I've heard the pleas from the Poetic Asides commonwealth asking that I post the November PAD prompts earlier in the day. I've been on Main Street and seen Joe Poet and Jane Poet working to put food on the table and still write a poem-a-day. I've visited schools, hospitals, and random fast-food restaurants and hear the same stories of "earlier prompts" in every large city and small town. From the corporate CEO to the amateur hockey mom, all poets seem to want the prompts earlier in the day.

And I agree, which is why I will make an attempt to post earlier in the day for the rest of the month. The beginning of this month was a little rough because of a database project related to WritersMarket.com, but that's no excuse for getting the prompts out later in the day. So be prepared for earlier prompts. Be very prepared.

I am Robert Lee Brewer, and I endorse this message.

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Whew! I am sooooooo glad the political ads will come to a halt today. At least for a little while anyway (since the political season is now almost a year-round phenomenon). As many of you know (even if you're living outside the U.S.), today is election day in the United States of America. Hooray for voting and having a voice! (Even if I do usually back the losing candidate.)

For today's prompt, I want you to write a "soap box" poem on your theme. If your theme is food, have an asparagus campaign for less discrimination against veggies. If your subject is parenting, maybe make a case for having one hour or less of TV each night in favor of playing board games or doing a family activity. Regardless of your theme, today is the day you can pull out that soap box, dust it off, stand on it, and take a stance on an issue (or several issues--heck, this could turn into someone's theme).

Here's my attempt for the day:

"Monster Rights"

-speech delivered by The Mummy

You all know me; I've been around for centuries
just hanging out in my tomb. Some people come and
wake me up, and then they get mad at me when I'm
a little grumpy. I mean, have you ever been
woken after a very long sleep? You're grumpy,
simple as that. Just ask my friend Godzilla, who
has had more than his fair share of interruptions
to long sleeps. And that's exactly what I'm trying
to get at. We are not the problem; people are.

Dracula, you need blood to stay alive, correct?
But when, my friend, have people stopped to consider
your needs as a living, breathing, undead creature?
Never! They just try killing you like a common
mosquito, walking around with their wooden stakes,
mirrors, crosses, holy water, and attitudes.

Frankenstein's Monster, did you ask to be created?
And who, may I ask, created you? A man! Only
to be hunted and chased around the countryside
by men, even though you, too, were once one of them.

From werewolves to witches, I've seen the appalling way
mankind has treated those of us who just happen
to be a little, um, different. Some of us,
like the vampires, have special needs, sure; and a few
of us, like the homicidal killers (a la
Freddy K. and the Phantom of the Opera),
indulge, perhaps, a little too much in our arts,
but I say, the time for monster oppression has
passed. The time for monster equality is now!

 

Okay, this prompt may be a little out there, but it's inspired by a few albums I've listened to (and loved) over the years. They'll have kind of a foreshadowing or refrain piece that shares a snippet of a song to come later on the album. And I want you to write a foreshadowing piece for a poem that you will fully compose later this month (Day 20, to be precise).

This piece should be short, sweet, and hint at some bigger picture that ties into your theme and the poem that you'll be writing on Day 20. You should think of it almost as a puzzle piece that doesn't become 100% clear until the accompanying poem is read later on in the collection.

Here's my attempt for the day:

"I am the man"

Leave the door unlocked,
curtains open, and power on.

Only have a landline;
investigate that noise.

When you scream out...

Okay, we've made it through the first day. We've got our first poems and our themes established. Now, let's get to the second prompt, which is to write a declaration poem: that is, a poem that makes a statement about your theme. A good way to attack this poem may be to write it in the voice of an imagined person or a real person who is not yourself.

For instance, if your theme is food poems, you could write a poem in the voice of Rachel Ray, who makes a declaration about the importance of food. Or if your theme is dysfunctional families, write a poem in the voice of Jerry Springer or Dr. Phil. Or, well, you get the idea.

(And remember, if you're not feeling a particular prompt, don't be afraid to steer yourself in a different direction. After all, our main goal is to have 30 poems at the end of the month.)

Here's my attempt for the day:

"Abraham Van Helsing"

Let me tell you of monsters:
Monsters is monsters, and they
will always be monsters. And
people is people, and they
can be monsters, sometimes as
terrifying as vampyres,
but people have a conscience.
People, when they are monsters,
can feel regret. Not so with
Dracula, not with a cold-
blooded vampyre. He will suck
his victim's blood, and even
turn his victim into a
soulless bloodsucker like him-
self. Monsters is monsters, and
they will always be. People
can be monsters, but they are
always people; they always
have room to learn from mistakes.

 

Good morning. Here we are. Another PAD challenge. Feels like it was just a few weeks ago we were doing one, but I guess it hasn't been since April. This time around I'm going to be throwing out a prompt (and my attempt at a poem) each day, but we're going to do it with a focus on having a chapbook's worth of poems at the end of the month.

So, with that said, I'm going to give a little more room than normal on following the prompts--and the prompts themselves may at times feel a little spacious. This is to give you the ability to write a collection of poems around a particular theme, which means, yes, I want you to give a little thought to the theme you'd like to explore through the month of November. For instance, your theme could be political poems, poems about motherhood, nature poems, food poems, animal poems, poems about your life, poems about a particular medical condition, poems about whatever, etc.

You probably don't want to make your theme too specific, but having some sort of focus will be helpful, I think. My theme will be to write poems having to do with monsters. I'm not sure if it will be just horror movie monsters or if I'll mix in real life monsters as well, but that's the theme I'm choosing for myself.

So before moving on, think a little about what theme you'd like to write about. You can include it with your poem today--or leave it a mystery for other writers to guess at. Totally your call. Here, I'll wait while you think of a theme.

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Okay, you've got your theme (even if that theme is just to write a bunch of disjointed poems). At the end of the month, I may be asking you to collect your poems together from this challenge and send me your chapbooks so that I can try to pick a Best Chapbook Award. If I do this, the winner probably won't be announced until Groundhog Day. But I'll give more information on this idea as the month unfolds.

Let's get into today's prompt. For today's prompt, I want you to look at your theme and write a "hook" poem. This is a poem intended to hook your reader on your theme. Think about the beginning of poems like "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "Howl." This poem gets right into the meat of your theme, and pulls the reader along. Think of a dramatic situation involving your theme and start there (in medias res). Totally.

