It’s Tuesday and the dVerse Poets Pub is open with cold drinks, a range of salads, and any ice cream of your choice, as well as a selection of delicious poetry.  I’m Kim from writinginnorthnorfolk.com, your host for this week’s Poetics.

I used to be a member of The Poetry Society (UK) and entered the National Poetry Competition many times. I still follow the competition and receive various communications from The Poetry Society. Over the years I have also collected their prompts.

This week’s Poetics is based on one of those prompts and a poem that came second in the National Poetry Competition in 2017. Read the poem ‘The Window’  by Mary Jean Chan here.

This poem begins with a somewhat grand statement:

“Once in a lifetime , you will gesture at an open window…”

It presents the reader with an open window, but we see beyond the window into the poet’s life, in which she is struggling with her mother’s reaction to her coming out as queer.

The poem has energy, created by a combination of line breaks and caesurae which are used to build up rhythm: “your mother’s/ anger is like the sun, which  is like love,/ which is the easiest thing – even on the hardest of days”. The use of italics is significant, another voice (the mother’s or the speaker’s words to her mother?) briefly breaking in. The poem also has movement, which is not physical or geographical, but emotional.

There is generosity in Chan’s poem, in which the mother’s anger is like the sun, but then becomes like love, a shift of metaphorical register from something positive, to something ambiguous (the sun can be scary as well as brilliant) and then into something positive again.  

Your challenge:

Re-read and explore Chan’s poem,  particularly the use of line breaks and caesura to build rhythm and evoke emotion, and the three-word movement: “anger is like the sun, which is like love”.

Now write a poem in the first person that begins with “Once in a lifetime”.

Think of a similar three-word movement (anger/sun/love) and develop it in your poem. It can be about a real situation in your past or current life, or something that happened to someone you know, or an imagined situation.

Leave yourself time to refine your draft and then follow the usual instructions:

• Write a poem in response to the challenge.
• Enter a link directly to your poem and your name by clicking Mr Linky below.
• There you will find links to other poets, and more will join, so check back for their poems.
• Read and comment on other poets’ work – we all come here to have our poems appreciated.
• Please link back to dVerse from your site/blog.
• Mister Linky will close on Saturday at 3 p.m. EST.
• Comment and participate in our discussion below, if you like. We are a friendly bunch of poets.
• Have fun.