This week’s prompt comes
from guest blogger, Gail Fishman Gerwin—
get ready to call up your kinfolk!
From Gail:
My late aunt Helen Stern
Mann, who met challenges with courage, humor, and high dives, began all her
letters to us with Dear Kinfolk,.
This greeting provided the title for my poetry collection, which deals with kin
by blood, kin by marriage, kin by experience. So many of our memories call on
these kin: perhaps feuding aunts, spouses (current, former, or fantasy), loving
parents and grandparents, siblings, children, grandchildren, cousins, and even
the animal kinfolk we love(d). This week, in a spirit of honoring our family
members, I invite you to think about your
kinfolk and to write poems about them. Here’s one of mine from Dear Kinfolk,:
Smothered
with Love
1
Foam or feather, says my daughter
when
I forget
where I left my keys,
where my glasses hide,
what happened yesterday.
Foam or feather, she says, lets
me
choose the pillow she’ll use
to
smother me if I forget who she is.
2
The
pillow engulfs my head,
I
struggle, then give in to the white
void,
my arms at rest, parentheses
against
my sides, my legs slack,
toes
point out second position.
3
I
climb over the hedge that separates
the
old real from the new real, see
my
mother, father, aunts, uncles,
grandparents,
friends.
They
beckon, they know I didn’t
forget
their lives, I recorded them.
Look—they
are poems.
(Prologue, Dear
Kinfolk, ChayaCairn Press, 2012)
Poetry calls on many of
us to remember, to honor people who touch(ed) our lives, events that linger in
our hearts, places we cannot erase. In the following poem from her collection “No
Longer Mine” from This Sharpening
(Tupelo Press, 2006), Ellen Doré Watson, who heads the Poetry Center at Smith
College, honors her mother whose indelible mark she can’t relinquish:
How many years will my
mother go on passing/the anniversary of her subtraction, the day the
first/piece of her slipped off into wet grass or got left/in the parking lot
like a scarf lost and the end of winter/and not missed until the next? Why
mourn the day/my daughter takes possession of her body — mother,/daughter, no
longer mine as if they ever were? Who/flipped the switch from wishing to remember
to trying/to forget? It’s all recorded, each scintilla, memory dozing/until
some rasp or whiff heralds its return and leads us/back without our knowing.
Brain whorls are funny/that way, forever rearranging us — daughter
opening/because she says so, mother a watercolor fading to plain/paper, not
because of not remembering but because/her mouth no longer makes words; she
lives beneath/her eyelids because she can no longer name the world.
In "My Grandmother's Bed," Edward Hirsch takes
us on a trip that calls on our senses to share his beloved grandmother’s
apartment and his childhood nights within. In "A Dog Has Died," Pablo Neruda’s matter-of-fact voice
belies the tragedy of a pet’s loss. He takes us on a voyage that questions
one’s own existence and place in the world.
This week, think about
your kinfolk and write a poem that calls on your memories. Maybe there’s an old
photo in your own archives that will prompt you. A wedding, a drive for a
holiday visit, a conversation long overdue, people you cannot identify. Share
your kinfolk.
Guidelines:
1. Give your kinfolk voice. Write a poem from a
kin’s point of view.
2. Write from your childhood point of view or write
as an adult looking back.
3. Take readers to your kin’s home: the
furniture, the meals, chatter among visitors, dust under the sofa.
4. Adopt a relative you admired or disdained:
your friend’s mother, father, sibling.
5. Write a poem that lets readers know how you
feel about the subject without spelling out these feelings.
6. Write a poem that places your kinfolk in history;
use images that define that period.
Tips:
1. Tap your memory for your kin’s qualities; note
those you want to feature.
2. Use interesting enjambments (See Watson
poem).
3. Take a look at your poem sideways. Is there
an interesting line pattern?
4. Try a prose poem.
5. Don’t forget imagery.
6. Use stanza breaks to show time lapses.
7. Let your thoughts flow; let stanzas run into
each other.
8. Try a poem with short lines, no more than
four words each.
9. Try repetition at the end of each stanza.
10. Have fun as you bring kin to life in your
words.
Examples:
__________________________________________________________
Sincerest
thanks to Gail for sharing with us this week!
You Can Order a Copy of Gail’s Book by Visiting www.chayacairnpress.com.
