Turning a Corner:
Exploring and Creating Poems of Transition
with Angela Voras-Hills / Thursday, January 20, 2022 / 7:00-8:30pm
PROMPTS
A.
1. Think about how you marked the changing of the seasons when you were younger. Were the seasonal changes of your memory linked to a holiday or certain people or activities? What smells do you remember? Were you with others or alone? Do you remember any particular clothes?
2. Think about how you mark the changing seasons now? How have the seasons of the year changed for you?
Read “The Chorus,” by Craig Morgan Teicher (below)
4. Are there ways to combine these ideas not chronologically? Can you maybe incorporate the perpetuity of seasonal changes into your experiences of the changing seasons as you change?
B.
5. Think about a time in your life when you felt like you lost yourself. What were the circumstances? Use as much detail as possible. How did you find yourself again?
Read "Poem Beginning With a Retweet," by Maggie Smith (below)
6. Type into your search bar “If you don’t” and then one more letter (for example, just type "If you don't r"). See how your search engine thinks you might want finish the sentence. Choose one of these lines as the first line of your poem. Or use a line from a book or headline as your first line. Maybe you can incorporate repetition or a list into your poem?
C.
1. Think about a moment in your life when you realized nothing would be the same. Write about that moment in as much detail as possible.
2. Now think back to the time before that moment. What do you wish you would have spent more time on? What do you wish you would have appreciated more or paid closer attention to? Think about all of the ways that time was special. Write about those things in detail.
3. Now, think about who you are now, looking back at all of this. What do you know now about who you are that you wouldn’t have known if it weren’t for that moment?
Read "Salad Days," by Barbara Ras (below)
4. Go back through all of your notes and find a way to connect them. Maybe they connect chronologically or thematically and move back and forth in time? Can you condense that last part of the prompt— you looking back— into a sentence or two and make it a turn?
POEMS
Poem Beginning With A Retweet
by Maggie Smith
If you drive past horses and don’t say horses
you’re a psychopath. If you see an airplane
but don’t point it out. A rainbow,
a cardinal, a butterfly. If you don’t
whisper-shout albino squirrel! Deer!
Red fox! If you hear a woodpecker
and don’t shush everyone around you
into silence. If you find an unbroken
sand dollar in a tide pool. If you see
a dorsal fin breaking the water.
If you see the moon and don’t say
oh my god look at the moon. If you smell
smoke and don’t search for fire.
If you feel yourself receding, receding,
and don’t tell anyone until you’re gone.
https://blueflowerarts.com/illuminations/poem-beginning-with-a-retweet/
Salad Days
by Barbara Ras
How easy then, the fun house at Lincoln Park
before it grew into a field of weeds, you could buy
five tickets for a buck from a blank face in a booth
and enter the dark with your brother to be scared
by tilting floors, phony doors, corpses
bursting out of coffins, and once out into blue sky
dash breathless to your mother and father, dazed,
you could have called them salad days,
but why would you — no one in your family
had read Shakespeare — so you bought
French fries, doused them with malt vinegar,
the four of you, competing for your share
of potatoes improved by salt and grease,
and nothing in those early evenings free
of care could have prepared you
to be the last one left, the one
with grief to spare.
https://granta.com/salad-days/
Petty Theft
by Rosalie Moffett
Forsythia will forever remind me
of my mother stealing
branches of it outside the Doubletree Inn
in Murfreesboro, Tennessee,
for her mother’s funeral. Stupid strip-mall
side of town we’d gone to for Starbucks,
caffeine fortification and an Office Max
to print the programs. That’s one facet
of the end: your family scrounging the city-side
for something pretty as tribute under the eyes
of Ruby Tuesday patrons. Here I am,
still young, young-ish, no kids, perched
in the bland middle swath of my life, wondering what
I’ll pilfer for my own mother’s ceremony. Her own
purple irises, perhaps, or if in winter
the prickly stalks of thistles, brown
and old but holding magnificent
crowns of snow: translucent sculptures
of time I’m taking from some future to let
melt in my present embrace of eventual grief.
I know each moment I poach just repopulates.
Something borrowed is the standard rule
for weddings; something stolen, my new protocol
for funerals. Here I am, young, my whole life
ahead of me! Whole life-ish. I shouldn’t dwell
on any of this. It’s the start of spring. Everyone
is still alive. Everyone, within reason. The yellow
branches of forsythia are fireworks, shedding
bright sparks in piles on this parking lot.
