Stephen Cavitt

The Poetry Professor Season 1, Episode 21

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.

In today’s episode, you’ll hear “Forty is Another Country”, and we’ll talk about writing prompts. Here’s…

Forty is Another Country

We’re three shots in, and I taste hound dog and vinegar. Albert always brings the cheap stuff. I’ve never seen him fly a bonfire without a bottle Velcroed to his hand. Tonight the man’s so drunk he’d jump thunder if it winked at him. For years, he ran the only record store in town, swam in velvet Elvis shirts and evergreen air fresheners, hit on college girls, called everyone honey. But since the shop burned down, he’s popcorn. He’s all over the place, loose black T-shirts and gray in his beard, and we take turns driving him home. In high school, he laughed like a boxer. Now he’s swallowed lemons. There’s a car horn in his head when he sleeps. He arcs the bottle through the wood smoke. I want to tell him it’ll be alright, but all I can think about is that Matthew Arnold poem we memorized in school: the world, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams, hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light. We are here as on a darkling plain where ignorant armies clash by night.

Discuss

I wrote this poem in a storytelling workshop at the Florida Storytelling Festival with Orlando Poet Laureate Shawn Welcome. Shawn had us list some nouns and verbs and adjectives, and he wrote them on the board, and then we mixed and matched from different people’s words. We moved words into different categories, so try some nouns as adjectives or try verbs as nouns. I didn’t actually write a story, which was the point of the workshop, but I did get this great prose poem, and Shawn was supportive with that genre switch.

It is different from most of the other poems in the book because of its use of language, it has its own consistent and slightly weird language, almost apocalyptic. Here are some of the phrases that are unusual for me that the prompt called forth. So we’ve got:

  •  “…I taste Hound dog and vinegar.” 
  • “I’ve never seen him fly a bonfire…”
  • “…a bottle velcroed to his hand.”
  • “So drunk, he’d jump thunder.”
  • “…swam in velvet Elvis shirts…”
  • “He’s popcorn. He’s all over the place.”
  • “In high school, he laughed like a boxer.”
  • “Now he’s swallowed lemons.”
  •  “…a car horn in his head when he sleeps.”

Working with the prompt and Shawn’s awesome idea of mixing words into different categories– verbs, adjectives–and shuffling verbs and adjectives and nouns got me out of my usual neural grooves, my habitual ways of saying things. And that’s what’s great about prompts; you skip a groove in the record and it wakes you up a little bit.

Let’s hear the poem one more time, and listen for the ways that the prompt called forth a different kind of language than what you might have heard in other episodes. Here’s…

Forty is Another Country

We’re three shots in, and I taste hound dog and vinegar. Albert always brings the cheap stuff. I’ve never seen him fly a bonfire without a bottle Velcroed to his hand. Tonight the man’s so drunk he’d jump thunder if it winked at him. For years, he ran the only record store in town, swam in velvet Elvis shirts and evergreen air fresheners, hit on college girls, called everyone honey. But since the shop burned down, he’s popcorn. He’s all over the place, loose black T-shirts and gray in his beard, and we take turns driving him home. In high school, he laughed like a boxer. Now he’s swallowed lemons. There’s a car horn in his head when he sleeps. He arcs the bottle through the wood smoke. I want to tell him it’ll be alright, but all I can think about is that Matthew Arnold poem we memorized in school: the world, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams, hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light. We are here as on a darkling plain where ignorant armies clash by night.

Prompt

If you’re writing along with me, let’s try something different. Today, I’m going to send you out into the world. Poets and Writers Magazine has more than 2000 writing prompts on their website at the time of this recording. Now, this is not a paid sponsorship, unfortunately. I just trust them; but Poets and Writers, if you’ve got money to throw around, I’m right here. 

On their website, you can limit by genre, and a new poetry prompt comes out every Tuesday. I’ll put the link in the episode description. Go there, choose a genre and select poetry from the pull down menu; then hit filter. Scroll through those prompts until one catches your eye and give it a try. Have fun doing something new.

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.

Links

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