The Best American Poetry

Wanted: The Best Last Line for a Book Not (or Not Yet) Written [by DL]

This week's "Next Line, Please" contest -- sponsored by The American Scholar -- is for the best last line or last sentence of a book that doesn't exist.

Here is quizmaster David Lehman's explanatory head note:

<<<
We love last lines. The endings of favorite novels enter the mind and lodge there. Scott Fitzgerald’s majestic conclusion of The Great Gatsby is a favorite: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Hemingway concludes The Sun Also Rises with a bitterly ironic line of dialogue enlivened by an unusual choice of adjective: “‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it pretty to think so?’” The terseness at the end of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is no less memorable: “For there she was.”

For their full impact, the great endings depend on the narratives that precede them. But a surprising number will be seen to have a meaning and a charm even when removed from their context. This is true of several of the lines I’ve quoted, and others spring to mind. When Dostoevsky brings Crime and Punishment to its finish, he leaves the door open for subsequent developments. He dangles the possibility of his hero’s redemption, then says matter-of-factly: “That might be the subject of a new story—our present story is ended.” Herman Melville airs a similar sentiment but with an effect that is both eerie and menacing at the close of The Confidence Man: “Something further may follow from this Masquerade.”

The last line of Sholom Aleichem’s story “A Yom Kippur Scandal”—“Gone forever”—concludes its narrative beautifully while making this reader believe it could perform the same function admirably for a half dozen others.

Your task for next week is to write the last sentence of a nonexistent story—either a story that we can imagine or one that we would yearn to read strictly on the basis of your sentence. The winning entry may imply a specific narrative—or it may be so suggestive that readers will be inspired to supply the writing that culminates in the sentence.

It doesn’t have to be long—just unforgettable.

Deadline: Midnight, Sunday, November 30.
>>>

And I didn't even mention the Borges story that waits until the last sentence to solve the mystery it poses.

To submit your best last sentence please follow this link and hea straight to the comments section.

Oh, and what does Elizabeth Peyton's painting of Jake (1995) have to do with the contest? Nothing, but you didn't know that until you reached this, the last line of the post. -- DL

"From Minor Errors, Mighty Words May Flow": A "Next Line, Please" Prompt

NEXT LINE, PLEASE

From Minor Errors, Mighty Words May Flow

By David Lehman | September 12, 2017

September 12, 2017

For our next prompt, I shall adopt Emily Winakur’s proposal, seconded by Paul Michelsen. In August Emily suggested that we write on “the topic of misunderstanding and all it may lead to (good, bad, surprising, etc).” The poem we write should have “as its basis a fundamental mishearing or misreading of language.” She proffers these “examples of mishearing/misreading that might take center stage in a poem: seeing ‘rabbi’ as ‘rabbit’; hearing ‘drive-through nativity’ (curious enough in its own right) as ‘dried fruit nativity’; a spellcheck wanting to substitute ‘banquet’ for Banquo and ‘madcap’ for Macduff in a paper about Macbeth.”

Paul Michelsen quotes my book about the New York School, The Last Avant-Garde: “Misunderstandings, though sometimes lamentable in our daily lives, have a value like that of dreams or jokes for the artist bent on making a virtue out of a necessity. The theme of misunderstanding—sometimes deliberate, sometimes inadvertent, but always implicit in the acts of creation and communication—is one to which [the late John] Ashbery has long been drawn.”

New York School mainstay Kenneth Koch has a poem, “Taking a Walk with You,” which is a catalogue of his misunderstandings. The poet Andrei Codrescu, mindful of Robert Frost’s statement that “poetry is what gets lost in translation,” contends that “poetry is mistranslation”—an assertion that makes complete sense once you consider that every metaphor is on some level a misrepresentation.

The Summer 2017 issue of The American Scholar has a splendid portfolio of poems by Mary Jo Salter, nearly every one of which illustrates the poetic value of mis-hearings. A beautiful poem of hers, in a recent issue of The Hopkins Review, alludes to a famous romantic line in Casablanca. The title of Mary Jo’s poem is “We’ll Always Have Parents.” The substitution of “parents” for “Paris” is all it takes to set the poem in motion.

So … our prompt is to write a poem based on a mistake, a typo, a misunderstanding, a slip of the tongue (about which Freud has so much to say), or an error that results in something better than what was originally intended. To honor compression as a virtue, let’s have a 12-line limit. The lines can be a solid block, or you can divide them into stanzas, rhymed or unrhymed.

Let me improvise an example:

I said “I planned to use his firm,”
but, when I type too fast, use
becomes sue, and so it happened.
As minor discords from foolish errors grow,
the threat of war loomed. Sensibly he wrote
“The time to make peace is now,”
but when he types too fast, now
becomes not, and that sealed our fate.
We agreed to disagree, but it was now no use.

But of course the tone of your poem, its orientation and its objective, may differ wildly from what I’ve written here, which, by the way, needs a title. Any suggestions?

Thanks, everyone. Deadline: Saturday night, September 16, midnight wherever you happen to be.

Permission required for reprinting, reproducing, or other uses.

David Lehman, a contributing editor of the Scholar, is a poet, critic, and the general editor of The Best American Poetry annual anthology. His book One Hundred Autobiographies has just been published. He currently writes our Talking Pictures column.

https://theamericanscholar.org/from-minor-errors-mighty-words-may-flow

The Alphabet as Hero: A "Next, Line Please" Entry

This post appeared as a  "Next Line, Please" entry on The American Scholar website, July 17, 2018:

For next week, our mission
will be
to test our ability
at compression
and brevity,
with our customary civility.

But first let’s look at a few poems that I didn’t have room for last week.

Faced with the job of writing a poem “in the manner of” something abstract, Angela Ball chose to define a style of living.

Louche glamour
bound me to Dietrich,
Garbo, and Bacall.
Subversive Hepburn
wore my power
with knowledge.
From me Dunaway
and Keaton gained
swagger, sparked
fads. Habitué
of war
and escape,
I pocket
time. Don’t look,
here I am now,
shouldering my way
into the room.

Lovely. Angela’s title is “Androgynous Style Speaks.” I think I’d simplify that to read “The Androgynous Style.”

My only criticism of Diana Ferraro’s “The Poet as an Insect” has to do with the title. This lush poem is more mysterious without it:

Nowhere, not near,
An absent whisper
A bee melting in a honey hell
Daffodils and roses dreaming of drowned daisies
And the river, the river looking like silk, like hemp, like dirt
Rolling from the upper plains
Washing the black hull of our boat,
The one you deserted three days ago
Leaving the invisible echo of your flight,
Unsteady, tormented,
While I stared.

For sheer cleverness it would be hard to outdo Steve Bellin-Oka’s “Poem in the Manner of the Muse as Real Estate Agent”:

This new sonnet’s amortization rate is unfavorable—
by the time your closing couplet pays off, you’ll
have needed a new polyethylene heating oil tank,
two water heaters, and a full copper re-pipe job.
And the loan inspector’s report notes that even though
the shiny iambic pentameter paneling in the octave
looks solid, underneath in the sestet the wall joints
are starting to fray like the hem of a well-worn skirt.
Your volta creaks as it turns—there’s another costly repair
on the horizon. May I speak frankly? You’re not young
anymore. Down the street in your discarded draft drawer
there’s a better investment. It may look like a shithole now,
but all it needs is a stanza wall knocked out to let the light
breathe. Hardwood floors enjambed and buffed and shined.

There is a venerable tradition of sonnets about the sonnet, and Steve’s is a welcome addition. My favorite line: “Your volta creaks as it turns.”

Christine Rhein’s “Poem in the Manner of a Hotel Room” has a wonderful opening:

Green light—the door unlocks. Once
inside, you’re free to fling your baggage
anywhere. Sometimes you discover
mold, bugs, all kinds of pesky sounds,
bickering voices. Sometimes, a split
of champagne and an ocean view.
Strange comfort, the chair and desk,
paper and pen, the times you catch
yourself in the mirror. When the alarm
blares (WTH?) at 2 A.M., it’s a bad idea
to begin pacing. Mornings turn bright
with coffee, and yes, every afternoon,
your bed is made. Why not stay as long
as you can, lost in an old, grand movie …

The ellipsis at the end is telling. I predict that Christine will regard this as the first draft of something not yet complete, rife with possibilities.