Here's my attempt for the day:

"The Hook"

She screamed as she closed the door,
so that the annoyed boy could not ignore.

He walked over to her side of the car,
only to realize he'd tried going too far

earlier in their Lovers Lane evening spat
when she grew so anxious to leave that

she made him curse her under his breath--
now realizing how close he was to death.

 

In anticipation of the November PAD Challenge (which starts Saturday!), I threw out the above question to members of the Poetic Asides group on FaceBook: What makes a great chapbook?

Here's what some of them had to say:

An interesting mix of poems on the same theme, not always by the same writer but with visable threads which tie each piece together or take the reader on a journey, turning the page again and again.

 

Sue Forde

 

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I think that a great chapbook is written around a theme and its variations. That theme might be the subject, the place, the people in the poem, a primary metaphor.

 

The variations might even involve different forms, different rhythms--a different sense of momentum.

 

And the whole chapbook builds on an emotional arc (it may even build along a narrative arc, if that fits the theme).

 

Granted, neither of my chapbooks reflects that thinking, although parts of them do. But this is the way I'm writing and developing chapbooks now.

 

Joannie Stangeland

 

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A chapbook is a universe, and the poet is the solar designer. The planets and moons, no matter how far out, need to follow their own laws of gravity. From the quark to the gravitational force, it needs to make sense to the poet or editor, even if it remains a mystery for the audience.

 

Jesse Loren

 

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Consistency of vision: a motiff, a strong extended metaphor. Kinda like making a kick ass mix tape.

 

Scott Whitaker

 

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Here are some thoughts:

 

1.) Excellent writing, whether for poetry or prose; 2.) a good editor who knows how to place individual pieces together which work in harmony and add cohesiveness to the project; 3.) having an understanding the audience of the chapbook and knowing whether the intent is to entertain, inform, enlighten and/or give some cause for pause.

 

It helps to have a nice cover too, to initially attract an audience, but the work has to stand on its own once the cover is opened.

 

Rj Clarken

 

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A great chapbook: when the poems taken as a whole allow the book to function as the final poem of the collection. I think I'm plagarizing Robert Frost here.

 

Charlie Cote

 

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I think with a chapbook you should either go the route of trying for as much variety as possible, to show your full range. The danger with this can be the tendency towards being uneven.

 

The other option is to go the total opposite and have a unifying theme, build it so it is more like a concept album with each poem exploring facets of a larger idea. This runs the risk of going in the total opposite and having everything too samey.

 

I think sort the framework out and then kind of forget about it and just concentrate on the individual poems.

 

Paul Grimsley

 

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After having read dozens of chapbooks, and sent out numerous versions of chapbook manuscripts, some as sort of a variety pack, and some ordered so that there was a definitive narrative arc, I have determined that what works best and what most editors (and readers) seem to be looking for are collections that focus on a single theme.

 

Because they're small, they are easily read in one sitting, so a series of linked poems -- sonnets that explore the complicated relationship with the body, an abecedarian where each poem interrogates a single letter, a series of ekphrastic poems -- is a great way to go.

 

My chapbook Small Fruit Songs is a series of poems written on a single theme in a single form: fruit-related prose poems. Once I had the concept in place, I wrote the whole thing in under a week, and the first publisher I sent it to accepted it within just a couple of days.

 

Cati Porter

 

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A chapbook is an opportunity to focus, and every good chapbook I've read had a clear theme or stance, typically with an arc of development. As a small press publisher, I find that thematic development and careful arrangement is what makes a manuscript submission rise above, as opposed to the seemingly random compilation of a selection of one's poems.

 

In journalism, feature articles (as opposed to hard news) often hang on a "news peg," or something that connects the feature to current events in everyday life. It's a hook, and functions just like the musical hook in a pop song. As long as it remains intelligent and avoids excess gimmickry, I think the concept of chapbook should do the same.

 

Nancy Pagh won the 2008 Floating Bridge Press chapbook contest with her collection After, with each poem being written "after" a particular poet. Each spread starts with the epigraph on a left-hand page, with the poem on the right, so the idea is abundantly clear. That's the hook, the concept. In a way, it's like an invented bucket (or drawer) that readers can categorize the book into, thus making the book more accessible. The real substance is deeper, of course, and in Nancy's case it's the emotional sway that underpins the poems in their darkness and fearless grit.

 

The art of chapbooks, of course, is the limitless pursuit of different ways to create an original theme, a hook, a stance, finding the right balance between intrigue and challenge while avoiding facile or cliched gimmickry. A good chapbook not only has solid poems, but often has an idea behind their assembly that makes me wonder "Why didn't I think of that!"

 

Michael Dylan Welch

 

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A great chapbook excerpts the general aesthetic of the author, while allowing a little leeway for them to explore either something new, like style or form, or topical that might not fill a book. I would argue it's not a "teaser" or a "taste," rather, a chapbook is a complete and individual, shorter work that may appear, in whole or in parts, in a larger body of work later.

 

Todd Dillard

 

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I've just become Co-director of Flarestack Poets, a new incarnation of Flarestack Publishing which has a reputation for producing some of the best chapbooks (or pamphlets as we tend to call them in the UK) in Britain. Here's the statement we put together that explains what we think makes a great chapbook:

 

We're looking for poetry that dares outside current trends, even against the grain... collections that aren't bus queues or greatest hits albums from poets who are forging their own linguistic connections with the root-ball of experience.

 

Jacqui Rowe

 

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Content (especially poems or prose pieces that work together to form a whole) coupled with design. A chapbook should feel good in the palm of your hand, should look good sitting on the edge of your desk.

 

Corey Mesler

 

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This is an interesting question since I will soon be judging a chapbook contest for Rosemetal Press. I'm interested in reading your summary post to get some insights.

 

The challenge I faced in putting together my own chapbook manuscript (I Call This Flirting, Flume Press 04) was fighting against the brevity of the form. My first stabs at ordering the short-shorts (it's flash fiction, not poetry) made the book read like running water. You just zipped right through with no stopping points. In this way, the early drafts seemed neutral as a whole. I was trying too hard to make it "flow." It didn't work.

