Prompt #270 – Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus

Over a hundred years ago, eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon wrote a letter to the editor of New York’s Sun, and the quick response was printed as an unsigned editorial on Sept. 21, 1897. The work of veteran newsman Francis Pharcellus Church has since become history’s most reprinted newspaper editorial, appearing in part or whole in dozens of languages in books, movies, and other editorials, and on posters and stamps. I've read Virginia's letter and Francis Church's reply every year during December for many years. I hope it will touch your heart as much as it always touches mine.

The Editorial

    DEAR EDITOR: I am 8 years old.

    Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus.

    Papa says, ‘If you see it in THE SUN it’s so.’

    Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?

    VIRGINIA O’HANLON.

    115 WEST NINETY-FIFTH STREET.

    VIRGINIA, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

    Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

    Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

    You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, VIRGINIA, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

    No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

SOURCE: http://www.newseum.org/exhibits/online/yes-virginia/

_______________________________________________

The first poem I ever had published was a letter to Santa that I wrote in December of 1956 (I had just turned 8 years old and still believed in Santa Claus). My poem was published in the Grover Cleveland Elementary School newspaper. Happily, my mom saved all those early writings, and I have an original copy of the newspaper.

Your prompt for this week is to write a letter to Santa in which you list the things that you wish for. These needn’t be material things!You may also consider writing about what you believe or need to believe.

Suggestions:

1. Think in terms of non-material gifts you’d like to receive. (For example: spiritual well-being, healing from (and cures for) illnesses, an end to homelessness and hunger, peace in the world.)

2. Think about your family members and friends. What would you most like for them?

3. Is there a relationship in your life that needs healing? What would you ask for in terms of that relationship.

4. What about our world? What would you ask for?

5. Is there something you want or need to believe? How would you ask for that belief?

Tips:

1. Observe the usual caveats: avoid the passive voice, eliminate “ing” endings wherever you can, don’t use too many adjectives.

2. Use more one-syllable words than multi-syllable words in your last couple of lines (think in terms of strong verbs and no superfluous language).

3. Try (minimal) repetition from another part of the poem—sometimes this can work very well.

4. Try to link the end of your poem to the beginning but not overtly—and don’t over-write.

5.  Write beyond the last line, then go back and find the last line hidden in what you’ve written.

6. Leave your reader something to reflect upon.

7. Point toward something broader than the obvious content of your poem.

8. You may want to try a prose poem  or to use letter format. Here's a letter from Santa Claus that Mark Twain wrote for his daughter Susie:

 

Mark Twain's Letter from Santa Claus

Written for His Daughter Susie

Palace of St. Nicholas

In the Moon

Christmas Morning

MY DEAR SUSIE CLEMENS:

I have received and read all the letters which you and your little sister have written me by the hand of your mother and your nurses; I have also read those which you little people have written me with your own hands--for although you did not use any characters that are in grown peoples' alphabet, you used the characters that all children in all lands on earth and in the twinkling stars use; and as all my subjects in the moon are children and use no character but that, you will easily understand that I can read your and your baby sister's jagged and fantastic marks without any trouble at all. But I had trouble with those letters which you dictated through your mother and the nurses, for I am a foreigner and cannot read English writing well. You will find that I made no mistakes about the things which you and the baby ordered in your own letters—I went down your chimney at midnight when you were asleep and delivered them all myself—and kissed both of you, too, because you are good children, well trained, nice mannered, and about the most obedient little people I ever saw. But in the letter which you dictated there were some words which I could not make out for certain, and one or two small orders which I could not fill because we ran out of stock. Our last lot of kitchen furniture for dolls has just gone to a very poor little child in the North Star away up, in the cold country above the Big Dipper. Your mama can show you that star and you will say: "Little Snow Flake," (for that is the child's name) "I'm glad you got that furniture, for you need it more than I." That is, you must write that, with your own hand, and Snow Flake will write you an answer. If you only spoke it she wouldn't hear you. Make your letter light and thin, for the distance is great and the postage very heavy.

There was a word or two in your mama's letter which I couldn't be certain of. I took it to be "a trunk full of doll's clothes." Is that it? I will call at your kitchen door about nine o'clock this morning to inquire. But I must not see anybody and I must not speak to anybody but you. When the kitchen doorbell rings, George must be blindfolded and sent to open the door. Then he must go back to the dining room or the china closet and take the cook with him. You must tell George he must walk on tiptoe and not speak—otherwise he will die someday. Then you must go up to the nursery and stand on a chair or the nurse's bed and put your car to the speaking tube that leads down to the kitchen and when I whistle through it you must speak in the tube and say, "Welcome, Santa Claus!" Then I will ask whether it was a trunk you ordered or not. If you say it was, I shall ask you what color you want the trunk to be. Your mama will help you to name a nice color and then you must tell me every single thing in detail which you want the trunk to contain. Then when I say "Good-by and a merry Christmas to my little Susie Clemens," you must say "Good-by, good old Santa Claus, I thank you very much and please tell that little Snow Flake I will look at her star tonight and she must look down here—I will be right in the west bay window; and every fine night I will look at her star and say, 'I know somebody up there and like her, too.' " Then you must go down into the library and make George close all the doors that open into the main hall, and everybody must keep still for a little while. I will go to the moon and get those things and in a few minutes I will come down the chimney that belongs to the fireplace that is in the hall—if it is a trunk you want—because I couldn't get such a thing as a trunk down the nursery chimney, you know.