I like the clipped lines and inconsistent commitment to lower-case letters in Darren Lyons’s effort to construct a poem out of materials derived from the year of his birth. Here is “1975 (to Rothko)”:

five years gone,
something reached up and bit my mom,
as if you entered the blood flow,
as you painted, as you bled. Red.
my sign is red.
watergate does not bother me,
you entered me
as i left the womb.
Dad has a scared left knee
from Kent State, student-thrown concrete,
from the day before the four.
five years gone,
the boat people flow.

Michael C. Rush took on “Frédéric Chopin—Piano Sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor, Op. 35, ‘The Funeral March’” as the springboard for strong oratory:

Damaged or damned,
we learn to prefer the hard-hearted
over the half-hearted,
to hoard the odds and ends
into which others had tried
to summon and trap,
to instantiate meaning, or love.

Truth is the smaller infinity,
all the misinterpretations
of mistranslations
of misunderstandings.
When the world spends all its time
telling us what it is, how do we
still get it so wrong?

Though I love the idea of ending a poem with a rhetorical question (e.g. “Ode to the West Wind,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” “The Second Coming”), I have reservations about Michael’s second stanza here because the break between stanzas seems to me to signal a pivot—to an “instance” implied in the last line of stanza one.

Josie Cannella’s poem dated 7/7/18, “The Garments of Love” is a sonnet in the traditional manner with a lively sustained metaphor:

Infatuation is an empty hanger.
One hangs on it a tux, a wedding dress,
Red roses, chocolates, love notes, time to linger
with sunsets, something borrowed, blue, no less.
One dresses up that hanger with desire.
It’s prettier than people, not real life,
but romance. Like a Christmas tree all wired
with wishes, waning with first signs of grief.
True love is not a hanger, but the suit
that suits one’s lover best, despite its flaws.
One loves the stains, the snugness, for it’s cute.
Each fault recalls a time and gives one pause,
reminds us of our own weak, ugly moments
our lovers love us through without much comment.

Though the imagery is a bit too rich for my blood, deliberately “prettier” and more poetical than it needs to be, I admire the splendid opening line, the play on “suits,” and the rhyme scheme, “hanger” and “linger” in particular.

---

The challenge for next week: to sum up a novel, movie, book, or play in a 26-word abecedarius. Usually an abecedarius consists of 26 lines, the first beginning with “a,” the second with “b,” and so forth. I am proposing something more radical because foreshortened. But as it is often easier to illustrate than to explain a poetic strategy, I’ll just offer my poem “Antigone” as an example:

Against brutal Creon,
doll establishes
fugitive greatness.
His internal
justice, knowledge
law mean nothing,
only piety.
Questing revenge,
she triumphs,
uttering virginal
wounds extravagant,
yearning’s zenith.

I managed to summarize Anna Karenina in two 26-word stanzas in a poem entitled “Anna K,” which you’ll find in my book When a Woman Loves a Man (and I’m pretty sure I included it in the volume of New and Selected Poems that came out in 2013).

Deadline: Saturday, July 21, 2018, midnight any time zone.

https://theamericanscholar.org/the-alphabet-as-hero/

"Lucky You" (a collaborative ode to Woody Allen, with a Harry James soundtrack)

On August 9, 2016, for the “Next Line, Feature” that The American Scholar posts on its website, we were directed to write couplets that would extend and complete an ode to Woody Allen begun a month earlier. I chose couplets from three poets and added one of my own. Here are the couplets I selected:

Paul Michelsen

“You would’ve checked out, too, but you remembered this:
Strict Freudians charge you for the sessions you miss.”

Angela Ball

A cloud wears your mother’s face. She says, “Get a man”
“Or woman if you’d rather.” Something sweet and lowdown

Calls to you, suggests you borrow mighty Aphrodite’s
Magic, ask a stranger, “What’s new, Pussycat,” take a chance on life.

Charise Hoge

Ask Hannah and her sisters:
how hers is hers, she is his, and he is hers?

Magic of attraction has no trickery;
blame it on the moonlight, or heart’s thievery,

David Lehman

Or the marvelous piano soundtrack: Rodgers & Hart’s “Manhattan”
In Café Society, the men in tuxes, the ladies in red satin.

So here we are, a twenty-line poem, written collaboratively by six of us:

Lucky You

Watching The Purple Rose of Cairo on the Independent Film Channel,
You’re freed from all that’s tawdry, dull, and real by using your control panel.

You nosh on a slab of good-for-you chocolate, a victory for Woody,
And pour a snifter full of cognac, wearing your ex’s old hoodie.

Five foot five and vegetarian, like Woody, movies your lingua franca,
You covet the ivory dinner jacket Bogey wore in Casablanca.

Ask the clarinetist at the Carlyle: What is irony?
Is it success at running but failure to take the money?

Ask Hannah and her sisters:
how hers is hers, she is his, and he is hers?

You would’ve checked out, too, but you remembered this:
Strict Freudians charge you for the sessions you miss.

A cloud wears your mother’s face. She says, “Get a man”
“Or woman if you’d rather.” Something sweet and lowdown

Calls to you, suggests you borrow mighty Aphrodite’s
Magic, ask a stranger, “What’s new, Pussycat,” take a chance on life.

Magic of attraction has no trickery;
blame it on the moonlight, or heart’s thievery,

Or the marvelous piano soundtrack: Rodgers & Hart’s “Manhattan”
In Café Society, the men in tuxes, the ladies in red satin

Paul Michelsen provided the title and line one. Millicent Caliban wrote line two. The second stanza is half Angela Ball and half Christine Rhein. Angela wrote stanza three; I wrote stanza four.  

https://theamericanscholar.org/a-snifter-and-a-hoodie/#.XqNeIv9KiM8
https://theamericanscholar.org/play-it-sam/#
https://theamericanscholar.org/ode-to-woody-allen/#

 

"Next Line, Please": Five Glorious Years [by David Lehman]

          In September 2019, my tenure as editor and quizmaster of “Next Line, Please,” the weekly challenges that The American Scholar introduced on its website in May 2014, came to an end. Two years ago, Cornell University Press published a selection of the first two and a half years of the project under the title Next Line, Please: Prompts to Inspire Poets and Writers. Proud as we are of that book, many NLP regulars, myself included, believe that much of our best work was done in 2017 and 2018.

          In the five years of our existence we wrote a sonnet line by line, and a sestina stanza by stanza; seasonal haiku that we expanded into tanka; and limericks, acrostics, centos, improvisations, impromptus, addresses, epistles, rejoinders, and prologues. We built poems out of anagrams, synonyms and antonyms, and games of what Nabokov called “word golf,” in which, instead of rhyme, the end word of each line is the end word of the previous line with one letter altered, e.g., “When you're shooting well, you're unconscious, you're sick. / No thoughts distract you, your touch is as the silk / of your rich sister's scarf. Now don't sulk.” [A subset might be called poetic alchemy, in which you can go from lead to gold in six lines (lead, leaf, loaf, load, goad, gold) but you might have more fun spinning it out to sonnet length (lead, leaf, loaf, loan, load, road, read, rend, send, mend, mind, mild, mold, gold).]

We completed poem fragments by Emily Dickinson, such as her poem no. # 1639:

          A Letter is a joy of Earth –
          It is denied the Gods –

Some of our poems were triggered by aphorisms or messages like Napoleon’s memo to Josephine, “Home in three days. Don’t bathe,” or Anna Kamienska’s notebook entry, “Sleep is what I’ll miss most when I die.” We translated a poem from a language none of us knew, without resort to a dictionary or an existing translation, and we composed poems with titles borrowed from the names of chess openings (e.g., “Queen’s Gambit Declined”). One week our assignment was to write a poem entitled “The Minister of Loneliness” – a title Wallace Stevens may have liked – prompted by the news that in January 2018 a member of parliament named Tracey Crouch was appointed to the position of Britain’s “Minister of Loneliness.” We also wrote two-line poems, poems entitled “The One Thing That Can Save America” (a John Ashbery title), poems beginning with the first line of Coleridge’s “This Lime Tree Bower My Prison,” and poems ending with the last line of Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” We rewrote lines from Milton’s “Lycidas,” refreshed clichés, issued fake apologies, composed false confessions, concealed secrets while telling them, collaborated with one another, and ended poems with questions in the manner of Shelley and Yeats. Did we ever write brief critical essays that had to conclude with a quote from Hamlet, or was that something I meant to do?

