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Next Line, Please

New directions or nude erections: the new "Next Line, Please" challenge

“The Jester’s Magma”

By David Lehman May 19, 2025

Our new prompt:

<<< Errors, mistakes, and slips of the tongue and pen are, as Freud taught us, neither innocent nor devoid of meaning. Misunderstandings are inevitable, and in a sense—as Emily Winakur and Paul Michelsen suggested in a “Next Line, Please” entry back in 2017—it could be argued that metaphor itself is a sort of beautiful mistake that, for example, gives “rosy fingers” to the dawn. Sometimes one can get the momentum going for a poem just by changing a couple of words in a well-known phrase. Aping Polonius, one day, I found myself changing a few letters and transforming his classic line into “Neither a follower nor a leader be.” And how often have I typed “sue” when I mean to say “use”? You could even write “Ode to the West Wing,” leaving it unclear whether you mean Shelley’s magnificent ode or the TV show with Martin Sheen.

Thus, 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. Deadline: Ten days after this column is posted. Note: We hope soon to publish our NLP posts on a bi-weekly basis. Stay tuned!  >>>

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Radio

I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark


from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman

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