There’s a Starbucks nearby, no matter where I go.
There’s a big box store, a row of measly
ornamental shrubs, a tree or two.
There’s the present where everyone lives, now
studded with moments I’ve robbed from a time
I imagine, in which a child watches me scavenge
the landscape for bits of beauty,
learns how to do it herself.
from New England Review 40.4
The Chorus
by Craig Morgan Teicher
1.
It’s, you know, the part that repeats,
the bit you’re supposed
to remember, the bit that bears
repeating, the part that means
something new
each time, something different,
and the same thing, too,
the thing you can’t forget,
that gets stuck in your head.
So, like, childhood
is endless and over
almost as soon as it begins?
Yeah, like that. Ten years
shrinks like the pages
of a water-damaged book.
No, the pages don’t really shrink
or shrivel, they crinkle, get kinda
crisp and brittle, but
time’s like that, a wrinkle,
and suddenly you’ve been
married as long as
you were ever a kid,
ever awash in the interminable
Thursday of your first ten years, when
three months was an aeon, when,
like, childhood was endless
and over as soon as it began.
See what I did there? Shifted
the refrain into the middle.
Yeah, time is like that, and
2.
suddenly your newborn
is ten and your wife
is celebrating the birthday
only grownups do,
and you must be older
than your mom was
at your age, and it’s not
Thursday—was it ever? And the two
pills you have to take every night.
How is it Sunday, I mean
Monday, this morning, your alarm,
your coffee grumbling, thunder,
and the kids (two of them,
suddenly) are out the door, and
their childhood is
endless and already over
as soon as it begins, and
you’re on the bus to work. See what
I did there? I don’t. The four
pills you have to take three
times every day, you might
3.
as well be already
at your desk, your deathbed,
holding your daughter’s
grownup hand, you
hope, the hospital calm and
clean, like the one your mother
died in, and there’s hopefully
money somewhere to take care
of everything, and this
is like childhood, endless
and over as soon as it begins,
or as close as you’ll ever get
again—see what I did
there? Did you
see? Did anyone?
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/06/03/the-chorus
Opera Singer
by Ross Gay
Today my heart is so goddamned fat with grief
that I’ve begun hauling it in a wheelbarrow. No. It’s an anvil
dragging from my neck as I swim
through choppy waters swollen with the putrid corpses of hippos,
which means lurking, somewhere below, is the hungry
snout of a croc waiting to spin me into an oblivion
worse than this run-on simile, which means only to say:
I’m sad. And everyone knows what that means.
And in my sadness I’ll walk to a café,
and not see light in the trees, nor finger the bills in my pocket
as I pass the boarded houses on the block. No,
I will be slogging through the obscure country of my sadness
in all its monotone flourish, and so imagine my surprise
when my self-absorption gets usurped
by the sound of opera streaming from an open window,
and the sun peeks ever-so-slightly from behind his shawl,
and this singing is getting closer, so that I can hear the
delicately rolled r’s like a hummingbird fluttering the tongue
which means a language more beautiful than my own,
and I don’t recognize the song
though I’m jogging toward it and can hear the woman’s
breathing through the record’s imperfections and above me
two bluebirds dive and dart and a rogue mulberry branch
leaning over an abandoned lot drags itself across my face,
staining it purple and looking, now, like a mad warrior of glee
and relief I run down the street, and I forgot to mention
the fifty or so kids running behind me, some in diapers,
some barefoot, all of them winged and waving their pacifiers
and training wheels and nearly trampling me
when in a doorway I see a woman in slippers and a floral housedress
blowing in the warm breeze who is maybe seventy painting the doorway
and friends, it is not too much to say
it was heaven sailing from her mouth and all the fish in the sea
and giraffe saunter and sugar in my tea and the forgotten angles
of love and every name of the unborn and dead
from this abuelita only glancing at me
before turning back to her earnest work of brushstroke and lullaby
and because we all know the tongue’s clumsy thudding
makes of miracles anecdotes let me stop here
and tell you I said thank you.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/92017/opera-singer
Two Men & a Truck
by Laura Kasischke
Once, I was as large
as any living creature could be.
I could lift the world and carry it
from my breast to its bath.
