MONDAY PROMPT/June 7
This week’s prompt
Emotion is in our poetry – on some level, be it evocative or exploratory, empathetic or explosive.
This week’s prompt is about anger. Maybe something or someone has pissed you off recently – someone you know or someone you don’t. Maybe it’s personal; maybe it’s philosophical. Maybe something in the Gulf of Mexico has you seething and frustrated. Maybe there are old hurts that still sting.
We want to explore that anger this week, but we want to do it in a controlled way. We want to focus our anger. While using emotion in our work can be fantastic, sometimes our poems can become overwrought unless we handle heat deftly. Sometimes the poem is more rant than revelation, or a lecture instead of a lesson or metaphor. Although that may be satisfying on a cathartic level, we might not get as much out of our poem as we could have had we focused that emotion and used it like a tool.
I read Bill Moyer’s Fooling with Words recently. His interview with Shirley Geok-Lin Lim was striking. Lim said she used the strictest form structure she could think of to “control her anger,” in this case anger directed at the Chinese one-child policy that resulted in female infanticide. Out of her focused anger she wrote “Pantoun for Chinese Women.”
This week why don’t you try doing what Lim did? Use repetition, in the form of a pantoum, to focus your anger in the unique voice of poetry.
Pantoums aren’t as scary as one might think. You don’t have to rhyme or use meter (although poets did when the form was first created). The modern pantoum is a poem of any length, composed of four-line stanzas in which the second and fourth lines of each stanza serve as the first and third lines of the next stanza. The last line of a pantoum is often the same as the first.
Read Lim’s poem as an example, or look through the many samples linked at About.com. The Poetry Foundation has a couple of pantoums as does Read Write Poem. Spend a little time thinking about the form – and your anger – and see where it takes you.
The resultant poem does not be polished. Think of it as an exercise, a draft, an experiment in anger management that might create something powerful. Come back Friday and let us know how it went. (And if this exercise doesn’t grab you — try some other means to focus your anger in a poem.)
(If you need a book recommendation, I can happily point you to Moyer’s. Lot’s of great poetry and explanation, via Moyer’s interviews, about how a broad range of talented poets go at their work.)
How prompts work under the Big Tent
We post prompts on Mondays, and you have all week to write your poems, based on our fabulous prompt or any other inspiration. Come back on Friday when you will find a “Come One, Come All” post where you can use the comments section to 1) leave a link to your poem or 2) leave the poem in its entirety.
You’ll have all day Friday (and all weekend!) to post your work and read each others’ work. Take your time. Enjoy all the poems that are new to the world.
Some hints
Hint: We’ve set Big Tent Poetry to Central Time.
Hint: An easy way to check on new post comments is with RSS reader, if you use one. Here’s the address: http://bigtentpoetry.org/comments/feed.
Hint: Since we’re a new site, and you’re new to it, your comment(s) will be held for moderation for your first few posts. We’re checking the filters often, so don’t despair! That said, if it takes more than a half a day to see it come live on the site, do email us at info (at) bigtentpoetry.org. (But be patient, okay?)
Circus etiquette
We figure you know how to play in the poetry community, but here are the basics:
Be nice. Have fun. Remember we aren’t a critique forum. We want to support each other as we bring more poetry into our lives. Only provide critique if someone specifically asks for it.
Although we love seeing our badge in the sidebar of your blog, we would appreciate it if you would also link back to the site in each of your poem posts. Linking within your post helps people travel back and forth from your site to the Big Tent Poetry site, and it helps perpetuate Big Tent Poetry “findability” in Google searches — and that helps us all.
I have written a couple of pantoums for an assignment, and vowed never to write another! However, who knows what anger will do…..
[...] BigTent Angry Pantoum Sorry to overload the system, folks, but here’s my feeble not completely angry best for Friday’s Big Tent Come One Come all. http://bigtentpoetry.org/2010/06/monday-prompt-june-7/#comments [...]
I tried, I really tried, and failed abysmally. I’ve written lots of angry poems (mostly political) but couldn’t tame my thoughts into the pantoum straightjacket.
I did find an old one, fairly angry, and that will be on my blog if anyone’s interested.
In any case, I shan’t be here on Friday, as off to UK for my graduation. (Still boasting about it!)
http://vivinfrance.wordpress.com
thanks for posting, viv, since you won’t be here on friday! my note below is just a general reminder so that new people to the site won’t be confused by our early frolicking. :)
congrats on the graduation and safe travels!!!
Hey hey HEY, I just wrote my first pantoum! I’d like to send it to the person to whom it is intended, but you know. BAWK! BAWK! (infer: chicken) Instead, I’ll wait and post it on Friday, under the Big Tent, where it has an encouraging audience. Sometimes, I even hear whistles, from way up top the bleachers….
I must say, this is my all time favorite circus. ~Brenda
the circus audience is encouraging, isn’t it? we have fun with angry poems and whatever poems come our way!
[...] notes: I wanted to write about anger for Big Tent Poetry’s prompt but I ended up writing about the moon. The old hurt is the Vietnam War. The title is inspired by [...]
what’s this? unauthorized circus-cavorting?! poetry that won’t behave?!
hi, everyone! so happy to see discussions of the prompts here in the prompt post. and so happy to see poem-ing so enthusiastic it can’t be held back.
just remember to try to hold back the poems for the come one, come all posts on fridays (and all weekend). that way you’ll get a bigger audience (because that’s when we’re trained to come in search of them).
Pantoumescent adj Abnormally swollen or distended with repetitious lines, as in a pantoum.
(Oh crap, I must’ve forgotten to close the bold tag. Sorry about that.)
(Is the now-showing bold what you wanted?)
Yup. Thanks!
oh, no. does it say anywhere if there is mucous? or seeping?
Suppurating pustules! (I love that phrase.)
If it doesn’t it should. At least in the 2nd or 3rd definition.
bletch! great pantoumescent weeping pustules, batman: now I know I’m sending the thing back where it came from.
[...] “octocam” at the Hatfield Marine Science Center, I had no idea what I would write for the angry pantoum prompt at Big Tent Poetry. But as I watched the octopus move around the tank, I realized it could convince [...]
[...] Here’s the Big Tent Poetry prompt. Here’s where to go to find what other poets did with it. [...]
[...] is for Big Tent Poetry’s weekly prompt. The form is called pantoum, and this is my first crack at one. I liked the repetitive spiraling [...]
[...] Big Tent Poetry [...]