Florence Weinberger: “When I was eight years old, I said ‘fuck you’ to my mother; the beating I got baffled me. Of course I had no clue, only that it was a bad word, not yet in general use when I graduated from high school in 1950. Hearing it spewed with such gleeful abandon on the floor of a body shop in the Bronx, it still had its power to shake me. ‘Grist for the mill,’ as Ram Dass said of just about everything. I took it to include a poem kept waiting for all these years.”
Roberto Ascalon: “I’ve taught a poetry class in this one school for the last eight years. It’s been fantastic. But hard sometimes—it’s a credit retrieval school—the last ditch for kids who’ve been expelled for being angry or being sad or being high or for fighting or cursing out a teacher or not speaking English well enough or scratching fuck you on the bathroom mirror or being pregnant or skipping school for weeks—conditions and actions that often haunt the poor and the black and the brown. With lots of love, freedom, encouragement and a safe space, I find most kids want desperately to read their work out loud. But recently I had this one boy, who, by his very presence, prevented others from reading their poetry. Class fizzled when he was in the room. He’d talk brazenly on the phone during class or slouch deep in his chair and make offhandedly cruel comments under his breath. His swagger and arrogance conveyed total disrespect—all with this amazing smile and high cheek bones. Infuriatingly, he could have been a leader if he’d wanted to—but instead chose to laugh at other folks when they read. One day I had enough. I stepped to him, suited up in manly-man aggression, kicked him out. After he left the room, to my deep shock and surprise, the other youth called me out and argued with me. They said I wasn’t being right. They said that he needed the class as much, even more, than they did. They saw how unfair it was—all of it. So, I let him back in the next day. There was an uneasy détente. The other kids eventually read their poems. He wrote a handful of lines that year, maybe ten or twelve. A win. I wrote this poem for him—and for the other youth who wanted him back in the room. For Miss Diane and Lasheera and Romeo and Rica. For all of the brown boys that get denied by people like me. For James Baldwin’s nephew.”
Laurie Uttich: “My poetry tends to be full of fury or grief. It stumbles into a room, throws an emotion on the floor, and slams the door on the way out. I revel in the release of my Inner Poet who is so different than the person I walk around as every day. She shows her teeth and she doesn’t spend a millisecond worried about what anyone thinks (even you). But one of the men I write with on Fridays at a Florida prison often calls me a contradiction and chides me for my ‘sad stories’ while he writes his own poems about joy. This year, I decided to try and do the same.” (web)
Prompt: Find a partner and write a collaborative poem in some kind of form.
Note from the series editor, Katie Dozier: “Ghazals have always struck me as a literary picnic—a checkerboard blanket brimming with many different dishes composed of unique couplets. This modified, collaborative ghazal, with its ‘No-Thing-ness’ whimsicality served up alongside more serious stanzas, unpacks a memorable conversation for us all under the summer afternoon sun.”
Dean Marshall Tuck: “Don’t you sort of miss dropping coins into payphones and parking meters and jukeboxes? I was thinking about this, and the sounds the coins made falling down their slots, and I suppose that’s what began my poem. Then things took a turn. It’s hard not to see mortality in everything. I did not expect to get there while contemplating the parking meter, but here we are.”
David Rosenthal: “I write early in the morning, so I tend to write about the dawn a lot. I also get most of my news in the early morning, scrolling through news outlets and social media. Those two elements of my morning routine intersect in this poem.”
