj, Randa Jarrar)

Saturday, March 3 | 9:00 AM
S121. Speaking in Tongues
(Sandra M. Yee, Tarfia Faizullah, francine j. harris, Henry W. Leung, Milta Ortiz)
Red Lacquer Room, Palmer House Hilton, 4th Floor

Saturday, March 3 | 1:30 PM
S191. Coloring Outside the Lines
(Sandra M. Yee, J. Michael Martinez, Jamaal May, Dina Omar, Jane Wong)
Red Lacquer Room, Palmer House Hilton, 4th Floor

Saturday, March 3 | 4:30 PM
S229. Asian American Writers’ Workshop Discusses Asian American Poetry: Past, Present, Future
(Victoria Chang, Timothy Yu, Ken Chen, Nick Carbo, Sandra Lim)

"The Tub" by Edgar Degas (1886 | Musee d'Orsay, Paris)

Today’s prompt is inspired by a series of ekphrastic studies I’ve been writing on images of “women at bath.”  In compiling these sketches, I’ve observed, among others, paintings by Degas, Picasso and the woodblock artist Hashiguchi Goyo, searching for visual elements that might bring a fuller sense of description to my writing.

The traditional mode of ekphrasis—that is, the “making of poetry from art”—involves describing or imaginatively inhabiting a painting, sculpture or photograph; in this way, the poet more or less lends their descriptive craft to that of the visual artist.  What I’ve been investigating, however, is how iconic images (such as Picasso’s “Blue Nude”) can be broken up into elements that recur in various, refracted ways across images, then worked into a poem’s narrative fabric in a way that doesn’t necessarily foreground itself as ekphrasis.

The curve of the woman’s back in the painting above, for instance, is mirrored by the shape of the body in “Blude Nude,” not to mention the statue of Aphrodite crouching at her bath by the ancient Roman sculptor, Praxiteles (from whose influence all these pieces are, quite potentially, derived).  The poem I’m currently drafting may not be “about” the woman in Degas’ “The Tub,” and it may not draw direct influences from Picasso or Praxiteles’ work either.  But in its descriptive impulses, it incorporates elements common to all these works of art, combining them into a sort of patchworked woman to be stitched into my poem, which stands very much apart from the histor(ies) of these paintings and sculptures.

Prompt:  Research a set of paintings (or any other form of visual art) linked by subject matter, time period or even mood, and spend some time observing what features appear in each piece.  Describe each work of art on its own and then as it relates to the whole, thinking how these details might serve to “round out” a poem of your own.  Soak in the wealth (and variety!) of visual elements present in the paintings, and allow these to strengthen the descriptive or observational moments in your writing.

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For more related reading, see this Friday Prompt on ekphrastic poetry, a list of visual art resources and our March 2010 series on The Page Transformed, in which we posted a number of interviews (with Fiona Sze-Lorrain, for instance) and book reviews (this one features Luisa Igloria’s Juan Luna’s Revolver) themed around the relationship between the making of poetry and visual art.

An image from THE TREE OF LIFE

I’ve seen two fascinating films recently, both of whose images and underlying attitudes have seeped (mysteriously, inexplicably) into my work.  The first is The Tree of Life, whose cosmic interludes (and I mean this literally: one minute you’re observing a family at a dinner table and the next you’re panning across sunspots and galaxies… or maybe a child’s conception?) and drifting trajectories through time make you feel like you’re living inside a Jorie Graham poem.  The second is Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, a lush, sometimes perplexing film whose primary effect was to draw me back into the sounds and mythologies of my childhood in Southeast Asia.

What I found after watching these films, Uncle Boonmee in particular, was that certain scenes began to haunt me, such that while drafting entirely unrelated poems I would start stitching lines together from the perspective of a character in a movie, or with an emotional pitch keyed to a particularly memorable scene.  Weirdly enough, I found this productive; elements of the poems derived, however indirectly, from these films turned out to be not at all foreign to the impulses of the overall piece.

I’ve watched documentary films to fuel my poetry before, mostly to capture a sense of the figures who populate historical moments I’m fascinated by (and removed from), but this was different.  This was a less linear process, because rather than engaging film as a purely communicative medium, I had allowed myself to stew, so to speak, in the visual rhythms and narrative dynamics of a piece, then emerged to transmute these impressions into writing.