Angela Ball has, I believe, formed a coherent manuscript of poems out of her consistently imaginative responses to prompts. Other NLP all-stars also show up in literary magazines. I sometimes wonder what certain pseudonymous players are up to, since it is entirely possible that our Millicent Caliban existed only in our space and is now writing under some other bewitching sobriquet. I miss the sophisticated handling of exigent forms (and bemoan the absence of such poems from many journals that will not allow the whimsy of the weekend to spoil the solemnity of a Sunday church morning). The great thing about a constrictive form is that it is not a hindrance to the imagination but a stimulant.  Here's what Christine Rhein did with the twenty-six-word abecedarius on December 12, 2017:

Alphabetical Order

Assertion by committee: 
double-dare ethos. 
Fibbed goodwill, 
handshakes. Insider 
justice. Know-how
laughter. Mere near 
onus, pious quid-pro-
quo-ing. Redeployed
stereotypes—taxing
underdogs. Votes 
warped, x’d, yea-yea-
yea’d. Zoopathology. 

.Zoopathology, yea-
yea-yea’d. X’d warped 
votes. Underdogs 
taxing stereotypes. 
Redeployed quid-pro-
quo-ing. Pious onus 
near. Mere laughter—
know-how justice insider 
handshakes. Goodwill 
fibbed ethos. Double-
dare committee
by assertion.            

On June 11, 2019, I invented a form I called the “Impromptu,”which I defined as “a nine-line stanza that can serve as the prologue to something else that either has or has not yet been written.” The stanza should have “the feel or tone of an improvisation” with a “unifying formal element.” For “Preparing to Blow Out the Candles,” the pseudonymous Herbert McDunnough took “The new year’s walk, restoring” for his epigraph, which he attributed to T. S. Eliot:

The look back has not gained us fruit. The
First time’s no more sweet than the second
Tragedy’s glad to share what belongs to tragedy
To blind young eyes with what it forever sees
Not holding back, not limiting itself to buy one
Get one free. It keeps coming, one keeps getting
One’s caught again in traps of why, in lust of what
Own and other’s ends mixed up. My one
Wish—unwise?—to not want what the other wants.

The wonderful thing about the writing here is that you can read the poem in a state of puzzled wonderment and then go back and notice that it is a double acrostic spelling out “The first tragedy’s to not get one’s own wish” and “The second tragedy sees one getting what one wants.” Reading it a third time I spotted the concealed acrostic running diagonally down the page: “The time’s glad eyes limiting one in lust. One wants.”

To the editors of The American Scholar go my thanks and my admiration. They were willing to take a chance on poetry --  willing to bet that once and future students of the liberal arts would rise to the occasion of such challenges as get a poet's juices flowing. To everyone involved in “Next Line, Please,” these words are dedicated with an appreciation of what we managed to achieve: not only poems of wit, ingenuity, and excellence, but a forum blessedly free of snark, smirk, and insult, where people could exchange enthusiasms, suggestions, and opinions while adhering to an ideal of civility and respect that, in our academic and intellectual institutions, is too often honored more in the breach than in the observance.

Next Line, Please: Get Hurt—or Go Back to Work [by Virginia Valenzuela]

This week we wrote poems culminating in one of following lines:

“No one was supposed to get hurt.”

“And then he [or she/ I] went back to work as if nothing had happened.”

The first line is a household phrase from crime dramas; the second was taken from Franz Kafka as a familiar sentence “from any number of old stories—though it might not have appeared in any of them.” 

Michael C. Rush chose the first of these to conclude his poem “In the Beginning”:

Everyone was supposed to die.
There was a plan.
Some people were going to propagate.
Some were intended to languish.
But there was deviation from the plan.
People stole focus from the gestalt.
Shouting “Look at me!”
they looked at themselves.
Screaming “Watch this!”
they did this and that.
The plan was abandoned.
The plan was rejected.
The gnostic became toxic.
People exceeded their purview.
People superseded their program.
Or believed they did.
Crying “We have usurped our destiny!”
they thought they had.
Postulating suffering as the coin
with which fate could be bought,
they spent themselves
to acquire a rougher path
to the eternal poverty.
O, unhappy knaves!
Everyone was meant to die.
No one was supposed to get hurt.

Not a bad way of twisting our expectations for a well-deserved "ohhh!" at the end.

In “You Just Went Back to Work,” Elizabeth Solsburg makes use of both lines in a narrative about a patient in a psych ward who had hoped for a spousal rescue, but... :

When they told you I had to stay
in the psych ward, I thought you’d rescue me,
and take me away somewhere safe;
I counted on you to stand up and say
I was not a danger to myself
or anyone—that this was just my way
of getting you to pay attention to me,
to shift your focus back to my life, away
from all the petty miscellany that eats your time,
that you shouldn’t be bothered with anyway.
You were supposed to tell them I’d go home with you,
that you would make sure I was OK,
you should have told them it was all a big mistake—
that no one was supposed to get hurt, especially me,
but instead you left me here and went away,
drove back to work like nothing had happened,
like it was any other day

Pamela Joyce S’s “The Cleaving” reflects the power of punctuation which can drastically alter the meaning of a sentence:

Given the years of feigned happiness
before deceit and calamity,
he asked, can there be equanimity—
a mutual parting of ways—
cerebral, free of regret and
fester? He turned the knife to test her
as she struggled for an answer.

No. One was supposed to get hurt.

Angela Ball offers up a prose poem, “The Golden Age of Piracy”:

I hadn’t meant to deceive my colleagues, at least not at first, when I said I was spending the weekend with my friend, not adding that the friend was a fourteen-year-old Labrapointer.

When I left the house, Grace O’Malley climbed to the second floor to gaze down from her window seat, chin resting on the sill, gaze following my gray sedan as it pulled onto the street.

Entering the restroom at work, I heard a conversation between stalls. “Don’t mention it to ____. They might want to come along.” I turned and left. Probably they were going to a bar, the kind where people “hooked up,” a thing inciting terror, not interest. What did interest me was the secret of how people talked to each other, always knowing what to say. What did was pirates and their strict rules. Perhaps their lore held, like buried treasure, the secret of human behavior. I knew not to expect answers for why the grayness of Grace O’Malley’s muzzle was expanding, and the skin inside her lower lip, once black, had turned a jagged pink. The bathroom conversation went on. “Is she ‘on the spectrum’? —I don’t know, but that would explain a lot.” As Hugh Rawson says in his pirate’s dictionary,

1. The meanings of words change considerably, according to who says them, to whom, and in what circumstances.

2. The meanings of words change over time.

3. The way a word is spoken or said also is important in determining its meaning.

4. The power of a word as well as its meaning depends greatly on the setting in which it is used.

If I were on a “spectrum,” I would not be red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, or violet. I would be a Jolly Roger, saying My Prisoners Will Survive. I am an observer. This made me good at writing report after report defending our unit’s utility to the institution, good at studying pirates, and good at taking care of my dog.

One day when I had taken Grace O’Malley to the clinic, Brandy called with the dreadful report. “Come around five,” she said. “We’ll light a candle.” Blackbeard drank rum laced with gunpowder. Where to find some? I knew that my setting and circumstances were about to change.

I flung open my door, shouted into the hall, “After today I’m leaving. Let the pirates come and fire our cannon.”

Then I went back to work as though nothing had happened.

Visit the American Scholar's page to read the entire post, and tune in next week for a new prompt!

Next Line, Please: Starting with the End [by Virginia Valenzuela]

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. 

Next Line, Please: Patricians, Peasants, and the Marriage Equation [by Virginia Valenzuela]

Two weeks ago, Ringmaster Lehman provided us with an extraordinarily fruitful prompt concerning the power dynamics inherent in romantic love. Inspired by John Updike’s Couples, NLP writers were tasked with responding to the claim that “Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant.” Is it true?

Donald LaBranche’s “Treatise from a Seaside Town” may win the popularity prize based on the amount of likes it received from other regulars. Though the poem does not mention Updike’s line, its relation is quite clear.

“Let reality return to our speech.” ––Czeslaw Milosz

What I had come to the ocean to learn
is not what the ocean chose to teach.

As when, up on the boardwalk, with first light
at its most lucid, a young Sister of St. Francis,
shimmering with vocation
shares coffee and a seaward facing bench

with an elegant woman in a bright red hijab.
They seem to me to be aristocrats of secrets.
The sun travels higher and shadows rise and recede

like tidal surf. Their heads are close in
as they attend to each other’s words.
They sip coffee and consider. Voices
of children, seagulls, and barkers are lost to me.