 

I decided to break it up into sections--putting in resting points as it were. The section break pages each quote a made-up fortune cookie fortune... The sections are thematic but not obviously so. After I did this, the chapbook seemed longer and fuller. I also frontloaded it with the most powerful work (in my opinion, of course) leading the chapbook.

 

Unlike a novel or a full-length collection of poetry or stories, I think with a chapbook you have less time to build momentum. So your challenge is to artificially create the kind of depth a reader experiences with a longer work. A chapbook invites an all-in-one-sitting reading so I guess that ups the reader expectation in a way...

 

When I love a chapbook, there's a kind of resonance and completion when I hit the last page. It makes me want to look the whole little book over again, amazed that it's so short but seems long. I want to think about it, and then pick and choose favorites as I reread--not in order--the second time.

 

Sherrie Flick

 

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A great chapbook, to me, connects in some kind of way. It doesn't have to be a theme, but something weaves them together. Maybe it can be a chapbook about, say, a relative, and all the poems mention that relative and it can be titled after that relative. Also, chapbooks should be short (like 10-20 pages) and consist of the BEST poems, no fillers. Not poems that can't stand on their own.

 

Melissa McEwen

 

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Stature: If it has the stature of a book, it is a great chapbook.

 

Sally Evans

 

 

As I was in the middle of typing up the Wednesday Poetry Prompt yesterday, my Internet service went down. Apparently, some construction crew cut through a cable that disabled all their operations in Georgia. Anyway, I finally got my service around 9:15 this morning. So, here is the prompt I wrote yesterday.

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I don't usually post interviews on back-to-back days, but I thought I'd make an exception in this case, because it might be the last interview posted until after November with this November PAD (poem-a-day) challenge coming up. And I'm just so excited to share Nin Andrews with anyone who hasn't read her work.

You see, there are poets who seek me out for interviews; there are poets who I seek for interviews; and then, there are cases where me and another poet just kind of bump into each other. In the case of Nin Andrews, I was definitely seeking her out after picking up (at random) one of her previous collections, Why They Grow Wings (Silverfish Review Press).

Since I'm an editor, I've always got more books than I can possibly read, but I was hooked from the first line of this--to me, anyway--previously unknown poet. After doing a little research, I learned she was not such an unknown quantity, in addition to learning--to my delight--that she recently released two other collections, Sleeping With Houdini (BOA Editions, Ltd.) and Dear Professor, Do You Live in a Vacuum? (Subito Press).

Here's a favorite of mine from Sleeping With Houdini:

Sleeping for Kafka

I heard on the radio this morning that prayers can heal. Experiments demonstrate that cancer patients who are prayed for, even by an anonymous person, have a better prognosis than those who receive no prayers.

A person can purchase prayers from Grace Church in Kansas by dialing 1-800-prayers. Visa and Mastercard are accepted.

I read that Kafka, a chronic insomniac, felt refreshed after watching his beloved sleep. Sometimes he invited her over, just to admire how she draped herself over his couch, wrapped in immaculate rest.

Some speculate it was the dreams of his beloved he wrote.

Thoughts like dreams drift from mind to mind. Some are heavy and sink to the ground or disappear under water where they grow like sea plants, while others are light and glide upwards like helium molecules.

When Jacob saw angels going up and down a ladder, they were merely tracing his thoughts.

Nietzsche said few people think their own thoughts. Instead they are thought. Many people are dreamt and prayed. They are like seashells inhabited by hermit crabs.

Most of us have no clue whose dream we are.

 

And with that, here is the interview:

What are you currently up to?

 

I'm working on two projects, one which I hope might become a New and Selected Orgasms. And another, which is a set of essays and longer prose poems that are very loosely linked by an economic theme.  Or money.  (I know it sounds boring, so I'm hoping that's not the case.)  I was always told as a child not to talk about sex, politics, or money, and I always do what I am told not to do.

 

I've read that you grew up on a farm. How do you feel your childhood shaped you as a poet?

 

As a child, I spent a lot of time at the barn with the horses, cows, cats, and chickens.  I also spent hours just staring at things—catching tadpoles, or watching ants pull crumbs or dead ants, or bees load up on pollen as they went from flower to flower.  We didn't have a TV or neighbors or other forms of distraction, so I spent a lot of my time daydreaming.  I think it's that empty space or time in my days I became used to as a kid that has shaped me most. It's the space I still need in order to write or solve problems or just stay sane.

 

In our correspondence, you mentioned that you've noticed a shift in your writing from more surreal work in your first collection (The Book of Orgasms) to more a storytelling style in your book due out next fall (Southern Comfort). Do you think there's a reasoning or natural progression behind moving from the surreal to storytelling?

 

I tend to do the opposite of what I am told.  Write what you know, my first teachers suggested.  But I have never been a big fan of reality.  Reality feels like sandpaper on my skin.  Sometimes I think I would love to escape the everyday world, and just move into the imagination forever.  Music, philosophy, dance, poetry, painting – they all help me do just that. Like good drugs, they offer an alternative to reality.  So initially I tried not to write my personal story.

 

But then, at a certain point, I started thinking about my childhood, and my children used to ask me about my past.  And I would tell them stories.  Stories about the time the one-armed man who worked on our farm shot a rabid fox. About the time the same man got drunk and let the heifers run loose on the freeway. About this crazy lady who came to the farm and taught me to see ghosts and read palms.  Or about a man called Toby who would walk up the dirt road on bare feet some days, and then go down to the mud pond to catch snapping turtles.  He said he caught them by feeling in the mud with his toes.

 

My children wanted me to tell these stories again and again, especially when I imitated the voices of the farmhands, my father, my mother, the crazy people, and the different animals and so on. They said I should write them down. But it's not easy for me to write about the farm. It's a bit like trying to break an ocean into drops.  And of course, I don't have an ability to see these pieces objectively.

 

From your first collection to your most recent, you've written a lot of your poems in the prose format. What do you like about the prose poem?

 

In the beginning, I wanted to write carefully crafted mini-tales.  And the prose poem is designed for that.  After a while I became interested in all the ways a prose poem can borrow from other forms.  So there are prose poems that are like fables, myths and parables, prose poems that are like interviews, love letters, fan letters, horoscopes, plays, advertisements, news reports, etc. There's so much versatility in the prose poem format.  And  great opportunities for humor.

