Summer Songs: Write with Chancellor Diane Seuss

Prompt #1: “The image reigns, here.”

Read “Lines Written During My Second Pandemic” by Eduardo C. Corral.

In Corral’s brief commentary on “Lines Written During My Second Pandemic,” he tells us that the first line, “All water flows toward loneliness,” emerged early in the Covid pandemic, and that he then looked through his notebooks for “language that orbits loneliness.” I love that process. Not all of us keep notebooks or journals, but we all carry them in our imaginations in one way or another. Note that all the lines in this fourteen-line poem are end-stopped. No enjambment here. This contributes to our experience of each line as its own unit of sublimity. Unity in the poem arrives via the coherence of the sonnet-like form, and from the appearance of his keyword—loneliness—in every line.

Write the opening line of a fourteen-line poem that reflects your current emotional state via an image. If you have journals, comb them for lines on the same subject; if you don’t, comb your memory, and generate lines which—remember—are end-stopped. In other words, each line is a complete sentence. Feel free to leap from line to line without worrying about plot or narrative coherence. The image reigns, here. The word you use for your emotional state will appear in every line.

Prompt #2: “Begin with: ______ used to say.”

Read “Silence” by Marianne Moore.

So intriguing, to encounter a poem that is nearly all quotational material. More intriguing? Marianne Moore never met her own father. Her source material emerged from a conversation, not personal experience. Although Moore’s work was not overt in its yearning, and in fact, like the father in “Silence,” was interested in restraint, I can’t help but wonder if she invents for herself a father in this poem, or if not a father, then a kind of interlocutor of her own aesthetic. And yet—something in this poem saddens me, especially that last line. A sad withholding with which many of us are familiar.

Write a fourteen-line poem that is primarily quoted material. Beginning with “_____ used to say:” might be a productive way to start. The quoted speaker may be one of your own parents, or another family member, or—perhaps more interestingly—a Moore-like invention, a voice weighing in on a subject that also reflects something of your own character, or the character of your poems.

Prompt #3: “Aim for an unexpected crossroads of emotion.”

Read “the sonnet-ballad” by Gwendolyn Brooks.

In “the sonnet-ballad,” Gwendolyn Brooks invents a hybrid form: a sonnet with balladic features and a ballad with a sonnet’s compressive fourteen lines, its metrical pattern, and rhyme scheme (but notice she works with one rhyme sound in the lines that rhyme with war). Both forms originate in song, though the ballad tells a story, often in the voice of a character or persona, while the traditional sonnet builds and revises an argument. Both approaches are present in Brooks’s poem. What draws me to “the sonnet-ballad” is the hybridity of feeling. The speaker mourns even while she constructs her lover as “untrue.” Death, the ultimate coquette, has seduced her lover away from her. What a strange, complex crossroads of feeling spirals through this lament. Its opening and closing questions are unanswerable.

Write a sonnet-ballad of your own. The poem should be fourteen lines which echo Brooks’s rhyme scheme. If you can hear the meter, mirror it. If not, keep your lines to ten syllables. Let the speaker be a person other than yourself, whether an invented character or someone actual. The poem ought to at least infer a story and sing a feeling. Aim for an unexpected crossroads of emotion—antithetical to sentimentality. Open and close the poem with the same question.

Prompt #4: “Extra credit if you ponder the ponderous imponderable.”

Read “Ponderable” by Lyn Hejinian.

To encounter Hejinian is to unseat the naked emperor of our expectations about what a poem is, or can be. She gives us some clues as to how to experience “Ponderable” in her brief note on the poem, classifying it as an elegy, and drawing our attention to the fact that it could be seen as a sonnet, given its fourteen (sometimes very long) lines, but arguing that “a proper sonnet is structured to facilitate logical thinking and that is precisely what is precluded when one is confronted by death: there is no coming to terms with it.” Read the poem again. How might it be perceived as an elegy? Remember that Hejinian’s process precludes logic. It parallels the outrage of death by its own outrageousness.

Try writing an elegy in fourteen lines of any length. You may have the loss of a specific person in mind, or your imagination’s response to death itself, the existence of it, the fact of it. Rebel against conventional linearity. Allow each line, no matter the length, to exist as its own unit of image, sound, and feeling. Imagination rules. It is the only pushback against death. Extra credit if you ponder the ponderous imponderable.

Summer Songs: Write with Chancellor Diane Seuss

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