Starting with the end seems to solve a few problems that naturally occur when trying to write a poem. It means you don’t have to stare at a blank page (what Mallarmé called “the empty paper defended by its whiteness”), and it prevents you from overdoing it with your last line, as so many of us are tempted to do.Therefore:
Write a verse or prose poem ending in either of these two lines:
—No one was supposed to get hurt.
OR
—And then he [or she] went back to work as though nothing had happened.
The first of these is a line you will have encountered if you watch crime dramas on television. The challenge here is to redeem the cliché. The other line was suggested by Franz Kafka in one of his aphorisms. He said it was “a sentence that strikes one as familiar from any number of old stories—though it might not have appeared in any of them.”
Deadline: Saturday, July 20, 2019. Midnight any time zone. Visit the American Scholar's page to enter your candidate.
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