 

Do you feel the structure of poems helps influence the content?

 

Yes. I think line breaks, for example, are content.  The same poem written with line breaks and without them—can have an entirely different effect.  And meaning. 

 

I think choosing a form is like choosing a design for a house. If  you have a big open space with skylights and a stage, that's one kind of experience.  If you build a large house with a bazillion tiny rooms, that's another experience.  

 

You mention that the poems in Dear Professor, Do You Live in a Vacuum? are inspired by actual comments, notes and questions from your husband's students. Where do you find that you draw the line between reality and fantasy in your own poetry?

 

In most of my writing, I try to keep reality off-kilter somehow. To offer at least a tiny escape from reality. I do this in different ways, depending on the book. In Dear Professor, I use humor to create that escape.

 

In the orgasm poems, I am sometimes taking a literal reality and making it surreal.  Or a philosophical discussion and putting it in an absurd context.  I have, for example, an interview with an orgasm.  That poem began when I saw the debate between Senator Bentsen and Senator Quayle.  When Bentsen said: Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine.  Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy, I imagined one orgasm saying to a fake orgasm, Orgasms are my friends. I know orgasms, and you?  You're no orgasm.

 

In the southern poems, I mix up the characters, recast a father as a farmhand, an uncle as a father, my friend's mother as my own mother, so that I can gain some objectivity. I want each poem to speak for itself, not for my experience.  A poem, I like to think, has its story to tell, its own truth.   

 

The poems in Sleeping With Houdini seem very tightly wound together. When you're putting together a collection, do you start with an idea and start writing the poems to complete that idea? Or do you write poems and then fill the gaps after you notice a pattern developing?

 

I will write on one subject for months at a time.  I end up with a heap of poems that cling to one another like static electricity.  It's a nightmare to try to organize my obsessions.  To try to make a pattern out of chaos.  It's a little like attempting to take tiny pieces of old fabric and sew them into a beautiful dress.

 

Who are you currently reading?

 

I was just reading Shirley Jackson.  She reminds me a little of my father, her dark sensibility.  And Mark Halliday's new collection, Keep This Forever, which is as brilliant and smart-assed as Halliday always is.  And The Lover by Duras, which is fabulous, of course.  It's interesting, now that I think about it.  All of these books are taking a bite out of my peace of mind.  But they are all teaching me things.

 

I've also been reading Rick Bursky's The Soup of Something Missing, a little collection I think everyone should read.  He's a poet I'm crazy about.  And Carol Maldow's The Widening, a book about sexual awakening.  She calls it a novel, but it's not. It reads like a memoir written in prose poems.  Each page is a chapter.  Each page is a beautiful prose poem.

 

If you had one piece of advice to share with other poets, what would it be?

 

I never follow advice, so I don't usually give any either. 

 

For me writing is a little like keeping the barn clean.  Every day I check over my work and see if there are any manure balls I need to remove. And every day there are.  For sure.  So I'm never surprised by a rejection.  And I'm always amazed by an acceptance.  That someone took something of mine, cow pies and all. So I'm grateful for even the tiniest forms of acceptance. 

 

Not that that's advice.  It's just the way I survive the poetry business side of being a poet.  And how I keep writing.

 

*****

 

* Check out Nin's blog at http://ninandrewswriter.blogspot.com/

 

* Click here for more information on Sleeping With Houdini

 

Poetry is often at its best when it's helping readers gain greater insights into life. In the case of After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events, edited by Tom Lombardo (Sante Lucia Books), poems have been chosen to help readers to recover from subjects such as war, abuse, addiction, death, and more. The anthology includes 115 poets from 15 nations, including Donald Hall, Thomas Lux, J.P. Dancing Bear, Annie Finch, Kevin Young, William Stafford, Mary Jo Bang, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Valerie Nieman, Rita Dove, and Jeffrey Levine.

Here's a poem by Lombardo himself that appears in the Recovery From Death of a Spouse section:

Daffodils

For weeks after Lana's funeral,
my mother cooked for me,
handled death's paperwork,
opened a door--
Look outside at your back yard.
Looking outward for the first time since burial
prayers, I saw daffodils blooming,
the ones that Lana and I had planted
in a sunken rectangular spot last Fall,
set against the bright, new green of Spring,
Easter white and careless yellow.

 

And with that, let's jump into the interview.

What are you currently up to?

 

In addition to my ongoing freelance medical editing, which pays my office rent, I am spending nearly all of my creative writing time on the marketing and promotion of After Shocks. I'm also in initial discussions with two authors and another publisher regarding potential next projects for Sante Lucia Books. Sorry to say, my own writing time has disappeared. I miss it, and I'll get back to it soon. I hope.

 

I also spend a lot of time with my two children, Lucy (12) and Sam (9). As a freelancer, I'm flexible enough to be Mr. Mom and pick them up after school each day, manage their afternoon activities and homework. My wife, Hope, has a real job, with a salary and benefits.

 

 

After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events is an anthology inspired by your experience as a widower. Could you speak a little about how this experience led to the anthology? Also, what do you hope this anthology is able to accomplish?

 

I've always hated that label "widower." I was so, so young when the label attached to me. I thought a widower should be in his 70s or 80s, some old guy walking with a cane, not a vigorous young man. I felt so out of place.

 

After my first wife, Lana, was killed in an auto accident on April 13, 1985, I found myself a widower in my early 30s, without peer among anyone I knew. Well-wishers offered condolences like this: "You’re young. You'll get over this." Or "You're too young, you'll never get over this."

 

I have spent the past two-plus decades coming to some understanding of my wife's death, my grief, and what recovery means in the context of my own life.

 

Reading poetry gave me solace during the early stages of my grief. I returned to some old favorites—Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, e.e. cummings, Robert Frost—not a particularly soothing group, you might say, but for me, they were familiar from a time in my life when my life seemed more settled. The language, the music, the ghosts in the haunted house offered an escape from a life seemingly shattered—an escape from "if…then", "what if ", "how", "why" questions plaguing my nights, questions that had no answers.

 

1985 was also the year of publication of Douglas Dunn's Elegies (Faber & Faber), which won the Whitbread Book of the Year. Sometime along the way, a dear friend gave me a copy, brought back from England. Though the circumstances of Leslie Balfour Dunn's death were quite different, I felt Dunn's world embrace me.