It goes on like this for some time, in recurring
rounds of speech and silence, of hand gestures
in the air as if they seek to maintain a balance
against these waters no one else can see.

Pamela Joyce S’s “Horse and Carriage,” which the author tells us she dashed off as a “quick take in a busy week using the words in the aphorism,” offers a more abstract rendering of Updike's line:

Marriage is a peasant.
It tends itself and survives.

But love, an aristocrat,
consists of every art.

Together—sustenance—
that masterpiece of heart

Timothy Sandefur offers his “Pasiphaë on the Simple Life,” which he calls a “a pseudo-sonnenizio”:

“Come live with me and be my love,” he said.
I didn’t know by “live” he meant abide.
Survive. Exist. For surely it’s not living
to be denied what makes you feel alive—
Aea with its lively salons, art,
music, lights. Here there’s only olive
trees and goats and work the live-long day,
and maids who drive you livid with their tales
of insipid romances of lives
past. I’ve told Minos the Simple I’ve
got to have more, but he lives—
despite his gold and silver and liveried
slaves—an unenlivened life. Dull.
Undelivered. Dead-alive. Unfull.

Timothy adds that a “true sonnenizio would take a line from a sonnet, and I’ve fudged a little by using a line from Marlowe’s famous ballad.” A sonnenizio is a form invented by Kim Addonizio, a superb poet whose work has appeared The Best American Poetry and The Best American Erotic Poems. Kim invented the form by taking the opening line of Michael Drayton’s most famous sonnet, “Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part,” and repeating one word from the line in 13 subsequent lines.

“A Common Enemy,” Millicent Caliban’s title, immediately catches the eye. Can the marriage of true or untrue minds resemble the diplomatic endeavors of nations acting on the idea that the enemy of my enemy is my friend? Here is Millicent’s poem:

To be a couple is a kind of play.
Each spouse performs a part with assigned role
although the script demands improvisation.
Together actors must work out the plot,
each one attuned to read the other’s cues.
The one who takes the lead to rule the roost
provokes a partner who is there to serve,
though not without resentment underneath.
The one who is allowed to rant and rave
forces calm and reason on the other
unless that one insists on going crazy.
Which one can play the fool or lunatic?
Ideally each of us yearns to be free
while also in control: there are constraints.
The cost of being two is to obey
the passions and the lust of someone else.
The benefit is being not alone
when facing the indignities of time.

Unsatisfied with her attempts to write a poem based on the Updike quote, Josie Cannella wrote that the assignment “was tough for me,” because “I’m what one might call ‘between marriages’ very literally, as I am divorcing a woman and soon marrying a man.” As soon as David read that sentence, he wrote, “That’s a first line for you!” And Josie responded with an extremely successful “Epithalamion after Separation”—an oxymoronic title:

Divorcing a woman and marrying a man,
I’m undoing the undoing that was my undoing.
For twenty-five years, I played the peasant to
her false fiefdom.
Supremely subjugated,
my ambitions abbreviated
and my creativity confiscated
by conversations unelevated,
I was deliberately devastated.
Now the life for which I’ve waited
a lifetime or two is celebrated.
Amen!

In response to Mr. Lehman's recent article, “How to be a Big-League Critic” for The American Scholar, Patricia Smith submitted “A Lofty Verse Essay on the Role of Partners in a Marriage,” noting that she “could not have written this without your professional hints,” 

According to John Updike
“Every marriage tends to consist
of an aristocrat and a peasant.”
Today’s iconic couples no longer
consist necessarily of a male and a female
traditionally the aristocrat and peasant
respectively
according to the expensive research
of noted Professor O. B. Livious [et al.]
who have concluded that roles
change regardless of and in spite of the players.

If my eidetic memory serves me correctly,
that may or may not be true
as some of the renowned Professor’s [et al.]
research lacked authenticity
and may have been incorrectly
interpreted so you may go ahead
and conclude what you will.

“The Peasant Revolt,” Elizabeth Solsburg’s clever sonnet, reverses the usual order of stanzas to excellent effect. The two three-line stanzas precede two four-line stanzas, as if the structure of the poem could reinforce its argument:

Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. —John Updike

Is it true that every marriage is a miniature fiefdom?
One aristocrat, monarch, benevolent despot
and one peasant to do all the heavy lifting.

The aristocrat knows how the kingdom
works, how its currency is love frugally spent—
the power goes to the one who is hoarding.

The peasant is the one who talked first about love,
revealed a weakness the monarch exploits.
So only the peasant tills in the field,
only the peasant cares for the soil.

But one day the kingdom becomes the trope
of a heavy burden pressed too hard,
leading to the cliched peasant revolt—
and the whole damn fiefdom falls apart.

There's a lot more to say on the topic of love and marriage, and plenty more poems to read. Visit the American Scholar's page here and here to read all of the poems, mini-essays, and dialogues on the topic.

Next Line, Please: Impromptu [by Virginia Valenzuela]

Three cheers for David, a man who not only celebrates his birthday today, but who doesn't use his birthday as an excuse to not do any work. We're happy to celebrate with you by writing and sharing our poems! Here is his prompt, introduced by a sonnet promised to us two weeks ago. Perhaps you regulars will recognize the hook:

Impromptu (on His Birthday)

On this June day I was born and I’m glad
I get to post a new prompt, but first must
Pause to say how much I like to write
Lines like lines one, two, four, six, eight, and nine
Of the impromptu poem this is, since
Each of these lines has just ten words, no more,
Like the first line of one of Frost’s great poems,
And then to catch up I must share the piece
I vowed to share last week, and here it is:

Sonnet

If history has taught us anything it’s that
Anyone can be bought, anyone can be sold,
Anyone can be called, anyone can be killed.
For every angry minute you lose
sixty seconds of happiness. Ceaseless
as the cricket, all night till dawn flow her tears.
You can’t think well unless you’ve dined well.
You can’t keep a secret unless you hide it from yourself.
You can bray all night before you shake down the stars.
Nevertheless there is pleasure in the pathless woods.
Love, built of beauty, dies when beauty dies.
There are two tragedies in life,
And whatever they are, you will endure them,
Like a heart that breaks but continues to live.

If you can tell that some of the lines of David's sonnet are stolen, you’re right, and David's defense is T. S. Eliot’s: “Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal." 

But for this week's prompt, we will focus less on borrowed (or stolen) lines and more on the “impromptu,” which David defines as a nine-line stanza that can serve as the prologue to something else—ideally, something that has not yet been written. Your stanza should have the feel or tone of an improvisation, and a unifying formal element such as the pointed use of one-syllable words, rhymes, anagrams, or acrostic patterns. Who knows, maybe we will have created a new form when the results are in.

Extra credit if you can guess which of “Frost’s great poems” begins with 10 monosyllables to great effect, and what’s so great about it.

Deadline: Saturday, June 15, midnight any time zone. Visit the American Scholar's page to enter your candidate!

Next Line, Please: A Sonnet Is Ample Space [by Virginia Valenzuela]

Last week’s prompt was to begin a poem directly quoting or with a variant of a sentence spoken by Michael Corleone in The Godfather II: “If history can teach us anything …” and over 150 poems poured in, telling us exactly what we've learned over time. Here are some of the week’s highlights.

Emily Winakur starts us of with “Cross-Discipline”:

If history can teach us anything,
it’s that a sonnet is ample space for
the creation of a planet. Already,
line four, atoms are spinning dizzily,
like toddlers hyped up on birthday cake.
By line six, the dinosaurs have marched,
leaving giant footprints in riverbeds.
Line eight, the earth is cooling down—
wait, it’s heating up again. Enter man-
kind, or at least our rodent forebears.
Of course we cause the turn of the earth,
the turn of everything: we invented
wheels. A star goes dark in Cassiopeia.
Did I say creation? I meant the opposite.

I absolutely love the way the poem references its structure, the way it takes us from prehistoric times to the present, reminding us that we are all, in some ways, obsessed with creation and destruction.

Millicent Caliban summarizes some unpleasant historical truths that we tend to overlook when romanticizing past eras. David wisely turns our attention to the turn after line eight, "a textbook example of using the logic of a sonnet to advance a double argument":

If history has taught us anything,
it is that life was dirty, cold and dark.
Diseases raged unchecked and danger lurked.
To travel far was risky, without comfort.
To be a woman meant a narrow scope—
a self-determined life was scarce a dream.
Hierarchies were strict and unrelenting;
your gender, race or tribe determined all.
Yet people put more trust in simple faith;
believed that God had so ordained their lot.
Some strove to conquer ignorance with learning
and, when they could, indulged in acts of love.
They understood the sacredness of Nature
and did not waste her bounty in their rage.

