Mileage from Titles
I know last week I said I’d tell you about Bad Stories, and I will soon. That post is waiting patiently in my drafts, but this weekend is a bit loaded and warrants something else. Yesterday my mom arrived back in town and her hair has gotten long and she casually mentioned that she wrote a children’s book (!) for the curriculum at the school in Dhaka she teaches at. She’s a wonder. I’m glad to have her back in town. It was my father’s death anniversary and we observed it by doing something very strange, all of us together–sisters and nieces and sons–that I’ll write a poem about later, I’m sure. I’m trying to finish this book in the next few months and I think having my mother in town will be very helpful for that. I’ll just transcribe our interactions and people will be like, “I don’t get it, is this a metaphor? This can’t be literal.” But it will be literal. You have the inside track on this.
Ma: don’t change a thing.
I finally just subscribed to Poetry Magazine. For all the towers of books I have, I tend not to subscribe to many print periodicals, on some kind of principle related to waste. But now I subscribe to three and I’m pretty sure I’ll become a magazine-hoarder and in a few years you’ll find me buried under National Geographic, Creative Non-Fiction, and now Poetry. What a way to go. I’ll take it. This poem by Hanif Abdurraqib is from the May issue of Poetry. It was the opening poem in the issue and I read it on the walk from the lobby of my building up to my apartment then sat down on the couch and read it again. So good.
You’ll want to see its proper formatting over at Poetry, the title links to that. Take a look at the form, the slashes instead of line breaks, and the really great mileage of the title. That’s your prompt, to begin with a title. “For the…” and write to someone/something that seems far outside of you but near enough to warrant conversation. The birds that wake you in the morning, the sidewalk you travel daily, the rain you got caught in. Then write to it. 20 minutes. It’s Sunday you guys. You have the time.
