Proposing an original prompt is always a risk, but reading the poems provoked by what I shall always think of as my “stolen lines” prompt—“take a line from someone else and run with it”—I feel like the fellow who won the Daily Double at the track. So many fine poems in the 185 comments, and so much thoughtful, practical criticism, make me feel that any similar imperative is bound to generate excitement so long as the proffered lines are choice.
“I wish I were a girl again, half savage and free,” a line slightly abbreviated from the way it appears in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, can make fresh a familiar longing, and Anna Ojascastro Guzon went off to the races with it. Here is “In Unison”:
I wish I were a girl again, half savage and free
half apprentice a half-step behind
a half-moon reflecting a full sun’s light
onto half the earth’s humans as they prepare
a meal, a cup of instant soup, alone, at a counter
or a palm’s width of bread passed among
five-thousand. Nothing great was ever
achieved half-assed, she wrote
on the wall as a girl, half tethered to faith
in stories, half glued to the scripts that raised
her to imagine what it’s like to be as wild as
one howling, into vastness, a moonless night
utter darkness, half listening for responses.
Isn’t that fine? All those halves make a most admirable whole.
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Money is as beautiful as roses”—an early version of Wallace Stevens’s “Money is a kind of poetry”—has long fascinated me, and perhaps it should come as no surprise that poets would seize on the line and see its possibilities, as Nicole Tillman does in “Blood Roses”:
If I gave you a million dollars,
what would you buy? My friend
Jenn says roses. One million roses.
Where she’ll buy them for a dollar
each, I’ll never know.
Money is as beautiful as roses.
Rows of blood roses
that call down the bloody hall.
Money is blood. Blood money. I once
saw a girl saw into her own wrists.
Her eyes were as empty as
The Willowbrook Asylum. The blood
flooded her arms like an army of roses.
Try to stop me, she said. Go ahead and try.
“Rows of blood roses” is as beautiful in sound as it is in image, and the double meaning of “saw” darkens the poem—as if the titular terms were engaged in a grudge match, and the first term prevailed.
Pamela Joyce Shapiro directly addresses “Dear Mr. Emerson” in a poem that makes music out of the poetry/prose dichotomy. The clever rhymes (“loss is” and “roses”), the double meaning of “till,” and the alliterative last line, all contribute to the poem’s magical effect.
If money is the prose of life
as beautiful as roses,
poetry it seems must be
the soil and sun of infinity,
without which surely nothing grows.I see the pleasures each might bring,
when flourishing in abundant spring.
Though stocks and petals tend to fall
in drought or storm or just because,
poetry survives it all.What losses can define what loss is?
Waning wealth or stolen roses?
Forget the till and till the mind,
plant poetry and praise the sky.
Heather Newman’s “Money is as beautiful as roses” gives us “money bouquets / falling on romantic shoulders / immune to the thorns of fortune.” The line with “slings and arrows” is less inspired, but it is here that the poem pivots, and the word “prickles” takes over:
Someone said this or wrote this
and I am charmed by the sentiment,
that heady dream of money bouquets
falling on romantic shouldersimmune to the thorns of fortune,
those slings and arrows we know.
But do we understand prickles?
Outgrowths, sharp and pointed,easily removed without much damage,
the defense mechanism, the skin-deep.
Prickles are life, our protections, our layers.
Prickles cling to others, help roses climb,unlike the thorn, vascular and greedy.
One rose with its prickles is more than enough.
Working on my own effort—which also bears the title “Money is as beautiful as roses”—I felt as if I were struggling with Emerson, making common cause with Heather, Pamela, and Nicole:
“You won’t outlive your money,”
is a statement everyone loves hearing
from a reputable financial adviser
though not from the guy with the gun
by your side at the ATM machine.To outlive roses is easy and natural,
and necessary, too, to their beauty.
You can outlive the tall slender crimson
flower against the lush green pasture
in the painting that will outlast your fame,but not your money, which remains
nevertheless as beautiful as roses.
Emily said, “The first stanza made me laugh out loud,” which I took as a high compliment.
Emily’s own effort took the form of a villanelle. “Forced Choice Villanelle” takes off from “Give me money; friends you can keep,” my rewriting of the Renaissance poet Barnabe Googe’s “Give money me, take friendship whoso list”:
Give me money; friends you can keep,
though I’ll gladly take great legs over both.
Fame turns blue at the bottom of the heap.Daffodils beat roses, those prickly creeps.
Cats under canines, whose love swears an oath.
Give me retrievers, friends you can keep.Country crushes city for a good night’s sleep.
