M Christine Delea's Blog, page 33

Across the Ocean: Writing Prompt

This week, we are using today's poem (Eurydice by Ocean Vuong) as our inspiration.

The trick to this type of prompt is to make your piece so wildly different than the source material that a reader, including (in this case) Vuong himself, would have no idea that you used his poem as your jumping off point. This makes it quite different from writing that is blatantly a reaction to/parody of/homage to/study of another piece (this would include everything from Romeo and Juliet/West Side Story; "Wha...

Eurydice by Ocean Vuong

Eurydice

by Ocean Vuong

published in The Nation (January 28, 2014)

It’s more like the sound a doe makes when the arrowhead replaces the day with an answer to the rib’s hollowed hum. We saw it coming but kept walking through the hole in the garden. Because the leaves were bright green & the fire only a pink brushstroke in the distance. It’s not about the light—but how dark it makes you depending on where you stand. Depending on where you stand his name can appear like moonlight...

Pride by Diana Goetsch

Pride

by Diana Goetsch

from In America (2017 Rattle Chapbook Prize Selection)

https://www.rattle.com/pride-by-diana-goetsch/

for Paula Schonauer

I’ll never forget the smell of mouthwash

on the breath of two old Choctaw women

who got picked up by a cop and taken to detox.

The cop was my friend, a six-foot-five

woman who joined the Oklahoma City

Police Department as a man

and transitioned on the job. Nobody

on the force would be Paula’s partner,

so she patrolled alone, occasionally

inv...

Wrong Turn: Writing Prompt

Although it is a common trope in many types of literature and movies, taking a wrong turn is something everyone of us has done, and without the horror movie or fantasy novel results.

This week, write about a wrong turn--your own, someone else's, an entirely fictional one, or a combination of these.

Feel free to use the well-known trope or subvert it or try something completely different.

If a literal wrong turn is not your style, that's fine. We often use that phrase to connote a bad decisi...

Untitled by Marilyn Hacker

Untitled

by Marilyn Hacker

page 121 of her book, Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons

W.W. Norton and Company, 1986

You did say, need me less and I’ll want you more.

I’m still shellshocked at needing anyone,

used to being used to it on my own.

It won’t be me out on the tiles till four-

thirty, while you’re in bed, willing the door

open with your need. You wanted her then,

more. Because you need to, I woke alone

in what’s not yet our room, strewn, though with your

guitar, shoes, not...

As Planned by Frank O'Hara

As Planned

by Frank O'Hara

published in The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara

edited by Donald Allen

After the first glass of vodka

you can accept just about anything

of life even your own mysteriousness

you think it is nice that a box

of matches is purple and brown and is called

La Petite and comes from Sweden

for they are words that you know and that

is all you know words not their feelings

or what they mean and you write because

you know them not because you understand them

because y...

Work That House!: Writing Prompt

“Cleanliness is not next to godliness. It isn't even in the same neighborhood. No one has ever gotten a religious experience out of removing burned-on cheese from the grill of the toaster oven.”--Erma Bombeck

I loved reading Erma Bombeck's books when I was young, and I have--at my old age--the messy house to prove how influential she was in my life!

Today's blog poem, Rejected Embroidery Projects by Triny Finlay, is not quite about housework, but there was a time when such needlework--like vac...

Rejected Embroidery Projects by Triny Finlay

Rejected Embroidery Projects

by Triny Finlay

published in The/tEmz/Review, Issue 22

I stitch whimsy-careful scenes

for people who don’t love me back:

MSN logo, bi flag, Tetris blocks

for the 90s kid who left

on a work trip that winter

and chose not to return;

sun, moon, and rising

signs for the zodiac=led

trauma specialist who preferred

her subtle cats. Understood.

Whose hands will pick those finished

hoops from the nearby dumpster?

It’s all going to light up eventually.

Whose lungs will ...

Little Shields, in Starlight by Carl Phillips

Little Shields, in Starlight

by Carl Phillips

posted in Literary Hub, 2022

Maybe there’s no need for us to go anywhere more far than here, said the dogwood leaves, mistaking speech for song, to the catalpa leaves, imitating silence. It was like sex when, push the tenderness to either side of it, it’s just sex; hardly sex at all . . . Hardly worth mentioning, except forgetting seems so much a shame, lately, and why

shouldn’t there be records, however small, of our having felt somethin...

No Moon at All: Writing Prompt

Jackie Kay's incredible poem, "Margaret's Moon," mentions the moon just once in her short poem (line four: "a hammock moon"). Most of her poem is focused on Margaret, the speaker, and moon-adjacent description.

I love this, as everything else in the poem has the moon, unmentioned, in it, particularly the last line. Our imaginations have already engaged the moon from the title and that brief mention, and there it sits, high above us but there, as we continue to read.

This week's poem is going ...