People may talk if they want, until they hear my footsteps in the hall. Then you tell them to keep quiet a little while till I go back up the chimney. Maybe you will not hear my footsteps at all—so you may go now and then and peep through the dining-room doors, and by and by you will see that thing which you want, right under the piano in the drawing room-for I shall put it there. If I should leave any snow in the hall, you must tell George to sweep it into the fireplace, for I haven't time to do such things. George must not use a broom, but a rag—else he will die someday. You must watch George and not let him run into danger. If my boot should leave a stain on the marble, George must not holystone it away. Leave it there always in memory of my visit; and whenever you look at it or show it to anybody you must let it remind you to be a good little girl. Whenever you are naughty and somebody points to that mark which your good old Santa Claus's boot made on the marble, what will you say, little sweetheart?

Good-by for a few minutes, till I come down to the world and ring the kitchen doorbell.

Your loving SANTA CLAUS
Whom people sometimes call "The Man in the Moon"

Source: http://www.twainquotes.com/santaclaus.html

Prompt #259 – Tips for Poets

 

Hi, blog readers! I hope July and August were good months for you! As we end the summer reruns and move back to regular prompts and posts, I thought it might be a good time to review some of the things that poets can do, or not do, to make their work better. With that in mind, I hope you find the following useful.

• Read! It’s important to “know” both time-honored and contemporary poets. Whenever possible attend readings and participate in workshops – learn what other poets are doing in their work, and be part of the poetry community.

• Write little – embrace the minute on the way to the universal.   

• Be aware that every poem needs a strong emotional center that doesn’t smother meaning with sentiment. (There’s a big difference between sentimentality and poetic sentiment.) And … every poem should have an obvious meaning as well as underlying meanings.

• Understand that overstatement and the obvious are deadly when it comes to writing poetry. Many promising poems don’t measure up because they’re over-written. Don’t ramble on and don’t try to explain everything. Think about this: a poem with only five great lines should be five lines long.

• Remember what Dylan Thomas wrote, “You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it tick … you’re back with the mystery of having been moved by words. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps … so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in.”

• Beware the dreaded Prose-o-saurus! A lot of people who “write poetry” work from a prose impulse and a prose logic. They arrange their writing in lines and stanzas that make the writing look like poetry when it really isn’t. It’s a kind of poetry masquerade.

• Memoir poems can be wonderful if they are not exercises in journaling that are presented as poems. If you write in this genre, ask yourself, “Is this a poem, or is this a diary entry?”

• Work on a sense of immediacy (even when you write in the past tense). Stay away from the passive voice, and be wary of words that end in “ing.”

• Avoid over-use of adjectives and too many details (bulk without substance doesn’t work).

• Eliminate prepositions whenever you can (i.e., the sky’s length rather than the length of the sky)

• Be specific – avoid abstractions and generalizations. Imagery is key. Write about things, not ideas. William Carlos Williams wrote: “No ideas but in things.” Tell it “like it is” in specifics, not through philosophical musings on the “meaning of it all.”

• Each poem you write should include at least one image that makes your readers gasp.

• Tune your ear to natural rhythms, especially if you are writing free verse. Develop a sense of sound in your poems (sonic impression): use alliteration, assonance, and internal rhymes. Read your poem aloud – listen!

• Avoid the slippery slime of lofty language and literary affectation. Neither big words nor literary pretensions will save a bad poem and may weaken a potentially good one. Be real!

• Subvert the ordinary. Language and figures of speech (i.e., similes and metaphors,) should be memorable and fresh, not hackneyed or tired.

• Steer clear of cleverness and “cutesiness.”

• Don’t be sucked in by fashionable clichés, and don’t think you must flatter current prejudices about what constitutes “popular” poetry.

• Be the poet you most truly are. You may really love another poets' content and style, but don't try to write like that poet.  Be your own person and your own poet.

• Stay away from foul language that doesn’t enhance anything and has no contextual significance. Shock value is cheap.

• Be generous with caesuras. Allow spaces in your poems for the unspoken silences. (Sometimes the best part of the poem is the part left unsaid.)

• Don’t use up all the “air” in your poem on the last couple of lines—leave the reader room to breathe.