This one takes us back to nature (or rather a Dickinsonian 'Nature'), which is both the worst place to be (dirty, cold, and dark) and the best place to be (the sacredness of her bounty). Very cool.

Randall Brett’s “Student Debt” juxtaposes memories of train rides in boyhood to events in South Africa, and dazzles us with its painfully relatable last lines. 

If history can teach us anything,
if the djinn of memory riding beside me
on the Regional from New York to Providence
is roused angrily from its nap
by the calling out of place names:
Saybrook, Old Lyme, New London, Westerly

What pass for the colonies of your childhood—
while you text me from LA about the First and Second
Boer Wars, the Voortrekkers, the Battle of Blood
River, the map marked “all dead,”
your studies from the spellbook of time—

How you are happy in every past,
but ours.

I'll admit to having personal motives for loving this idea of people being thoughtful and understanding with the history of everything except for their relationship to you, but even so, the journey is objectively lovely.

“Intercourse” is the eye-catching title of Josie Cannella’s passionately earnest poem:

If history has taught us anything
perhaps it’s that we need to talk things out.
Some diplomatic negotiating
mends rips in social fabric, sans a doubt.
Whether a border has been wrongly crossed
or toes have accident’ly been stepped on,
without a conversation, all is lost
and hope for peaceful resolutions, gone.

Some suffer rips and wrinkles. They don’t care
to grapple with the ugly likelihood
that those who’ve wronged them simply do not share
their moral obligation to make good.
Disquieted, they quiet down their pain,
let anger gall, and plan revenge to gain.

Always relevant given the mode of political and social discourse going on today, I love the double meanings behind phrases like borders "wrongly crossed" and toes "accidentally stepped on."

And Eric Fretz wins the brevity award for his two-stanza poem:

If history can teach us anything
It’s that we never know what’s coming next.

Sometimes decades pass and nothing happens
And sometimes ages are transformed in weeks.

Which I love because this can be applied to life, career, romance, and yes, the movements of the world.

If you're still hungry for some wonderful poems and interesting conversation, visit the American Scholar's page to read the full post!

Next Line, Please: "If history can teach us anything..." [by Virginia Valenzuela]

This week's prompt on Next Line, Please is inspired by that rare gem, the delivery of a great line.

In The Godfather: Part II, when you hear Michael Corleone tell Tom Hagen, “If anything in this life is certain, if history has taught us anything, it is that you can kill anyone,” it makes such an impression that a fragment of the line tends to survive in widely different contexts.

The part of the line that really endures is “If history can teach us anything,” and Rhymester Lehman thought it an excellent opening line for a poem. Two stanzas, 14 lines or less, with a break between stanzas.

Visit the American Scholar's page to enter your candidate and to read more! Deadline: Saturday, June 1, midnight any time zone.

Next Line, Please: A Letter is a Joy of the Earth [by Virginia Valenzuela]

There are a number of poems that were considered by their authors be unfinished, even fragmented, including Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and some of Emily Dickinson’s mysterious two-liners. For this week we considered Dickinson's poem #1639, using it as our first two lines in a poem of our own creation:

A Letter is a joy of Earth—
It is denied the Gods—

Of course it is almost impossible to beat Dickinson at her own game, but what can we say? A poet's gotta try.

It may be Angela Ball who comes closest to imitating Dickinson’s characteristic aesthetic, two stanzas, eight lines, slanted rhymes, and lots of em dashes:

A letter is a joy of earth—
It is denied the Gods—
Its script sails slotted—
Dimly in its berth—

Its sovereign words purse—
Tightly—all the while—
Till appointed hands unfurl—
And deliverance—arrive—

Emily Winakur’s staccato rhythms and cascading thoughts mirror humankind's struggle to make sense of it all: life, death, the world, the gods:

A Letter is a joy of Earth—
it is denied the Gods—
Singing stories—Death or Mirth—
announcing—like a Fraud—

that Thing you did. Was it so Great—
if no one knew but for
those Gods hushed and hovering—late—
round heaven’s hearth—Voyeurs

of deeds and sins. To have to Pause—
unknowing—to hold paper
up to Sun—and wonder at the Flaws
and Flights that will appear—

as soon as paper splits and tears
by taper’s candlelight.
Anticipation mixed with fear—
“Madame,” it says, “I write—”

Charise Hoge’s “Mollusk and Mail” completes Emily’s fragment "as Marianne Moore might have done," David says, "with the celebration of a lowly creature," one that is extremely close to my heart, the snail:

A Letter is a joy of Earth––
It is denied the Gods––
Though Godspeed may prevail
––when it is deemed a snail.

Admire then the Snail––
A coiled envelope that seals
the softness of a living thing
––discerned in words––arriving.

Beth Dufford “cheated and used two of Emily’s mysterious couplets to bookend my meager whimperings in between,” and to great effect:

A Letter is a joy of Earth—
It is denied the Gods—
Like warmth before a shadow’s Birth
Eludes the sheltering frog—

Let me use this Day, let it not slip—
Let me imprison it in a locket—
Let me not thirst with this Hock at my lip
Nor beg, with domains in my pocket.

Visit the American Scholar's page to read the full post, with more mysterious lines and couplets and scholarly commentary from the master of poetry, David Lehman. And tune in next week for a new prompt!

Next Line, Please: Questions and Echoes [by Virginia Valenzuela]

Have you ever written or read a poem that started and ended with a question, and found yourself so totally enthralled, so mystified, and included? Well, for this week's installment of Next Line, Please, our contributors were tasked with that very idea, with works by Keats, Shelley, and Yeats that end with a question, and works by Goethe, Rilke, Auden, and Shakespeare that begin with one, as inspiration. Shall we dive in?

Angela Ball refers to “Ode to a Nightingale” in the title and first line of her poem, “Viewless Wings”:

Are there still “wings of poesy”? Yes. They’ve been shelved,
like a beaver top hat collapsed when not in use, whose hatter
survives in a madhouse, where he deplores the lake
for its surly, copulating swans. Stylish poets reject
metaphorical levitation, as evoked by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.,
in his sonnet, “High Flight,” where he “slips the surly bonds of earth”
in a Spitfire MK1, aided by wings from Cuthbert Hicks,
author of “The Blind Man Flies” and source of the line,
“And touched the face of God.” What are these straw-man
“bonds of earth”? Why “surly”? Can plagiarism
fly?

I'm a sucker for things like poesy and mad hatters, and copulating swans, for sure! What a powerhouse.

Michael C. Rush dazzled many of us with the questions raised by “Eleutheromania” and with the magnificence of sound in the poem’s sixth stanza:

Who holier than the disbeliever?
Even the thirstiest visits the cistern of drool.

Choose your delusion? Choosing your delusion
is just one of the delusions that chooses you.

I smell burning books, millions of them, unseen, unread,
hijinks of accusing kachinas and kinkshamers drinking the soul-ution,

instantiating confusion, a quasi-tsunami of ludonarrative dissonance,
a knucklefruit parley between the chronic ironic and the cure of the curve

as was kisses will be with the lips of is.
What we take for granted is taking things for granted.

The shock of a duck
jerked up in the jaws of a dog.

Which is more powerful, narrative or verisimilitude?
Is power determined by the ability to deceive?

David Lehman is with Stephanie Cohen, who said her favorite lines of the week were “The shock of a duck / jerked up in the jaws of a dog.” For my part, I'm pretty enthused by "drinking the solution."

In “Requiem,” Pamela Joyce S. beautifully weaves echoes of Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”: “full of sorrow,” “half in love,” “full-throated ease,” “tender” night.

What are you thinking?
To think is to be
full of sorrow and
I am full of thought.

Only half in love,
you said half joking,
the quiet breath escaping
like a death rattle.

I called you soft names
with full-throated ease
In the forlorn landscape
of tomorrow’s separate dreams.

What thoughts will please you,
Love, on this last tender night?

So much yes! 

Diana Ferraro’s “Clockwork” begins and ends with timeless questions:

What time is it?

The sorry round face, two bones as hands
The mock banner of a forbidden ship
Poison, pirate, prowess, no lighthouse warns.

The past, a sacking bag laid on the bare land
Jewels and coals shifting and clanking
A peaceful cow with a bell hails the future.