 

Grief wrongs us so. I stand, and wait, and cry

For the absurd forgiveness, not knowing why.

A decade later, Donald Hall's book Without, poems covering the illness and death of his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, touched me in the same way.

 

These two books moved me deeply as books of recovery. They seemed direct, straightforward, and honest in their stories, emotion, and language.

 

Many contemporary poets are writing about topics in recovery. Mary Jo Bang's Elegy relives her grief over the death of her son. Linda McCarriston wrote Eva-Mary about growing up abused, which won the National Book Award. Sharon Olds wrote collections about childhood abuse and alcoholism. Others: Carolyn Forche, Bruce Weigl, Tess Gallagher, Marie Howe. Each poet has focused upon a topic of his or her own experience. They all represent a chorus of voices in a growing sub-genre of recovery poetry. I used a poem from Ms. Bang in After Shocks. The others will be considered for the second edition, due out in a couple of years.

 

What this anthology intends to do is show that the poetry of recovery cuts across many boundaries. What this anthology intends to accomplish is to provide its readers with a source of comfort in the language of poets who've experienced life-shattering events and have come to some kind of acceptance.

 

 

There are "115 poets from 15 nations" anthologized in After Shocks. How did you go about getting all the permissions? I'm guessing it must've been quite an undertaking.

 

You've heard the simile "it's like herding cats." The permissions effort for After Shocks was more than an undertaking. It became a lifestyle for several months. It took a great deal of organization, diligence, and guts. There were so many different pieces. But once I organized it in my own mind, the rest was just the grunt work of getting it done.

 

There are essentially two levels of permissions. The first level is the permissions from well-known, top-level poets with large corporate publishers, e.g. Donald Hall and Thomas Lux at Houghton Mifflin or Rita Dove at W.W. Norton, or Carol Ann Duffy at Faber & Faber, etc. Many of those very well-known poets have signed their rights over to their publishers, and those publishers re-sell the reprint rights, generally splitting the proceeds with the poet. In these cases, permissions became a matter of finding the permissions editor at the publisher, writing a letter, negotiating a fee, signing the contracts, sending a check. The process is well-defined, straightforward, and the permissions folks at these large publishers are professionals. They are eager to book the revenue from reprinted poems, for which you and I and they know that there's a very small market. So, in my case, as a very small publisher, the big houses were very easy to negotiate with. It was either give me a price I can afford or I walk, and if I walk, they get nothing.

 

I lost only one poem out of scores in this top level group. Only one publisher would not negotiate downward to a fee I felt I could afford.

 

The second level is essentially everyone else. Many of the poets at this level may have national profiles, many of them are well-known regionally, many of them are already award-winners. But their publishers are smaller houses than those large corporate publishers above and may not retain the re-print rights so that the author retains the rights, or if the publisher does retain the rights, it does not charge for reprints, or gives the poet the authority to grant the re-print rights. The process in these cases varies so much that it's virtually ad hoc. My approach was this: I emailed these poets, asked if they owned the rights to the poems I had selected for After Shocks. If they said YES, I took them at their word, and asked them to email permission, which they did. If they referred me to their publishers, then I emailed their publishers, and in almost all cases, received reprint permission via email free of charge. Most of the small publishers were cooperative, generous, easy to work with. Also in this second level, there were several contributors who submitted unpublished poems, so the permissions for those were very simple. The poets granted permissions. This second level was completed all via email. The first level was done all on paper, with letters and contracts and the good ol' United States Postal Service.

 

I must mention a few publishers like Alice James Books and Tupelo Press and Iris Press who were quite generous by not charging reprint fees when I asked for several poems from several of their poets' books. Working with editors like April Ossmann at Alice James and Jeffrey Levine at Tupelo and Bob Cumming at Iris was a pleasure. They are first-class editors, and they appreciate spreading their good poetry around.

 

On the other hand, there were a few small presses and university presses who were simply buttheads, refusing to negotiate or treating me with arrogance because I was not Norton or they believed I might be naïve or foolish enough to pay them exorbitant reprint fees. In four cases, I told the poets that I would not use their poems in the anthology because their publishers were not cooperating or were charging too much. In two of those cases, the poet's involvement broke the logjam. In the other two cases (both of them university presses), I lost the poems because the university presses were quite rigid with their reprint structure and refused to negotiate even a penny. So, in the end, I walked, and they got nothing. I felt this as a defeat because in the end, it was the poets who lost, not After Shocks. I had plenty of great poems in hand.

 

There was one other negotiated oddity in permissions. One university press would not negotiate a reduced fee, and when I told the poet, she offered to pay the fee. I refused to go along, but she was adamant. I probably should not have given in, but I agreed to pay half the fee, which actually brought my cost down within a comfortable range. She paid the other half. I really liked this poem, and I really needed it to balance out a chapter, so my editorial needs may have trumped ethics. I'm not sure that I'd do that again. It seems a bit unfair for a poet to pay her own press to buy reprint rights to one of her own poems. I'm not sure what the ethics of that situation dictate. Maybe I'll write this question to the New York Times ethics column, eh?  As editor of Writer's Market, do you have an opinion on this?

 

All in all, the permissions work was time-consuming and tedious. But it was worth every drop of sweat.

 

Also, to put together an anthology such as this, you must do a lot of reading. What (or who) are some of your recent favorite reads?

 

During my reading and selection months, I was reading so much poetry I couldn't believe it. Morning, noon, and night poetry. I was dreaming about poems. But what a rewarding experience! I have met poets literally around the world.