• Resist the urge to “finish” a poem by tying it up in a neat package. Last lines that explain or sum-up can ruin an otherwise good poem.

• Don’t undercut your poem’s “authority” by ending with trivia or a “so what” line that doesn’t make your readers catch their breath.

• Think about an unexpected outcome (especially in a narrative poem). Shake up your readers’ expectations.

• Discipline yourself for the process of revision and revise, revise, revise! Often during tweaking, you’ll need to shorten a poem, not make it longer. Ask yourself, “Do I really need that word, phrase, or line?” When you revise your own writing, you have to play critic to your own creation. Be tough on yourself. Sometimes it will be necessary to sacrifice words or images you love for the sake of the poem. However, beware of over-editing and recognize that when the editing process is no longer one of discovery, it’s time to stop. As Leonardo DaVinci said, “Art is never finished, only abandoned.”

• Spend time away from a poem you’ve just completed – put it aside for a few days (or weeks) and then look at it again. Take time to refine your work. Keep the keepers (and file away the poems that you know aren’t exactly right).

• Don’t be so “stuck” on your own work that you fail to take the advice of workshop leaders and colleagues. Be true to your own voice, of course, but understand that you can never be completely objective about your own poetry.

• Listen to criticism and try to learn from it. Advice (even if you don’t like it) is often a very good thing!

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year

I send my sincerest thanks 

to all of you who have visited this blog over the past year,

to loyal readers who visit regularly,

and to those of you who have taken the time to post comments. 

Poetry is about sharing, and I'm grateful for the sharing that happens here!

To readers who celebrate Christmas, 

I wish you special blessings of light, love, and peace throughout this holy season. 

And to all of you, I wish a New Year filled

with abundant good health and much happiness!

Regular posts will resume on Saturday, January 11, 2014, so stay tuned until then.

In poetry and blogging,

Adele

An Interview with Charles Simic

Here we are in mid-November, approaching the most festive, celebratory, and busiest time of year. It occurs to me that many of us won’t have time to work with prompts or on our poems, so I thought I’d offer slightly different fare for a while—some poetry-related reading and then a short hiatus in December. For starters, I’d like to share an interview that I did with the great poet Charles Simic. This appeared in issue XXIII of Tiferet (autumn 2013) and is reprinted here with the permission of publisher Donna Baier Stein. There are some great tips for poets from Charles Simic at the end of the interview.

An Interview with Charles Simic

By Adele Kenny

TIFERET: Literature, Art, & The Creative Spirit, Issue XXIII

Copyright © 2013 By Tiferet. All rights reserved.

Reprinted by Permission

Dušan [Charles] Simić was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia on May 9, 1938. His memories, as he noted for this interview “… begin with April 6, 1941 when he was three years old, when a German bomb hit the building across the street from his and threw him out of bed at five o’clock in the morning …” During World War II, his father was arrested several times and in 1944 fled from Yugoslavia to Italy, where he was again imprisoned. At the end of the war, he went to Trieste where he lived for five years before making his way to the United States. Simic’s mother attempted to escape postwar Yugoslavia but was imprisoned with Charles and his younger brother by the Communists. Charles, his brother, and his mother ultimately moved to Paris, where they lived for a year before emigrating to the United States in 1954 where they joined Charles’s father after a decade apart.

The family lived in New York for a year before moving to the Chicago suburb of Oak Park where Simic graduated from the same high school as Ernest Hemingway. His first poems were published in the Chicago Review in 1959. Working nights at the Chicago Sun Times, he attended the University of Chicago but, in 1961, was drafted into the US Army and served until 1963. In 1964, he married fashion designer Helen Dubin, with whom he has a son and a daughter. He earned a bachelor’s degree from NYU in 1966, and his first poetry collection, What the Grass Says, was published in 1967. He became a US citizen in 1971 and taught at the University of New Hampshire for 34 years. He and his wife live in Strafford, New Hampshire.

Prolific as well as acclaimed, Charles Simic has published over sixty books in the U.S. and abroad. In addition to being a distinguished poet, he is also an eminent translator, essayist, critic, and editor. A 1990 Pulitzer Prize recipient, he was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 2000. He has received numerous awards, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He served as the United States Poet Laureate from 2007–2008 and, among other honors and awards, he has received the PEN Translation Prize, the International Griffin Poetry Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award, and the Frost Medal.

Imagistic and terse, Charles Simic’s poetry is characterized by dark imagery and incongruity—a stunning blend of originality and genius that produces a style unmatched in contemporary poetry. A post-modernist and a surrealist, Simic is also a minimalist who trims away everything “extra” to create a streamlined effect intensified by surprising concurrences of language and imagery. His poetry is like waking in a darkened room and unexpectedly recognizing the strangeness in familiar furniture forms.