Poets undoubtedly edge writers of prose,
forgetting fame at the bottom of the heap.Boys versus girls, flat lands versus steep—
I’ll admit some polls remain too tight to close.
Still, give me money. Friends you can keep.And to you, my legs, my strong black sheep,
mid-life maestros of Pilates and hope,
you’ve kicked fame to the bottom of the heap.
Worth all the money–true friends I will keep.
Emily rewrote and improved her last line with the inspired help of Pamela Joyce Shapiro, the NLP player of the week, who will (I hope) suggest a prompt for possible future use.
Saul Bellow’s “If I am out of my mind, that’s all right with me,” prompted Millicent Caliban to write a poem glorifying escape. In “Room with a View,” a gallery gives way to a garden:
If I am out of my mind, that’s all right with me.
I have long wished I could escape.
It was getting so awfully crowded in there,
Like a small New York apartment, with no good views.Last night I discovered several rooms I had not noticed;
each one as if created by a different artist: Picasso, Rousseau, Monet
(or did I fall asleep and dream I was at MOMA?)
Doors led out to a garden where I stopped to chat with a goat.Inside and out ceased to have a meaning. All was open to explore.
I followed twisting paths to denser forest, higher ground:
delightful prospects seducing me at every turn, prompting me
to lose myself or venture down the indifferent river in a row boat.
The poem originally had an extra two-line stanza: “No choice was irredeemable or seemed to place constraints. / How wonderful to be released at last from consequences.” At Charise Hoge’s suggestion, Millicent omitted the stanza, improving her poem and winning Charise this week’s Marianne Moore award for judicious editing.
Michael C. Rush uses the Bellow line in the middle of his forcible poem about the “noise in one human head.” His title is “Something Else”:
It was getting so awfully crowded in there,
in my mind, everything tied too tightly together,
a mesh I kept getting caught in.All understanding begins with not understanding.
Are you willing to not understand,
at least provisionally? Creatively?If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me.
As the sky moves as wind, I move as mind.Surely there is more noise in one human head
than in the experience of all birds
that have ever been, combined?It’s not that we suffer—it is, it is that we suffer—
but that we attempt to make of the suffering
something else
There’s so much to praise here; the rhetoric is so strong, the ambition so commendable. I think Michael could make a few adjustments in the last stanza. Instead of “attempt,” how about “try,” and maybe there’s an easier way to make the distinction in the stanza’s first line. Here’s a try:
It’s not that we don’t suffer—
but that we try to make of the suffering
something else
Of the several efforts to appropriate the opening of Arthur Rimbaud’s “Drunken Boat,” I particularly liked Christine Rhein’s “Michigan Vacation, Air Quality Alert,” for its lyrical loveliness and for the poem’s determination to leave “The Times” behind and reach a river of whispers beyond meaning:
As I rowed down the indifferent river,
I could feel the wildfire smoke stinging
my eyes, could see the sun, siren-red,
rise between thick clusters of pines,
as though to taunt me with an eerie game
of hide and startle. I should have known
better, I told myself, than to expect
a brand-new day—one with no bitterness
on my tongue, no haze graying the banks,
the waters ahead. I should have gone back
to the cottage, closed all the windows,
scrolled my way through The Times,
but I kept on rowing, making the river
whisper—lovely nonsense in my ears.
“Journey” is what Diana Ferraro does with the Rimbaud opening. The second line is a smart surprise, but the poem reaches its full power with its grand finale:
As I rowed down the indifferent river
I realized I had no oars
My dry hands crossed over my knees
No ferryman on board
The rumor of water as the slim boat
Sled surrounded by silky waves
Silence on the greenery of both shores
The feeling of an ending, the obscure
Knowledge of the meant point of arrival
A motherly wide stone grey sea
Calm paradise of eternity as a womb
All things lived, all things said
Treasured forever in the transparent,
Democratic box of infinity
Thanks, everyone, in or out of our “democratic box of infinity.”
John Ashbery told me he often liked to start a poem with its title, reversing the usual process. Ever since, I have found myself pulling out my little black pocket notebook and writing down an arresting phrase that may work as a title. For our next prompt, I propose writing a poem with an arbitrary ready-made title. Here is a list of potential titles that have occurred to me this week—some of them cliché, some of them from a misheard or misunderstood phrase:
- Warning-Track Power
- Having It All: An Elegy
- A Missed Connection
- Pickup in Green Park
- Shotgun Wedding
- Where Monday Went to Die
- The Bad Old Days
- It’s All Good
- The Press Gurney
- Silver Blaze
Limit: 14 lines. Deadline: two weeks from the date this post goes up, midnight any time zone.