 

In the U.S., Jericho Brown's just released collection, Please is excellent. He's a young, Cave Canem, emerging poet. Look out for this guy! I wouldn't have known of his new book had I not met him through the After Shocks submissions. He answered my call for submissions, placed on the Cave Canem web site, and we've kept in touch. Susan Meyers' collection Keep and Give Away, which won the South Carolina Book Award and the SIBA Book of the Year Award is also a great read and a fine example of the new poetry coming out in the South. Another book that caught my attention during my reading was Martha Collins' most recent one Blue Front, a book-length view of tragic events, with huge scope, set the microcosm of her family. Unfortunately, I couldn't excerpt it for After Shocks, though Ms. Collins did submit several other poems, of which I selected two. Another recent discovery is the poetry of Joseph Enzweiler, published by Iris Press of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He's a poet who lives near Fairbanks, Alaska, works half the year as a carpenter and stone mason, then as the long Arctic winter descends, he holes up in his primitive log cabin in Goldstream Valley north of Fairbanks and writes poetry on an old Royal Typewriter all winter long.  And it's great stuff: deep, cold, brooding with insight! During selections, I read New Hampshire poet Pam Bernard's unpublished manuscript Blood Garden, a stunning real-time portrayal of her father's combat experience in World War I. Yes, WW ONE. He was an older father when Ms. Bernard was born. I selected a poem from the manuscript for After Shocks. Blood Garden is slated for publication by WordTech in 2010. Watch for it. It's another fine addition to the oeuvre of war poetry. I would also note Brian Turner's Here, Bullet (Alice James Book), which is by now quite well known, an excellent collection of war poetry informed by Turner's tour of duty in Iraq. One more—Isreali poet Rachel Tzvia Back's third collection On Ruins and Return, extraordinary, moving work steeped in the everyday activities of Israeli Jews and Arabs, living and dying side-by-side in Galilee.

 

There are four excellent collections from London publisher Ambit Books that I would call must-reads for any American poetry lover who would like to expand his/her reading into exciting new areas. This series is called Poets Here from Elsewhere and features four poets living in the U.K. who have left their homelands because of politics, persecution, or poverty. The books are Sir Winston Churchill Knew My Mother by Indian poet Satyendra Srivastava; Bells of Speech by Kurdish poet Nazand Begikhani, who fled Iraq after her brothers were killed in the chemical bombing of Halabja in 1988; memories of summers in brist near gradac and other poems by Bosnian poet Sonja Besford, who fled Bosnia after the civil war there, and A Day Within Days by Liu Hongbin, who was exiled from China when his poetry was posted around Tiananmen Square during the uprising there in 1989. All four of those books were written in English. I happened to be reading these four collections when I conceived After Shocks, and they opened the anthology's door to the world.

 

An excellent anthology that I came across during my reading, which I would highly recommend, again to expand beyond the normal reading a typical American reader usually gravitates toward: Six Basque Poets, published by Arc Publications in the U.K. It's phenomenal reading, with several excellent poets within, whom you would never, ever come across anywhere else. I found Bernardo Atxaga's poem "Death and the Zebras," and as I read it, felt shivers up and down my spine, and I knew I needed this poem as the final poem for After Shocks. The publisher, Arc Publications, was a nice discovery. It has several in its "Six Poets from…." series. Check out the web site. You won't be able to resist buying a couple.

 

Robert, I could go on and on. These are just a few of many, and I hate to call them out because there are others just as good. There are so many excellent poets out there whom I discovered during my reading, poets I never would have come across except for the submissions call. When you work on an anthology, you get exposed to many, many, MANY poets whom you'd never in your life expect to read. It's taught me to reach out further and further, open up to ALL poets, everywhere.

 

 

You're the founding editor-in-chief of Web MD, the world's most widely used health website, and you now work as a freelance medical editor. Does your background in medicine help inform your own writing or with compiling this anthology?

 

My own writing tends toward the body, the physical, sometimes even going inside the body to root around or look back out at the world from in there. My unpublished ms. has the working title The Body Functions. I'm not afraid to work with medical diction. I find there's a nice music to it when used in the right spot. I like to confront the diseases that break us down. I like to question the conventional wisdom. My approach, even in poems I've written about my first wife's death, uses stark clinical details. I feel that my 15 years of writing and editing health and medicine have given me some feeling for both the strength and fragility of this sack of bone and tissue we are blessed and cursed to live within. I think that experience colors about half of my published work, but there are other colors, tones, and moods in my work, too. I also was a scholarship college football player, and I've written some poems about all the concussions I suffered, kind of an interesting combination of medicine and athletics.

 

I'm certain my career as a medical editor informed the compilation of After Shocks. But there are no clinically descriptive poems in After Shocks. Where I believe it had an effect is that I have this sense of wonder when I look at us—human beings. I am attracted to poems that exhibit that same sense of wonder. We are truly a marvel. So fragile, yet so strong. The strength is not only physical. We possess a resilience within us that literally forces us to want to live. Of course, all forms of life possess this, don't they? Life wants to continue living, and life will alter itself to continue living. You can see this clearly in real time in viruses' behavior over their rapid generational evolution. Deadly viruses quickly evolve to lesser virulence so that they don't kill too many potential hosts, thus continuing their own source of livelihood. Once life takes root, it doesn't want to be uprooted. But we have something other life forms don't have…a big brain, the seat of a clever mind. Most of us use it to survive, no matter what horrors happen to us. Reading some of the poems in After Shocks makes me clearly understand that there truly are no limits to what we can survive. Just one chapter would illustrate this point: Recovery from Loss of Child. Reading the submissions for that chapter drove me to tears some days. I have children. I can't imagine the devastation of this loss. But these poets have survived what may be the worst loss of all. One of the forewords to After Shocks was written by therapist Nicholas Mazza, who lost his son in a car wreck. Dr. Mazza, who is editor of Journal of Poetry Therapy, writes: "Not a day goes by that I don't think of Chris or try to do something in remembrance of him…although there will always be an empty space on anything that I write, I remind myself that reflection can become remembrance, and this becomes a legacy for those who have gone before us. It is through poetry and story that we create meaning and form relationships."

 

Of course, a few of us are not equipped to survive, and those unfortunate ones choose to end their lives: facing illness, from grief, after abuse, fighting addiction. Who can blame them? It's hard and at times, can be hopeless. I've come to see that a life-shattering event has two outcomes: You either make it or you don't, and if you don't the alternative is the end of all hope. And a few of us go down that road. Fortunately, not that many. Most of us would rather continue living. Life wants to live. That's part of what I've learned as a medical editor.

 

So for After Shocks selections, I focused on that kernel of hope, that ray of recovery, that evidence that life wants to live. In some selections, it's in the air even as carnage surrounds the narrator. In others, it's years down the road from the event. But it's there, in each poem.