Bright stamps on lost letters, used gloves, missed calls,
Stocked sunrays heaped within a tall fire
Written papers burn on the trail of autumn leaves.

Weightless witnesses stolen by the wind
Zephyr, sirocco or gale, so many skies!
Present melts in the sigh of a lived life.

Is it time?

As always, there are many more poems and interesting conversations on poesy to read up, so head on over to the American Scholar's page for the whole post! 

Next Line, Please: A New Genre [by Virginia Valenzuela]

This week's post was inspired by our family names in a wholly new genre of poems: the trilogy. It's not quite as official as the sonnet, but its results just can't be beat.

Eric Fretz’s “Fretz Trilogy, a Cento” plays on the homophone of the author's last name to great effect:

“Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room,”
An ex-army officer turned critic frets.

Can you not hate me, as I know you? Do
Irks care the crop-full bird? Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?

In one another’s arms, birds in the trees,
While far beneath us frets the troubled purple of the sea.

Elizabeth Solsburg offers “The Elizabeth Trilogy,” a poem that pivots on the conflict between “Little Women” and “The Church,” as mediated ambiguously by “My mother.”

My mother wanted my name to be Beth—
just that: plain, simple and sweet,
like her favorite of the Little Women,
who is always obedient and perfectly meek,
a good daughter for eternity.

The Church had a different idea—
said I needed the name of a saint,
long dead, and of virtue they’d approved.
My mother, more obedient than I’d ever be,
added the syllables to fit their rule.

She called me Beth the whole of her life—
and for a while I tried to live up to the name,
but those syllables finally caught up with me:
maker of rules instead of blindly obeying,
the chosen of God, the warrior queen

The time for diminutives has long ended
I am the Elizabeth I’ve chosen to be.

Eduardo Ramos Ruiz’s “La Trilogía de Ramos,” mixes Spanish phrases to excellent effect, and could serve as a model for yet another potential genre, the bilingual poem:

(In memory of my father: Juan V. Ramos)

I was named Juan—el nombre de mi padre,
who died before my birth. It’s said
he frequented the tavern La Paloma Azul,
played the accordion and loved
un trago de vino more than his wife.

I was nicknamed “Juan without fear”
by my wife because I carry myself sin miedo.
In fact, I took the pitchfork away from the devil.
I am the undiscovered composer of corridos
who seeks no fame, only perfect end rhymes.

I named my first-born son Juan—
como su abuelo, el primero.
Juanito plays the guitar, composes, and loves
singing more than un trago de vino.
I fear he’ll find a wife, so I pray for no strife.

Emily Winakur’s vigorous use of prose poetry in “The Black-Thumb Trilogy” proves that poetry is found in the language, rather than the line breaks:

I.
Heart-shaped philodendron can survive a minor depressive episode, but not the kind where you leave Seattle for Bethlehem, PA, at the height of summer, and you cry all through the Cascades, over the Columbia River, into Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, the poor plant baking in the back seat; you’re still crying when you run out of gas in Wyoming and you can’t find a motel room within 200 miles of Sturgis, South Dakota; the only thing that stops it is the naked lady on the back of a Harley in the Badlands.

II.
A peace lily is not peaceful in the cold.
Even if you keep it on the side of the apartment away from the windows, where it will thin and drop yellow leaves, it can feel the cold in the snow you stamp off your boots, on the stacks of papers to grade that you’ve carried in from the car, in the gusts that shake the hawks who cling to the tops of bare trees.
If you take the bus to the city for a weekend, your peace lily will get lonely.

III.
Until I had a baby, I was not about to fuss around my fiddle-leaf fig, sticking my fingers into its soil to test for dryness, turning it this way and that before this window or that. But after the baby, after I had given her a bath and combed her and nuzzled her and swaddled her,
it just made sense to turn to the ficus next. To check its dish for drainage, to soak cotton balls in baby oil and clean its ear-like leaves, to talk to it, occasionally, in my baby-talk voice, asking which position it preferred, which kind of light.

Visit the American Scholar's page to read the full post, with more poems and more commentary from quiz master Lehman himself! And check back next week for a whole new prompt.

Next Line, Please: The Lehman Trilogy [by Virginia Valenzuela]

One day last week, David Lehman opened the newspaper and saw a full-page ad for a new play titled The Lehman Trilogy. 

As someone who shares the name, he has occasionally met people who assume he's a part of that famous family. "I am not," he says, "though the confusion can prove entertaining."

When your name is in the headlines or in the title of a play, you get interested. So for this week's prompt, why don’t we turn this situation into an opportunity to write? Take your name and write “The — Trilogy.” It can (but doesn’t have to) be three parts, but no part should be longer than five lines. Some novels are said to “span three generations.” Here’s your chance to do that in verse—or to do something completely different. Have fun with it, and deviate from fact as you will.

Visit the American Scholar's page to read more of David's witty backstory, and to enter your candidate! Deadline: Saturday, March 30, midnight any time zone.

Next Line, Please: Red Eyes and Blue Moons [by Virginia Valenzuela]

This week's post shows off poems that made clever use of phrases with multiple meanings, phrases such as "red eye" or "blue moon" or "working stiff" or "grass widow." As always, there were droves of impressive responses to the prompt, and much else to be admired. Shall we jump in?

Steve Bellin-Oka’s “Red Eye” won deserved praise from discerning readers:

Bright crimson smear in the sclera. Over-
flow of a miniature river’s cataracts into the ovoid pool
of black pupil, blue iris, and lens. I almost never look
at my face in a mirror: so someone asks, what
happened to your eye? What hasn’t. Violent sneeze,
burst vessels. Once I abraded the cornea when by mistake
I rubbed sand into it. Maybe I was trying to make
glass. On the all-night flight from Vancouver to Baltimore
where you lay dying, I took a window seat so I
could both see and not see, hologram of the reading light
fixed above the jet wing. In Polaroids of us at the beach
as kids, our eyes burn red as coal embers, as unchecked fever

Diana Ferraro said it best when she wrote, “I like very much the almost medical, precise descriptions that create a cold distance, then slowly build into all the meanings of red eyes until we fall into the painful abyss of the unexpected.”

Christine Rhein shares first place with “Working Stiff,” the soliloquy of a man wearing a “man bun” (gross) and “Armani suits” (very nice if you can get it):

I’m serious. Fourteen hours a day. My neck, shoulders hurting.
My laptop heating up. Like business. I own a mall, a dance club,
three coffee shops. And on paydays, we all chat—my employees
happy,
able to buy the hippest clothes, great bodies, expensive hair—the
kind
that bounces when they walk. For myself—it’s a man bun, six-pack
abs,
Armani suits—in Second Life, Kona Karl raking in the lindens, and
me
designing logos for the coffee cups, bikinis for the dancers. To top all
that—
I’m getting married soon. But hey—don’t tell my wife. She thinks I’m
just playing “some stupid game.” She’d never understand Kona Karl
needing a tuxedo, a honeymoon. Or the 55,000 lindens—260 bucks
I’ve spent on special animation, making sure that, yeah, I’ll be
working
magic on my wedding night. And on any night when my bride,
Cloudberry,
shows up, logged-in, to shake cocktails, fill the hot tub in the beach
house
she picked out for us—the mortgage, like in real life, costing me
plenty.

"Blue Moon" proved to be a very popular jumping off point for NLP contenders.

Patricia Wallace earns high marks with her poem of that title:

I like the moon, the way she hangs around
when everyone else has split, sick of my caterwauling,
my complaints, my sorry love life. Sometimes she’ll slip in
an extra appearance at the bar and shine her full attention
on our conversation. We talk about dark sides and tattoos,
joke about the gossip: the black-out nights, how secretly
she’s a man, the dog-eared rumors people spin out drunk
with daylight, wanting to be hip and clever by claiming
we’re looney. She says she gets the blues from wildfires
and volcanos. Been there. I know the feeling,
Once in a blue moon, if she’s had a few too many,
I’ll walk her to the corner, lift her to a lamppost and watch her drift
into a dawn sky. There’s that little tidal tug as she disappears.

Taking advantage of the unusual terms used to keep score in tennis (where “love” equals zero) Allen King contributes the clever and economical poem, “Love-Love”:

Watching tennis
on t.v.
she turned
and asked,
“What’s love?”
Boy did
that make
me think.

There's plenty more to see, so visit the American Scholar's page to read the full post!

