Intro

Welcome to the Poetry Professor Podcast with Stephen Cavitt, where every week I read you an original poem and then we talk about its key technique. This season, you’ll hear poems from my book Noctis Terrores. Today I’ll read “Pocket Universes”, and we’ll talk about whimsical poems. Here’s…

Pocket Universes

If I was your dad and your best friend slept over and she got her period in the middle of the night, I’d drive to Walgreens and slip you tampons in the hallway when she wasn’t looking. If I was your dad and your college boyfriend came home on Thanksgiving, I’d roll out a sleeping bag on the couch, hitting the pillow twice to fluff it up, and tell him we don’t sleep together in this house until we’re married or at least in grad school. Your friends would tell you, I wish he was my dad, and you’d roll your eyes. If I was your dad, I’d call you Sport. You wouldn’t hate it until you were nine. Years later, in a thunderstorm, you’d hear it, an echo down the years—Sport, Sport—and you’d start to cry.

Discuss

I have no idea what this poem is doing. Is it a poem about how I wish I was a dad? Probably. Who’s the poem to? Great question. How do I know it’s a poem? Well, it has a few clues. Number one, it’s full of precise sensory details. Number two, it’s a collection of instants. It covers more than one moment in time. We move from childhood, to teenager, to grownup, but it’s not summary; it’s not big summary statements. There are exact moments within those years that we cover briefly. And three, it ends on a nice line with action, so the ending rings out beyond the poem.

The moral of the story or the moral of the poem is this: You’re going to write for years. Keep it interesting. Try new things, take some chances. Write a poem that isn’t like most of the poems you usually write. Sometimes it happens by itself, like it did for me with this poem. Other times you have to go chasing it. You have to look for the different:

• You can do that deliberately with prompts. 
• You could do it by co-writing a poem where each of you writes a line and then waits for the other. 
• You might flip open a book and pick five words at random and write those words into a poem. 
• You could make a found poem, where you take a page in a thrift store book or a newspaper or a magazine article, and you use a marker to black out all of the words except the ones that you want.
• You could try formal poems, like a ghazal or a sonnet. You can Google formal poetry or types of formal poems to get some ideas. 
• You could give yourself some semi-formal or structural challenges. I’m going to write a poem with seven syllables per line. Today, it’s 10 syllables. I’ll have five lines per stanza this time. There are free syllable counter websites on the internet that will help. 
• You might try a week of haiku. 
• You could even try those short “Insta-Poems” that are popular now on social media. 

This book, Noctis Terrores, is all literary poetry. But my former research assistant, Sadie Wilkie, and I adapted many of them into Insta-Poems that you can see on Facebook and Instagram @StephenCavittPoetry, and they’ll be up there until I give up on social media again. 

We took excerpts from the poems and made them into their own little square poems, thinking about visual shapes and line breaks, and it was a blast to work in a new genre. We might even talk about Insta-Poems in another future episode of the pod. But just try new things. If you do the same thing over and over for decades, you might get good at that one thing, but you’re probably going to get bored, and you may lose some of that zing or power that’s in the poems themselves.

I want your inner child to keep splashing. Paint all across the pages of your heart. So play, write some whimsical poems, try something new; you’re in this for the long haul and play keeps the joy alive. Let’s hear “Pocket Universes” one more time. What is this poem even doing?

Pocket Universes

If I was your dad and your best friend slept over and she got her period in the middle of the night, I’d drive to Walgreens and slip you tampons in the hallway when she wasn’t looking. If I was your dad and your college boyfriend came home on Thanksgiving, I’d roll out a sleeping bag on the couch, hitting the pillow twice to fluff it up, and tell him we don’t sleep together in this house until we’re married or at least in grad school. Your friends would tell you, I wish he was my dad, and you’d roll your eyes. If I was your dad, I’d call you Sport. You wouldn’t hate it until you were nine. Years later, in a thunderstorm, you’d hear it, an echo down the years—Sport, Sport—and you’d start to cry.

Prompt

If you’re writing along with me, write a poem that’s different than the poetry you usually write.

Use one of the prompts I mentioned earlier in our discussion or something else. Or just give yourself permission to be weird. Play a little; you deserve it.

Outro

Thanks so much for listening to the Poetry Professor Podcast with Stephen Cavitt. This season I’m reading poems from my book Noctis Terrores. It’s available now on Kindle Unlimited and in print at major online booksellers, and there’s a link in the episode description. You can support the show by picking up a copy.

I’ll see you next week.