 

You self-published this book under Sante Lucia Books. Could you speak a little on why you decided to go this route? Also, do you plan on publishing more titles under this imprint in the future?

 

In one word, control. I'm glad I did it this way, because I was in total control the entire way. I had such a clear vision for what I wanted to do, had I gone with an established publisher, the publisher would have filtered my vision through its own. Compromises would have watered down my vision.

 

But I almost did go with a publisher. I came awfully close, and now, I know that it would have been exactly the wrong move. Publishers work more slowly than glaciers move. This anthology—388 pages, 152 poems, 115 poets, 15 nations—went from an idea to bound pages in 18 months. Triple that if a publisher is involved. Fugedaboudit!

 

There was a small, but well-respected, publishing house who had agreed to publish After Shocks. We reached a verbal agreement after a meeting on November 1, 2007, when I showed him an early draft of the manuscript. Then, I never heard back from that publisher again, even after repeated emails. He was so very enthusiastic, said a contract was coming. I've since heard a rumor that he has taken seriously ill or that his company may have taken seriously ill. He's elderly. Maybe he up and died? I mean, you think the worst when there's no communication.

 

When I didn't hear back, I moved ahead. I could not wait. I had a publishing date in mind, Autumn 2008, and I wanted to move quickly. 

 

I had already formed Sante Lucia Books as a dba of the company I have for my freelance medical editing work, so I was prepared from the outset to do this alone, and I will freely and openly admit, I'm glad I did. I love to have complete and total control. I would drive any other publisher nuts. This is MY idea, and MY book, and I wanted to do it exactly MY way. I am already an editor, and a darn good one, so why would I need an editor from a publisher looking over my shoulder? On the publishing side, I'm learning a few things along the way, and I contracted with Kevin Watson, publisher at Press 53 in Winston-Salem, NC, to work with me on the design, production, and printing. I have absorbed a lot of marketing over the years, having been the creative partner with some great marketing minds during my career, so I'm familiar with marketing and publicity, so I felt somewhat equipped to work those angles. Some things I'm learning as I go, and they tend to be the lowest, but most unnerving, details. For example, After Shocks, the book, weighs 1 lb. 6 oz, in its bubble wrapped envelope. Well, your postman will not take  anything heavier than 13 oz., because Homeland Security has deemed 13 oz. as the weight of a bomb that can bring down an airplane, according to my USPS carrier. What that means, in a practical sense, is that I must hand carry each and every book I mail to my post office in person, hand them over the counter, so they can be verified and stamped as "non-suspicious mail." And I discovered to my chagrin that not all postal clerks are trained to do that correctly, resulting in some copies bouncing back to me like rubber bombs, er balls. I feel like I'm a character in a Kafka novel when I carry these stacks of books to the PO. I can only carry two full boxes at a time without herniating a disc, so that means daily trips to the PO and waiting in line, which is one big, time consuming pain in the butt. Hey, would I avoid that with a big publisher taking over this anthology? You bet. But I still love it.

 

My imprint is named after my two children. Lucy, whose given name is Lucia, pronounced in the Italian way, loo-CHEE-ya, and Sam whose given name is Sante, pronounced in the Italian way, SAN-te. They didn't charge me a licensing fee, and for that I employ them as envelope labelers and stuffers, when they're not doing homework, playing hockey or tennis, or taking dance lessons, which seems like all the time. So, since the publication of After Shocks, I've been demoted from Editor to Mail Room Clerk!!! But I love it. I love having ALL the control over EVERYTHING. I embrace the mindless work of placing stamps and labels on envelopes. It's a nice break from reality.

 

Another publisher would have screwed this up somehow, taken two years longer, designed a lousy cover. I had, still have, a precise vision for this anthology, and I needed to execute that vision to the last dot on the page. For the good and the bad. Hey, there are three typos in the first printing, and those are completely my fault and have already been corrected in second printing. But any good that devolves from After Shocks, that's also my doing.

 

I wouldn't give up this much fun to a publisher for a million dollars. No way.

 

And, c'mon, realistically, is Norton or Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux or even Copper Canyon really going to want an anthology edited by someone not named Donald Hall or Louise Glück or Billy Collins or you-know-who-big-name in poetry? I'm not a twig from the Cambridge Tree.

 

Plans for the future for Sante Lucia Books? Yes. I have plans in the works. Yes. I will be publishing other titles in the future, but right now, I'd rather not discuss them in too much detail. I'm both superstitious and part Sicilian. If I don't jinx it by talking about it, then someone might steal the ideas. There may be a traditional collection or two in Sante Lucia Books' future. On the other hand, I have some intriguing ideas to explore vertical markets in poetry, which I don't believe have been explored by other publishers. My media experience tends to be non-traditional, outside-the-box work, so much of my planning for the future of Sante Lucia Books will be in this vein.

 

How have you gone about promoting this book?

 

I have this feeling that I am digging 10,000 holes. Most will be empty, but I will find gold at the bottom of three of them, and some others will have some loose change, lost and covered over by years of dirt.

 

Basically, I'm focusing marketing efforts on readings, personal appearances, and getting the book into the hands of every media outlet, editor, reviewer, producer that I can. I follow up on every single lead, every idea, every suggestion offered by anyone.

 

At the outset, I developed an extensive advertising plan and set aside a budget. However, I've scrapped that plan almost completely. Instead, I've spent the money on a book publicist, and a very good one, Marjory Wentworth. So far, it's working out well. Together, we've set up readings in Charleston, Charlotte, Atlanta, Boston. For the Charleston reading on September 18, Ms. Wentworth set up two live TV spots and an article in the Sunday arts section of the Charleston daily newspaper. The attendance at the reading was the largest for poetry ever at the library there. Eight After Shocks contributors from South Carolina read there. November 9 coming up: Charlotte. This has the makings of a very large reading. There will be 11 contributors reading. The local paper is planning an advance story. [note: I'll have more on this in a week or so…] We'll do the same for Atlanta on March 11, 2009, and Boston on May 2, 2009. We're looking to fill in the open dates with readings in other cities: SF/Portland/DC/NYC. We are scheduling readings where contributors tend to cluster in groups of 5 or more. I'm working with an agent in London to host a reading for the 10 British poets for sometime in 2009. I'll be heading a panel of contributors who will read their After Shocks work at the South Carolina Book Festival. I'm considering doing a panel at the AWP in Denver in 2010. There is a distinct marketing advantage to having 115 contributors. There are 115 potential sales people out there pulling for After Shocks. And they have been sending me some great ideas. And bless them all, they've been very willing to come to read whenever I've asked.