Next Line, Please: Two-Word Titles [by Virginia Valenzuela]

John Ashbery once said that he liked to begin with a title, rather than end with one, when he sat down to write a poem.

Here on Next Line, Please, we are partial to two-word titles that can yield multiple meanings. For example, “Spring Break” might refer not only to college kids painting the town red in Fort Lauderdale but also to the damage that a winter storm may cause to a pristine spring of water.

Here are some potential two-word titles:

Working Stiff
House Arrest (or House Organ)
Twin Killing
Strip Steak
Food Court
Hot Corner
Blue Moon
Red Eye
Hung Jury
Grass Widow
Spring Break

Each of these phrases has a primary meaning, and in some cases a slang meaning—for example, “twin killing” is baseball shorthand for a double play. Your job is to choose a title from this list—or come up with a two-word title of your own—and write a poem that features two meanings of the chosen phrase. Extra credit if you start with one meaning and end with the other. Fourteen lines or less.

It’s not the same thing, but many years ago David wrote a poem that secretly capitalized on two possible meanings of “ERA” (“earned run average” in baseball and the proposed constitutional amendment). You can do the same with other acronyms, and maybe we’ll do that one fine week.

Visit the American Scholar's page to enter your candidate!

Next Line, Please: The Trope of a Nation [by Virginia Valenzuela]

Last week's prompt involved a game of "reverse scrabble," in which players found as many words as they could from the main word, "operation," and then used these words in a poem. Now one might read that and say, what benefit could that possibly have to the rhyme and reason of poetry? Well...

If you thought it impossible to write a poem about politics in 2019 that didn't make your stomach hurt, think again. I give you, Millicent Caliban's “Operation 1776,”

“Hamilton”—an opera with rap oration,
the art of Miranda, the trope of a nation:
to tear them away, to part from taxation.
Wanting the option to reap their reward,
the poor prone to riot, to feather and tar,
the gentry pen notes to air their pain.
In Boston, a port, the harbor is near.
Men say “nope” to the King and go for the tea.
“Do not tie us to Empire! We yearn to breathe free!”

Stephanie Cohen’s “The Operation” succeeds beautifully with its emotional complexities, its fascinating adjectives, and its impressive wordplay:

To ease me into a prone riot,
the anesthesiologist, near my ear, sang Lou Reed’s,
“Perfect Day” with a ration-
al tone dripped in toper tropes.

“You’re gonna reap just what you sew”
Roped to a table, I buoyed to a torpor
to treat my torn aorta. Its pores gulping
tons of musical notes; I became noise.

I wanted to repo the rate of nope and tar the vice
of human voice at the opera. Reduced to
the body’s notion, my ape-ness tore me open-
“I’m glad I spent it with you.”

Michael C. Rush used the prompt to create a musical mosaic in “Operation Intro.” The alliterative energy, which owes much of its existence to the nature of the prompt, is striking:

Playing air poet,
rioting into a pain rap
on an ornate iron piano
near an open air patio—
rip one, tip it, top it,
tap no poor pen to atone—
a pro, a rat, prone to opiate,
options no rite, apes no portion
ripe in art, pines into an apt ratio
in a not-rote era.

Christa Whitsett Overbeck’s “Hedonic Operation” sings a similar song but with a very different tune:

Portion, like slices of ripe pear,
the ratio of pleasures—

Rate the opiate:
a nice pinot
or porn noir—

Opine on art or opera—

Tear the fruit
to the pulp, I ate—
not unlike words
to the poet

And finally, a full-throated huzzah to Anthony Clifton, who crafted a sestina that cunningly echoes David's own “Operation Memory.” Here Anthony uses the same six end-words, one of which is a number and a variable.

"Operation Triple Bypass"

for David the Shepherd

I. Practice Practice Practice

Pain is always—always—an option. When
Will we mercifully earn time again for bed?
A piano lullaby (too much to ask?)—A hundred
Cherubs riot, humming the middle
Portion of Carmina Burana, dream of jobs
At Carnegie Hall, velvet rope, sold out shows, loaded

With diehard connoisseurs, open carry, loaded
With hope, ornate ideas, and pure joy; When
We are out to lunch, on a field trip, on to new jobs,
A zillion reasons to stay fixed with rope to the bed,
Whether young or not-so anymore, into the middle
Of middle age, or whatever one wants to call fifty.

II. Homecoming

I remember Otto was open at 8th St. & 5th
“Ave Maria” playing, ordered Pinot Noir, loaded
Patron bumped into me in the middle
Of the joint, happy drunk, a real trip. I remember when
You handed me your book, signed by poet, I rubbed
The cover, a tap for luck, as we talked about odd jobs.

I dug your rap about retiring from your current job
(I believe you did that rat race since 1996)
After a great lunch I ran off envisioning bed—
A siesta before a feast with friends (“parti” in Norwegian), loaded
With protein, bursting with flavor, plenty of Patrón. When
I got home, via train, I sighed, smiled, patted my middle.

III. New Ark

It ain’t easy to find oneself in the middle
Of this trap, or whatever you call New Jersey. Jobs
Come, go, they’re given, torn away. When
I scraped up enough cash to buy one
Ton (okay, ounce) of knockout weed, then loaded
A pair of bowls Goldilocks would’ve deemed just right, numbed

Myself, repainted my already-vivid daydreams that rubbed
Me into rapt attention, fiddled with, diddled my middle
Chakra, left me far from fulfilled, like a ripe gun unloaded
Into one’s favorite enemy (the one who stole your job?),
A rat of no consequence, maybe even just one of one’s
Least favorite friends, in the rain I wandered, wondered: When

I get wherever I’m going, after bed, post-dirt nap—when
I get to Heaven, Hell, one or the other, or land en pointe in the middle
Of Purgatory—will the poor soul’s job be to simply implode?

For more poems, players, and words straight from the horse's mouth, visit the American Scholar's page and read the full post!

Next Line, Please: Reverse Scrabble [by Virginia Valenzuela]

"Reverse Scrabble" is a prompt invented last week by our literary ring master, David Lehman. The aim is to derive as many words as possible from one given polysyllabic word and then integrate them artfully into a poem.

The word for this game of scrabble is operation.

Your job is to break down this word into its component parts—like playing Scrabble in reverse—and to compose a poem in which you use at least one such word per line.

Some short words are hefty enough to get you points (“art” for example), but four-letter words are a better bet. Extra points for words of five letters or more, like “opera” or “ration.” The poem should be between eight and 12 lines long.

So why “operation”? Head over to the American Scholar's page to find out, and to enter your candidate!
Deadline: Saturday, March 2, midnight any time zone.

Next Line, Please: This Was Glory, Too [by Virginia Valenzuela]

Five weeks ago, the members of the Next Line, Please collaborative set out to build a brand new poem, stanza by stanza, brick by brick, but lo and behold, something even more fantastic happened. We wrote the poem, and several variations, and several more inspired writers later, we come up with not one, but six full-length poems. Here they are, in all their glory:

1. Sovereign

I spent my days in an expanse of spirits,
vodka, scotch, tequila, gin—pick a poison then— [Pamela Joyce S.]
then spent, I slept; of reality dreamt;
and by mourning, could find no rest. [Koahakumele]

When night unstops its cross-boned bottle,
the dream: he killed a child by accident;
I protected him; even now, parents wait [Angela Ball]
where sat the two children we didn’t have, [David Lehman]

all grown up, as if entire chapters were skipped. [Lutz Ebersdorf]
Their wake precedes dawn. He opens his eyes. [Diana Ferraro]
The wine had turned sour, and the pickled fruit [Donald LaBranche]
smacked us awake in winter, real like medicine. [Stephanie Cohen / Katie R]

I am sovereign of the air-settled world. [Christa Overbeck]
Summer hits the swift wings of a swallow, [Diana Ferraro]
And then the blackbirds escaped, [Katie R]
succumbing in the snow to winter sleep. [Millicent Caliban]

2. The Dream

I spent my days in an expanse of spirits,
vodka, scotch, tequila, gin—pick a poison then— [Pamela Joyce S.]
then spent, I slept, of reality dreamt:
and by mourning could find no rest. [Koahakumele]

When night unstops its cross-boned bottle,
the dream: he killed a child by accident.
I protected him. Even now, parents wait [Angela Ball]
where sat the two children we didn’t have. [David Lehman]

The mother becomes her daughter,
the father leaves for work, and from
the third-floor window the young
brother watches his sister go to school. [David Lehman]

