Happy weekend poets! How do you get to know someone new? Or someone you thought you knew but who constantly surprises you? Ask questions! So get ready to ask your poet self some probing questions. The answers may surprise you. Here’s your (optional) daily prompt.
Interview Questions. Find a set of interview questions and answer some or all of them. Make your answers into a poem, omitting the questions. You could use classic job interview questions. Or, how about Huffington Post’s list of 84 questions to ask on a first date? Or, you could answer some of the 36 “questions that lead to love” detailed in a popular article from the New York Times column Modern Love.
I decided to use questions from a podcast I sometimes listen to called the 10-Minute Writer’s Workshop. They always start out by asking the author they are interviewing whether the first sentence or the last sentence is the most difficult to write. I wound up writing my whole poem as a response to just that question.
Writing Poems
First lines swarm you like bees,
pattern your neck with their probing footsteps,
breach the collar of your shirt.
You writhe with their tiptoed testing of your contours.
You may intoxicate them,
with incense sticks or syncopation—
that one lilting note in Vivaldi’s “Spring”
gets them every time—but
scraping, burrowing, they persist.
They have come to make honey
and will not be deterred.
Last lines are four-leaf clovers.
You can stare yourself blind for hours
in a patch of turf. Then you see it.
It was there all the time.
Pluck it, press it in a book.
But when you open it again,
a little dried husk falls out, shatters.
It’s not at all what you remember.
And you throw yourself down in the field
to look again.