December 2022 - Workshop Shit!

For the workshop this month, poets were given a set of images as a prompt, and encouraged to consider brevity. Drawing from Billy Collins’ American Sonnet, we reimagined the images as postcards, and explored the idea of “a compression of what we feel” by imagining the sort of poem that might be found on the back of a postcard.

Billy Collins

American Sonnet

We do not speak like Petrarch or wear a hat like Spenser

and it’s not fourteen lines

like furrows in a small, carefully plowed field 

but the picture postcard, a poem on vacation,

that forces us to sing our songs in little rooms

or pour our sentiments into measuring cups.

We write on the back of a waterfall or lake,

adding to the view a caption as conventional

as an Elizabethan woman’s heliocentric eyes.

We locate an adjective for the weather.

We announce that we are having a wonderful time.

We express the wish that you were here

and hide the wish that we were where you are,

walking back from the mailbox, your head lowered

as you read and turn the thin message in your hands.

A slice of this place, a length of white beach,

a piazza or carved spires of a cathedral

will pierce the familiar place where you remain,

and you will toss on the table this reversable display:

a few square inches of where we have strayed,

and a compression of what we feel.

Yosemite National Park (top left), Lake Como, Italy (top right), Niagara Falls (bottom left), Las Vegas (bottom right)

The Prompt:

Draw inspiration from the four postcard-style images on screen, and from the notion of “a compression of what we feel.” If you had to write a three or four line poem on the back of each, what would you write? Can these poems be tied together, or are they stand-alone? Would these “postcards,” be missives directed at someone, or documentation meant only to capture a moment?

Andrew’s Response:

The mind’s like sky here:

Endless on mountain summits,

Babbling in the brook.

This lake is ancient.

It’s long outlived old peoples,

Making fools of Gods.

They roar. They palpitate.

We’re pinpricks to majesty:

Afloat at Earth’s whims.

Spend all night awake!

Neon and night’s void are friends,

And morning’s too late.

Wish there was here.