It sits on her, hatches confidence or shame—choose one—
the dog barks—an iron clunk—mail slot
admits envelope, its addressees
our starry successors. [Angela Ball]

3. No Absolution

I spent my days in an expanse of spirits,
vodka, scotch, tequila, gin—pick a poison then— [Pamela Joyce S.]
then spent, I slept; of reality dreamt;
and by mourning, could find no rest. [Koahakumele]

When, like a thieved wallet, the house emptied, [Stephanie Cohen]
I saw the blackbird-clustered face of night. [Donald LaBranche]
No absolution. Spirits, bring me absinthe, [Pamela Joyce S.]
a doleful pour not tasted before. [Charise Hoge]

Could the blackbirds play the role of ravens [Millicent Caliban]
in an empty house, in which I return the thief’s wallet
and then ingest the salt of absolution, [Donald LaBranche]
the final pinch of grass in a sandwich bag? [Stephanie Cohen]

In a blackened crown of night and crows. [Katie R.]
We watched you raving at the wind, wandering
like a street thief in search of unlocked doors, [Pamela Joyce S.]
succumbing in the snow to winter sleep. [Millicent Caliban]

4. This Was Glory, Too
I spent my days in an expanse of spirit,
gave thanks to God for enemies with bad aim, [Jay Ronson]
as snow fell into the trees and blackbirds clustered
thick as leaves on the limbs, glossy shades of night. [Patricia Wallace]

When feathered darkness lifted up her hood
about my head, I saw that this was glory, too; [Christa Overbeck]
returning birds, retreating foes, [Beth Dufford]
the ache you blame on age and episodic sleep. [Stephanie Cohen]

If I could only sleep the length of clouds
and leap the length of August days again,
the snow would melt off blackbirds’ backs and bud [Eric Fretz]
in a blackened crown of night and crows. [Katie R]

How I miss my enemies, like birds in winter! [Dan Bishop]
I spent my spirit in an expanse of days, [Shari Ayers]
then young again, for you, for one fleeting midnight, [Pamela Joyce S.]
I am sovereign of the air-settled world. [Christa Overbeck]

5. In the Temple of Her Trees

I spent my days in an expanse of spirit,
gave thanks to God for enemies with bad aim, [Jay Ronson]
as snow fell into the trees and blackbirds clustered
thick as leaves on the limbs, glossy shades of night. [Patricia Wallace]

When feathered darkness lifted up her hood [Christa Overbeck]
I worshiped in the temple of her trees. [Millicent Caliban]
Blackbirds scattered at the blast. The snow now [Pamela Joyce S.]
about my head, I saw that this was glory, too, [Christa Overbeck]

and shook with cold or fear or joy. I could not tell. [Christa Overbeck]
Come, sing to the snow something new [Donald LaBranche]
amid the shouts of others. The snow my pillow. [J. F. McCullers]
Could the blackbirds play the role of ravens? [Millicent Caliban]

Perhaps make a crown of crows? I shuddered
with the madness of episodic sleep, dreamt
the house emptied of the spirits, their mourning
and my absolution to wait the wake at dawn. [Maureen]

And finally, the sonnet that Maureen and Patricia Smith came up with:

A Thick of Blackbirds

I spent my days in an expanse of spirits,
with each cross-boned bottle, dreamt
reality quenched: two children killed—
I ached in feathered darkness.

God, no thanks I gave for episodic sleep,
when hood of night, that temple, lifted
and I, mind weak, saw what I worshipped
rent—not once but twice

as blasts un-wrung from limbs of trees
in snow a thick of blackbirds, mourning
all I too well know.

Not age, not episodic sleep—
remembrance of the two shall linger
eternal in that expanse of spirits.

Visit the American Scholar's page to read the full post, and check in next Tuesday for a whole new prompt!

Next Line, Please: Stanzaic Choreography [by Virginia Valenzuela]

"Stanzaic Choreography," a phrase coined by the witty Angela Ball, has been favorably chosen to describe the dance of words and ideas going on every week on the Next Line, Please column. And especially now, as we have not one, but five collaborative poems in progress. Each has three stanzas, missing only a final word.

For the poem designated as A1, we have lines submitted by Lutz Ebersdorf, Diana Ferraro, Donald LaBranche, Stephanie Cohen, and Katie R. A poem now with nine authors:

I spent my days in an expanse of spirits,
vodka, scotch, tequila, gin—pick a poison then— [Pamela Joyce]
then spent, I slept; of reality dreamt;
and by mourning, could find no rest. [Koahakumele]

When night unstops its cross-boned bottle,
the dream: he killed a child by accident;
I protected him; even now, parents wait [Angela Ball]
where sat the two children we didn’t have, [David Lehman]

all grown up, as if entire chapters were skipped. [Lutz Ebersdorf]
Their wake precedes dawn. He opens his eyes. [Diana Ferraro]
The wine had turned sour, and the pickled fruit [Donald LaBranche]
smacked us awake in winter, real like medicine. [Stephanie Cohen / Katie R]

Charise Hoge proposed “The Wrong Side of the Bed” as a tentative title.

For the third stanza of A2, let's start out with a line from Millicent Caliban:

I spend my days in an expanse of spirits,
vodka, scotch, tequila, gin—pick a poison then— [Pamela Joyce]
then spent, I slept; of reality dreamt;
and by mourning, could find no rest. [Koahakumele]

When, like a thieved wallet, the house emptied, [Stephanie Cohen]
we saw the blackbird-clustered face of night. [Donald LaBranche]
No absolution. Spirits, bring me absinthe, [Pamela Joyce]
a doleful pour not tasted before. [Charise Hoge]

Could the blackbirds play the role of ravens [Millicent Caliban]
in an empty house, in which I return the thief’s wallet
and then ingest the salt of absolution, [Donald LaBranche]
the final pinch of grass in a sandwich bag? [Stephanie Cohen]

And a nod to Stephanie’s working title: “Bender.”

Eric Fretz offers three-quarters of the third stanza of B1; with two lines compressed from Katie R to bring the pirouette to a soft landing:

I spent my days in an expanse of spirit,
gave thanks to God for enemies with bad aim, [Jay Ronson]
as snow fell into the trees and blackbirds clustered
thick as leaves on the limbs, glossy shades of night. [Patricia Wallace]

When feathered darkness lifted up her hood
about my head, I saw that this was glory, too; [Christa Overbeck]
returning birds, retreating foes, [Beth Dufour]
the ache you blame on age and episodic sleep. [Stephanie Cohen]

If I could only sleep the length of clouds
and leap the length of August days again,
the snow would melt off blackbirds’ backs and bud [Eric Fretz]
in a blackened crown of night and crows. [Katie R]

Eric’s nominee for the poem’s title is “This Was Glory, Too.”

J. F. “Jeff” McCullers joins in on poem B2:

I spent my days in an expanse of spirit,
gave thanks to God for enemies with bad aim, [Jay Ronson]
as snow fell into the trees and blackbirds clustered
thick as leaves on the limbs, glossy shades of night. [Patricia Wallace]

When feathered darkness lifted up her hood [Christa Overbeck]
I worshiped in the temple of her trees. [Millicent Caliban]
Blackbirds scattered at the blast. The snow now [Pamela Joyce S.]
about my head, I saw that this was glory, too, [Christa Overbeck]

and shook with cold or fear or joy. I could not tell. [Christa Overbeck]
Come, sing to the snow something new [Donald LaBranche]
amid the shouts of others. The snow my pillow. [J. F. McCullers]
Could the blackbirds play the role of ravens? [Millicent Caliban]

Two possible titles for B2 are “Divine Guides” (Clay Sparkman) and “Gloria” (Josie Cannella). A simple “Blackbirds” (David Lehman) might also work.

The fifth poem to come forth was submitted by Maureen, who took what we had and did her own choreography with it:

I spent my days in an expanse of spirits,
with each cross-boned bottle, dreamt
reality quenched: two children killed—
I ached in feathered darkness.

God, no thanks I gave for episodic sleep,
when hood of night, that temple, lifted
and I, mind weak, saw what I worshipped
rent—not once but twice

as blasts un-wrung from limbs of trees
in snow a thick of blackbirds, mourning
all I too well know.

So now what we need is a final stanza—or rather, five. For A1, A2, B1, and B2 that means a quatrain; for Maureen’s submission, a three-line stanza would complete the sonnet. Good luck!

Visit the American Scholar's page to enter your candidate!