When I was in high school, I spent five weeks one summer at the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts in Erie. That was where I found my people - not just poets but dancers and visual artists and actors and pianists. Every one of us was a little odd, intensely devoted to our particular art. (Also one of us was Gillian Jacobs! My only real brush with celebrity. We worked together four summers later when we returned as TAs, and she was very nice.) It was two hours from where I grew up in Pittsburgh, but it felt a million miles away.
I was often jealous of the musicians in particular because their work seemed so clear: they had to practice. And they did, for hours, often booking extra time in practice rooms beyond the long days already scheduled for us. Meanwhile, I wandered around, reading, lounging in the sun, waiting for a poem to find me.
I’ve since found that of course poets can practice, too, and one way to practice is through imitation of something you love but can’t quite figure out. This prompt comes out of that idea of imitation, and my admiration for Camille Dungy’s writing generally, and her “average woman” poems in particular. I’ve read two of them - The Average Mother and The Average Mother Now Spends Twice as Many Hours on Childcare as Did Her Counterpart in 1965, and She Also Spends Three Times as Many Hours Working Outside the Home; or, How to Sing a Song of Sixpence When You’re Really Feeling Wry - and I hope there are more in her files somewhere, waiting for us to read.
Prompt #4: facts and figures
Find a fact or statistic that interests or surprises you. For numbers, the Pew Research Center and The New York Times’s Upshot are good places to start. If you’re up for pandemic-related reading, this recent study from the Pew Research Center about people’s experiences during the pandemic might be interesting. Use that fact or statistic as your title.
Write a poem in conversation with that title - one that tells a story but doesn’t directly respond or explain or refute the fact or statistic you’ve selected. If you’d like another parameter, include a notable body of water or a form of public transportation.
If having a form helps you, write the poem as a single sentence, as long as you can make it.
I'm a day behind, but I'm here! I have a very long factoid title about pay inequality, but here's the first two lines of a prose-poem: "It’s a wonder my maternal grandmother lived as long as she did, a motherless child herself, filling her mouth with Our Father’s and Hail Mary’s, rather than fighting for literal scraps tossed down basement steps;"
I love a lot of Camille Dungy's poems. One of the factoids I had already written on my notecards (from an old notebook) is: "12% of Americans questioned think Noah's Wife" was Joan of Ark" (I didn't take note of where I read it. I already have a poem about Noah's Wife and don't know if I'll get a poem out of this, but it's good for a laugh.