Vibe: tense, uneasy, unsettled
Rejections: 11
The email 2 hours ago said FWD: FYI:
last Friday 1 of our students threatened to rape another
I teach both though not together & I’m shredding
into lined strips of notebook paper
Read more at Kitchen Table Quarterly.
In some ways, this is my most collaborative poem. I wrote the first draft in a community poetry class, and received excellent feedback from my fellow writers. Then I revised the poem sitting in a coffee shop with two other poets, who were kind enough to weigh in, multiple times, as I experimented with word choice*, punctuation and spacing, until we were all satisfied.
*They also brought my attention to the fact that "stationery," a term we use in the UK to mean anything you might find inside a pencil case, is more likely to make an American reader think of correspondence materials. Maybe one day I'll write more about how I navigate having 3 versions of English in my brain!
Fun fact: this poem has a fraternal twin of sorts, a piece called "A Body of Water" (which inspired the prompt referenced in the poem) that is still in the draft stage.
My Kitchen Table Quarterly page-mate, Caitlin Palo, was kind enough to send me a note about what she liked and noticed in "Estuaries," so I'd like to do the same for her! Here's the beginning of her wonderful poem "Yellow":
First color after dark and light,
color of new leaves and daffodils,
the ugliest color, some say, of wallpaper
madness, of my least favorite Beatles song
Read more at Kitchen Table Quarterly.
One of my first observations of this poem was that the color yellow is both present and absent. The title introduces the color, but then it's not repeated; it's up to us to imagine yellow in combination with skies, plants, songs and drawings. Even when the word yellow is mentioned directly—"chocolate, not yellow," "neither whites nor yellow yolks"—it's to draw attention to its lack.
I love how this culminates with "powders and whites, which no longer / keep the old linens white," i.e., they're most likely yellowed. Notice how the poet does not tell us that explicitly, but gives us enough information to connect the dots.
I can't resist telling you my favorite line break of the poem: "of wallpaper / madness." (Runner up: "there's nothing / mellow here.") My brain had so much fun with the process of association and surprise. Wallpaper... wait, now we're onto madness... Hmm: Yellow + Wallpaper + Madness = aha! Charlotte Perkins Gilman!
A lot of writers (myself included) struggle with how much guidance to offer the reader. To a certain extent, the reader's expectations will depend on the genre—but there's also the matter of personal taste. To me, "Yellow" has the perfect balance of clarity and mystery.
Prompt
Write a poem (or find an old one) about something messy or intangible, and arrange the words in a highly structured form, i.e., through spacing, meter, rhyme, etc. OR Write about a colo(u)r.