{"id":5689,"date":"2012-05-18T07:00:05","date_gmt":"2012-05-18T11:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/?p=5689"},"modified":"2012-05-15T17:48:12","modified_gmt":"2012-05-15T21:48:12","slug":"curated-prompt-rick-barot-the-hermit-crab-poem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/2012\/05\/18\/curated-prompt-rick-barot-the-hermit-crab-poem\/","title":{"rendered":"Curated Prompt: Rick Barot – “The Hermit Crab Poem”"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Rick Barot<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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\u2019s installment was contributed by Rick Barot<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 These stories were horrifying and moving by turns, and my student was consumed by them.\u00a0 Because she was a poet, it was inevitable that her engagement with the stories would manifest itself in her work.\u00a0 But here was the problem: she was a comfortably situated Caucasian woman who didn\u2019t feel she had the right to write about this subject matter.\u00a0 Even more complicated: she wanted to write poems directly in the voices of these survivors, making her use of the material doubly problematic.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But a larger part of me wanted to advise the student to move forward, which is what I did.<\/p>\n

We artists get on a tightrope when we tackle subjects that are beyond the merely personal.\u00a0 But far from ever trying to dissuade anyone from writing about these subjects, I urge them to head straight into those subjects.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In poetry, there is no such thing as hands-off material.\u00a0 A poem never fails because of its subject matter\u2014it fails because the poet has inadequately given depth and shape to that subject matter.\u00a0 Dramatic historical periods, natural disasters, grand personal wounds\u2014writing about these subjects raises the stakes tremendously high when you have to write about them inventively, feelingly, thoughtfully.\u00a0 You have to be ingenious to avoid failure\u2014or, at the least, ingenuity will allow you to fail well.<\/p>\n

To my mind, when a poet deals with a subject that is apt to be simplified by polemic or sentiment, it\u2019s contingent on form to prevent those reductions.\u00a0 By form I don\u2019t necessarily mean traditional forms like sonnets and sestinas, though those forms are as viably powerful today as they ever were.\u00a0 I mean a shapeliness\u2014whether it is the rapturous listing of Garrett Hongo\u2019s \u201cNostalgic Catalogue\u201d or the symphonic multiple sections of Adrienne Rich\u2019s \u201cThe Burning of Paper Instead of Children\u201d\u2014that asks the reader\u2019s understanding to work at multiple levels.<\/p>\n

Obviously, what I\u2019m saying here is arguable: after all, for every poem that has to be as complicated as \u201cThe Burning of Paper Instead of Children,\u201d there\u2019s another poem that needs to be as formally restrained as Robert Hayden\u2019s sonnet, \u201cThose Winter Sundays.\u201d\u00a0 The real point is this: there\u2019s no limit to the work poetry can do\u2014or that it should do.\u00a0 We live in a free verse world\u2014which is to say that in poetry now, what we can do is thrillingly unfettered.\u00a0 On the other hand, given the painful state of things in the world, it seems also the case that the things poetry should<\/em> do has grown larger.\u00a0 The poet has never had more freedom and more obligations.<\/p>\n

In creative nonfiction, a genre that has been blossoming in recent years, there is a formal technique favored by lyric essayists that I\u2019ve found fascinating: the hermit crab essay.\u00a0 A hermit crab is a species of crab that inhabits abandoned seashells, moving from shell to shell as it grows.\u00a0 In the hermit crab essay, the writer co-opts the shell of another textual genre\u2014the restaurant menu, the instruction manual\u2014and uses that form to organize his or her essay.\u00a0 It\u2019s an exciting form in that the merging of incongruous elements\u2014practical structure and lyrical utterance\u2014leads to unexpected discoveries for both the writer and the reader.\u00a0 Of course, the hermit crab technique is wonderfully suited to poetry, as evidenced by this poem by Janice Mirikatini:<\/p>\n

RECIPE<\/p>\n

Round Eyes<\/p>\n

Ingredients: scissors, Scotch magic transparent tape,
\nEyeliner\u2014water based, black.
\nOptional: false eyelashes.<\/p>\n

Cleanse face thoroughly.<\/p>\n

For best results, powder entire face, including eyelids.
\n(lighter shades suited to total effect desired)<\/p>\n

With scissors, cut magic tape 1\/16\u201d wide, 3\/4\u201d-1\/2\u201d long\u2014
\ndepending on length of eyelid.<\/p>\n

Stick firmly onto mid-upper eyelid area
\n(looking down into handmirror facilitates finding
\nadequate surface)<\/p>\n

If using false eyelashes, affix first on lid, folding any
\nexcess lid over the base of eyelash with glue.<\/p>\n

Paint black eyeliner on tape and entire lid.<\/p>\n

Do not cry.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

* \u00a0* \u00a0*<\/p>\n

The prompt is a simple one.\u00a0 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019 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:\u00a0<\/em>The Darker Fall<\/a>\u00a0(2002), and\u00a0<\/em>Want<\/a>\u00a0(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\u00a0<\/em>Poetry, The Paris Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review,\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0The Threepenny Review. He lives in Tacoma, Washington and teaches at Pacific Lutheran University, and in the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s installment was contributed by Rick Barot. Once, I mentored a graduate student who had been obsessively reading the stories of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[627,13],"tags":[314,629,57,628],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5689"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5689"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5689\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5702,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5689\/revisions\/5702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}