 

We've sent out a couple hundred books to reviewers and various media people. The results are just starting to materialize in coverage. Three newspaper articles so far. Those two TV appearances. I'll be doing an interview in November for Georgia Public Broadcasting, which will run twice, the second time right before the Atlanta reading. This, of course, is local, not national publicity, but it's a step in the right direction. Once into the NPR door, I hope to leverage to other NPR stations, and maybe, if lucky, to the national level. I have this gut feeling that After Shocks is just beginning to get some media traction. It's still early, as After Shocks has only been out for two months, but Ms. Wentworth and I have done everything we possibly could, and I feel that the results are just starting to come in.

 

I've been booked into 6 dates for readings/discussions at church-based recovery groups or adult Sunday schools (with book singings at the churches' bookstores), and this has been a surprising development. I'm going to push this as far as I can. I'll go to any church, temple, synagogue, or mosque that invites me, and I'm working to spread the word in that sphere. I'll need to tap into networks of pastors, ministers, priests, imams, and rabbis. I haven't yet cracked the code here, but I have a sense that religious institutions are going to become very important in the marketing effort. After Shocks is not a religious book by any means, but I'm hearing very strong reactions from clergy who've seen the book to its underlying theme of the resilience of the human spirit. These church-based readings/discussions take poetry out of the realm of the typical poetry audience and into the realm of people who might not read poetry that often, but might react to it emotionally as a spiritual experience. A strong selling point here, of course, is my own personal story. Ms. Wentworth has taught me to recognize the promotional value of that and to weave me and the book into one story. The National Association of Poetry Therapists has also been a strong supporter, using its email list to publicize readings.

 

Other publicity—you've graciously asked me to answer questions on this blog! Maybe there are other bloggers out there, too!

 

I may spring the money for an advertisement or two in the near future. I'm seriously considering a Poetry Daily sponsor box on its home page. The cost seems efficient for the reach. However, I'm not yet convinced that advertising results in sales. Readings, personal appearances, word-of-mouth definitely results in sales.

 

 

If you could pass on one piece of advice to poets, what would it be?

 

Keep at it. No matter what.

 

I rejected many good poems for After Shocks simply because there was insufficient space. I could have published a 500-page anthology. Editorial decisions do not necessarily reflect upon quality. Editors' preferences are as numerous as the stars. Keep searching the heavens for your star.

 

If you could pass on one piece of advice to people suffering from life shattering events, what would it be?

 

Recovery cannot be prescribed. There are no rubrics, no roadmaps, no matter how many books you read. Recovery is not bottled like cough medicine. I hesitate to give anyone direct advice on this, because events that shatter lives—death of a loved one, divorce, exile, acts of war, abuse, addiction, etc.—cause unquantifiable, huge amounts of stress and horror and doubt, especially right at the beginning. From my own experience and from a distance of 23 years, I can say that what helped me most is that I realized I had to embrace the pain, let it wash over me, invite it inside, make it a part of me. It's very difficult, but I've come to believe that the longer you fight it, the harder it's going to be to come to some sort of new balance. And recognize this: After such an event, you will never be the same person. That person who you were—is gone forever, so give up trying to get back to normal. Normal is going to be something new and different. Maybe not as good, but maybe better. But if you don't open up to it, the road is longer and more painful that it needs to be. I had expected to reach some closure at some point, but I have discovered that there is no closure. Not really. Recovery goes on forever. Recovery became part of my spirit, part of that new level of stasis, that new "normalcy." I'm 23 years out from the death of my first wife, and though I'm at peace with who I've become, I feel like I'm still recovering from that event. I still bear the mark of a widower. I have started a new marriage and we have two lovely children. I still think about Lana and experience grief in some form every day.

 

*****

 

For more information, check out www.poetryofrecovery.com.

 

 

Okay, we're getting closer to November, which for some writers of fiction means it's getting closer to NaNoWriMo time. (Btw, NaNoWriMo translates into National Novel Writing Month.) There are would be novelists lining up to attempt writing 50,000 words or more during the month of November. There's even a NaNoWriMo website you can visit to check out this phenomenon at www.nanowrimo.org.

Anyway, that's all fine and good for those who write fiction. But what are the poets who don't write fiction supposed to do during November? After all, their fiction writing pals are all busy cramming 50,000 words into their laptops and hard drives.

I'm thinking it might be a neat idea to try writing a poem a day in November with the view of trying to have the makings of a chapbook heading into December. If there's enough interest, I would challenge myself and others to write a poem-a-day (as we did in April). I'll provide a prompt-a-day as well to try and help get the poetic juices flowing each day, but you can decide to follow or ignore the prompt as you see fit. After all, our main goal would be to have 30ish poems at the end of the month that you can then try turning into a chapbook submission (or heck, I guess you could self-publish, if that's the route you want to take).

I can tell you now that I won't have the time to highlight poems (as I did in April). But if there's enough interest, I will definitely work to do the prompt and poem each day. So, if you're interested in taking part in such a challenge with me, please let me know in the comments below this post.

Often, poets write with an eye to timeless subjects, such as love, loss, war, death, etc. In college, I was often warned against being too timely in my writing for fear that my fiction and poetry would eventually need a thousand footnotes to explain it. I understand that point of view, but I think there's a danger in ignoring the culture and world in which you live.

So for today's prompt, I want you to pick something from our current events and write about it. You can write a poem from the perspective of Darth Vader or an ode to the Internet (maybe even an elegy for typewriters). Anyway, make it current--and, as always, have fun with it.

Here's my attempt for the day:

"Jason Vorhees"

Technology will not keep you safe:
Your cell phones have dead zones,
and I will never die and stay dead
for I am as timeless as Lazarus or
the water in Crystal Lake. You can
drown me, chop off my head, bury
me deep in the ground, shoot me
into outer space on a rocket, but
I will return. As long as there are
teenagers unafraid of death, I will
return. Someday, you will learn.