Prompt: 

Think back on a film you’ve seen recently (or watch one of the two I’ve mentioned here) and recall some of your dominant feelings and impressions.  Which elements of the film now haunt you?  Was it the quality of the light in a particular scene, or the look on a character’s face as they came to realize something?  Think about particular moments or images that have “lodged,” so to speak, in the sticky web of your poetic sensibility, then start writing—from within the world of the filmmaker’s art.

It’s not what you think… if this is what you’re thinking:

Courtesy of Wikipedia (Postcard c. 1900)

…or this:

Courtesy of The Daily Green

Your “holiday postcard” can be written on anything, no Santas, Christmas sweaters or antlers required.  Just find a festive-looking piece of cardstock or a regular postcard, and jot down a few lines of a poetry that you’d like to send to someone as a holiday greeting.  These can be  meditations on what you wish for them in the new year, a set of images informed by the motif of illumination as discussed by Iris in last Friday’s prompt, even a few descriptive lines of verse about family gatherings or spiritual traditions centered around the holidays.

Most people send Christmas cards, family newsletters or photos of their family — but you?  This year, try sending lines of poetry.  (And don’t even get us started on giving poems as gifts!)

Image courtesy of dwellingintheword.wordpress.com

It was about a year ago that I posted this prompt on Allen Ginsberg’s American Sentences, thanks to former classmate Jessica Tyson; this week’s Friday Prompt is courtesy of another recent UW MFA graduate, Talia Shalev.  She’s derived the exercise from a chapter in the anthology Contemporary American Poetry: Behind the Scenes (Longman, 2002), edited by Ryan Van Cleave, and writes:

Spend an hour in an urban setting that’s somewhat foreign to you.  A Laundromat.  A bus terminal.  A French pastry shop.  Record your observations and thoughts.  Spend another hour in a more rural setting, such as a chicken farm, an apple orchard, or a fishing hole.  At the very least, find a garden or park!  Record your observations and thoughts.

Write a poem about the urban setting that uses words, ideas, and images exclusively from your rural setting, and then write a poem about the rural setting that uses words, ideas, and images exclusively from your urban setting.  Does forcing yourself into using unusual vocabulary choices allow you greater freedom?  Does it make intuitive leaps easier?  How might this translate into your other poems?

What I find compelling about this prompt is the way it forces the “translation” or “transmutation” of observational detail from one context to another—a gesture that can be taken in a number of directions.  The same process can be used to navigate not only the in-betweens of rural and urban settings, but also the private and the public, the mainstream and the “minority,” the high and the low.  While I think it’s important that the prompt remain grounded in specific locales (ie. places that can be physically inhabited by the poet), it seems totally possible that a person could make the same linguistic leap from, say, one part of town to another—and in the process, cast light upon new ways of constructing difference, culture and place.

Structure and Surprise, ed. Michael Theune (Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 2007)

This week’s prompt is less of a prompt and more of an invitation to check out this book on poetic structure published by the Teachers & Writers Collaborative.  Structure & Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns is a collection of essays by noteworthy poets like D.A. Powell and Prageeta Sharma, which discusses the use of “the turn” in poetry writing; that is, the energetic leap or shift that occurs as the mind works through form to create dynamic patterns of thought.  In his introduction to the essays, Michael Theune says:

Poetic structure is, simply, the pattern of a poem’s turning.  As such, poetic structure identifies a vital feature of poems: the best poems very often include convincing, surprising turns… [I]n a lecture called “Levels and Opposites: Structure in Poetry,” Randall Jarrell claims that “a successful poem starts from one position and ends at a very different one, often a contradictory or opposite one; yet there has been no break in the unity of the poem.”

One of the structures discussed in Structure & Surprise is the retrospective-prospective structure, a two-part structure that begins with a retrospective discussion of the past and then moves toward a future orientation that shows, as the essay’s author, Mark Yakich, puts it, how “inconstant and dizzying” time really is.  While you’re welcome to browse the list of structures on the book’s extraordinarily helpful website to find one that might work better for whichever writing/revision process you’re currently in, I’d recommend trying this particular approach for starters.

Prompt: write a two-part poem that uses the retrospective-prospective structure to narrate a past event or memory.  Midway through the poem, shift to the present tense to “acknowledge some kind of change” (p. 72) that allows the speaker to either look prospectively into the future, or reconsider the past through a different lens.

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For a list of additional structures and supplemental materials, check out the Structure & Surprise website .

For more writing prompts on structure, take a look at Iris’ Ordering, Reordering, Reversing or last October’s prompt, Complicating Narrative Structure.