When I looked down from the sky
you could see the love in my eye:
“Oh, tiny world, if anything
ever happened to you, I would die.”
And I said, “No!” to the hand. Snatched
the pebble from the mouth, fished it out
and told the world it would choke!
Warned the world over & over! “Do
you hear me? Do you want to choke?!”
But how was the world to know
what the truth might be? Perhaps
they grant you special powers, these
choking stones. Maybe
they change the child into a god, all-swallowing.
For, clearly, there were other gods.
The world could see
that I, too, was at the mercy of something.
Sure, I could point to the sky
and say its name, but I couldn’t make it change.
Some days it was blue, true, but others
were ruined by its gray:
“I’m sorry, little world —
no picnic, no parade, no swimming pool today ... ”
And the skinned knee in spite of me.
And why else would there be
such terror in the way she screamed, and the horn honking,
and the squealing wheels, and, afterward, her cold
sweat against my cheek?
Ah, she wants us to live forever.
It’s her weakness ... Now I see!
But, once, I was larger
than any other being —
larger, perhaps, than any being
had any right to be.
Because, of course, eventually, the world
grew larger, and larger, until it could lift
me up and put me down anywhere
it pleased. Until, finally, I would need
its help to move the bird bath, the book-
shelf, the filing cabinet. “And
could you put my desk by the window, sweetie?”
A truck, two men, one of them my son, and
everything I ever owned, and they
didn’t even want to stop for lunch.
Even the freezer. Even the piano.
(“You can have it if you can move it.”)
But, once, I swear, I was ... And now
this trunk in the attic to prove it:
These shoes in the palm of my hand?
You used to wear them on your feet.
This blanket the size of a hand towel?
I used to wrap it around you sleeping
in my arms like this. See? This
is how small the world used to be when
everything else in the world was me.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/58008/two-men-a-truck
Aubade with Burning City
by Ocean Vuong
South Vietnam, April 29, 1975: Armed Forces Radio played Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” as a code to begin Operation Frequent Wind, the ultimate evacuation of American civilians and Vietnamese refugees by helicopter during the fall of Saigon.
Milkflower petals on the street
like pieces of a girl’s dress.
May your days be merry and bright ...
He fills a teacup with champagne, brings it to her lips.
Open, he says.
She opens.
Outside, a soldier spits out
his cigarette as footsteps
fill the square like stones fallen from the sky. May all
your Christmases be white as the traffic guard
unstraps his holster.
His hand running the hem
of her white dress.
His black eyes.
Her black hair.
A single candle.
Their shadows: two wicks.
A military truck speeds through the intersection, the sound of children
shrieking inside. A bicycle hurled
through a store window. When the dust rises, a black dog
lies in the road, panting. Its hind legs
crushed into the shine
of a white Christmas.
On the nightstand, a sprig of magnolia expands like a secret heard
for the first time.
The treetops glisten and children listen, the chief of police
facedown in a pool of Coca-Cola.
A palm-sized photo of his father soaking
beside his left ear.
The song moving through the city like a widow.
A white ... A white ... I’m dreaming of a curtain of snow
falling from her shoulders.
Snow crackling against the window. Snow shredded
with gunfire. Red sky.
Snow on the tanks rolling over the city walls.
A helicopter lifting the living just out of reach.
The city so white it is ready for ink.
The radio saying run run run.
Milkflower petals on a black dog
like pieces of a girl’s dress.
May your days be merry and bright. She is saying
something neither of them can hear. The hotel rocks
beneath them. The bed a field of ice
cracking.
Don’t worry, he says, as the first bomb brightens
their faces, my brothers have won the war
and tomorrow ...
The lights go out.
I’m dreaming. I’m dreaming ...
to hear sleigh bells in the snow ...
In the square below: a nun, on fire,
runs silently toward her god —
Open, he says.
She opens.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/56769/aubade-with-burning-city
Aubade with a Broken Neck
by Traci Brimhall
The first night you don't come home
summer rains shake the clematis.