_______________

Adele Kenny: My mother’s family came from Eastern Europe and suffered greatly during the First World War. (My grandfather spent six and a half years in a Siberian prison camp.) When they came to this country, my grandparents and my uncles (who were children) felt an enormous sense of displacement. Did you feel similarly when you came to this country and, if so, did that make itself felt in your poetry?

Charles Simic: Not in my case. I was sixteen years old when I came in 1954 with my mother and younger brother to join my father, whom we had not seen since 1944, so it was a happy occasion. Plus, everything that I was in love with, American literature, jazz, movies and girls, were waiting for me in New York City. Neither then, nor now, have I had any nostalgia for Europe.

AK: How have the darknesses of your childhood in Belgrade, such experiences as being a drafted into the U.S. army and serving as a military policeman in France and Germany, and Eastern Europe’s past impacted your poetry?

CS: Growing up in wartime, being bombed, seeing atrocities, going hungry and spending a little time in prison shaped my outlook on life. My poems are full of allusions to such experiences, not just mine, but to those of many other human beings in other wars and other times.

AK: How are you “the last Napoleonic soldier?”

     

CS: I and my family belong to the great masses of defeated humanity who fought in every war in history without wanting to and came back home either in a coffin or without an arm or a leg. When I wrote that poem this destiny of ours struck me as very funny.

AK: As a Post-Modernist poet, you successfully avoid the obsessive biographical preoccupation with “I” and “me” that has dominated poetry in recent years. How do nonrepresentational awareness and personal experience co-exist in your poetry?

CS: A poem is a work of art made up of imagination and reality. I’m more interested in writing a good poem then telling the reader about myself. Of course, I use my own experiences, but I also make up things.

AK: It has been remarked that your style is characterized by simplicity and strangeness with an unsettling quality. Dark imagery and irony are seen in many of your poems, along with nods to the surreal and to the farcical. How do you view these elements as characteristic of your work?

CS: This is how I see the world. As someone whose memories begin with April 6, 1941 when he was three years old, when a German bomb hit the building across the street from his and threw him out of bed at five o’clock in the morning, this is an inevitable condition. My parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts were the same way. History has made us into a family of cheerful pessimists.

AK: Your book The World Doesn’t End: Prose Poems (1990), received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. What is it about prose poems that appeals to you?

CS: Because they’re not like any other kind of writing and thus impossible to anticipate how they will turn out. I never sit down to write a “prose poem.” I scribble in my notebooks and some of these scribbles every once in a while strike me as being able to stand alone and are worth keeping. What shall we call them? I asked my editor. Let’s call them prose poems, she said, so that’s what they became.

AK: Is there anything in your poems that has surprised or startled you?

CS: My returning again and again over the years to certain moods and images like Edward Hopper whose paintings share the same limited subject matter and the same atmosphere.

AK: How do you see poetry as a place in which the poet can achieve freedom?

CS: Poetry is freedom. The best poems never imitate, never worry what other people think. That’s why there’s so much poetry in the world. Where else would human beings find a place where they can let their feelings and their imagination run free? That’s what attracted me to poetry when I first started reading it and writing it fifty-five years ago, and it still does today.

A Few Things to Keep in Mind While Sitting Down to Write a Poem

from Charles Simic

1. Don't tell the readers what they already know about life.

2. Don't assume you're the only one in the world who suffers.

3. Some of the greatest poems in the language are sonnets and poems not many lines longer than that, so don't overwrite.

4. The use of images, similes and metaphors make poems concise. Close your eyes, and let your imagination tell you what to do.

5. Say the words you are writing aloud and let your ear decide what word comes next.

6. What you are writing down is a draft that will need additional tinkering, perhaps many months, and even years of tinkering.

7. Remember, a poem is a time machine you are constructing, a vehicle that will allow someone to travel in their own mind, so don't be surprised if it takes a while to get all its engine parts properly working.

Acknowledgment: “A Few Things to Keep in Mind …” is reprinted with the permission of Charles Simic and the Library of Congress http://www.loc.gov/poetry/writingpoetry.html.

Poems by Charles Simic:

"I Am the Last"

"Autumn Sky"

"Riddle" (Audio)

"This Morning"

Seven Prose Poems

Tiferet offers five digital issues and one print issue every year.  Each issue is packed with high quality fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, interviews, reviews, and visual art.

Contributors have included Robert Bly, Ray Bradbury, Gerald Stern, Nikki Giovanni, Ilan Stavans, Stephen Dunn, Alicia Ostriker, Robert Pinsky, Ed Hirsch, Jane Hirshfield, Dorianne Laux, Renée Ashley, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Laura Boss, Robert Carnevale, and Joe Weil (among many, many others).

Be Sure to Visit Tiferet Online

 www.tiferetjournal.com

If you'd like to subscribe, click here!