I bury the dead moth I found in our bed,
scratch up a rutabaga and eat it rough
with dirt. The dog finds me and presents
between his gentle teeth a twitching
nightjar. In her panic, she sings
in his mouth. He gives me her pain
like a gift, and I take it. I hear
the cries of her young, greedy with need,
expecting her return, but I don't let her go
until I get into the house. I read
the auspices the way she flutters against
the wallpaper's moldy roses means
all can be lost. How she skims the ceiling
means a storm approaches. You should see
her in the beginnings of her fear, rushing
at the starless window, her body a dart,
her body the arrow of longing, aimed,
as all desperate things are, to crash
not into the object of desire,
but into the darkness behind it.
http://www.versedaily.org/2010/brokenneck.shtml
Obit
by Victoria Chang
Victoria Chang—died unknowingly on June
24, 2009 on the I-405 freeway. Born in
the Motor City, it is fitting she died on a
freeway. When her mother called about
her father’s heart attack, she was living an
indented life, a swallow that didn’t dip.
This was not her first death. All her deaths
had fallen like snow except this one. It
didn’t matter that her mother was wrong
(it was a stroke) but that Victoria Chang
had to ask whether she should drive to
San Diego to see the frontal lobe. When
her mother said yes, Victoria Chang had t
he feeling of not wanting to. Someone
heard that feeling. Because he did not die
but all of his words did. At the hospital,
Victoria Chang cried when her father no
longer made sense. This was before she
understood the cruelty of his disease. It
would be the last time she cried in front of
it. She switched places with her shadow
because suffering changes shape and
happens secretly.
https://blackbird.vcu.edu/v17n1/poetry/chang-v/obit-victoria-page.shtml
Pitching Horseshoes
by Claudia Emerson
Some of your buddies might come around
for a couple of beers and a game,
but most evenings, you pitched horseshoes
alone. I washed up the dishes
or watered the garden to the thudding
sound of the horseshoe in the pit,
or the practiced ring of metal
against metal, after the silent
arc—end over end. That last
summer you played a seamless, unscored
game against yourself, or night
falling, or coming in the house.
You were good at it. From the porch
I watched you become shadowless,
then featureless, until I knew
you couldn't see either, and still
the dusk rang out, your aim that easy;
between the iron stakes you had driven
into the hard earth yourself, you paced
back and forth as if there were a decision
to make, and you were the one to make it.
https://blackbird.vcu.edu/v2n1/poetry/emerson_c/horseshoes.htm
Toad
by Kathryn Nuernberger
My child is sitting cross-legged on the floor reading to herself.
Sometimes she is so full of need I push her to the floor.
Only once I did that and I don’t even remember the moment
right, but I was trying to wipe urine off my leg and she was
naughty like a squirrel and jumping and singing and her head
slammed into my chin, which hurt and even more than that,
it pissed me off, because she’s my beautiful child, but in that
button snap of a moment she was suddenly just one more person
and I pushed her away in a way that felt to me like setting her
down, but awkwardly, because of how she was also balancing
her feet on my feet as I tried to pour out a bowl of pee
from her little potty as a toothbrush dangled foaming
from my mouth. Somewhere in the mess of that morning
she’d become person enough to, in the space between us,
create force of momentum, and then I did not set her down,
but pushed her and she fell away from it against the wall
and was crying because I, her mommy, pushed her. And I know
this should be the poem about how I’m horrified at myself,
the poem about what in ourselves we have to live with,
but in that moment which followed two years of breastfeeding
and baby-wearing and sixty-nine hours of natural childbirth
and the hemorrhaging and the uncertain operation, after which
I pumped every two hours, careful not to let the cord tangle
in the IV. Even then when she cried and no matter what
and no matter and no matter and no matter and no matter what,
I held her all night if she cried so she would not ever know
someday you’ll cry alone, but I held her and ached and leaked
and bled too as long as it took. Of course there’ve been nights
since but sometimes it feels as if I’ve never been asleep again,
so when I say I pushed my two-year-old against a wall and I don’t
remember it happening that way but it happened and I did
and I’ve been wondering a long time now what the limit is
and when I would find the end of myself, and that day, which
was yesterday, was the end. And this day, when we played
hide-and-seek with Daddy, and touched bugs, and read
Frog and Toad Are Friends twice together before she read it
to herself as I wrote this, this is the day that comes after.
Kathryn Nuernberger, "Toad" from The End of Pink. Copyright © 2016 by Kathryn Nuernberger. Reprinted by permission of BOA Editions, Ltd.
“What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why”
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46557/what-lips-my-lips-have-kissed-and-where-and-why