“When we name things simply, with words preceding their meaning, a cosmic narration takes place. Does the discovery of origins remove the dust?” writes painter and poet Etel Adnan in Shifting the Silence (Nightboat Books, 2020). “It reminds me of a childhood of emptiness which seems to have taken me near the beginning of space and time.” Following her thoughts as they “drip, not unlike the faucet,” Adnan demonstrates the power in trusting clear language, without ornament, and in doing so she offers a testament to poetry as a space built by the self for illumination and inwardness. Spend some time in a space where you can observe nature and take note of your surroundings. With Adnan’s words in mind, write a poem that considers what you see without concentrating on its meaning, when you “remove the dust.” How does this exercise strip the poem’s voice to its essential parts?

Many might think of the great Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci as naturally gifted, but Francesca Fiorani, author of The Shadow Drawing: How Science Taught Leonardo How to Paint (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020), points out in an excerpt published on Literary Hub that even the prolific virtuoso, at one point, did not know how to paint. It wasn’t until after a series of experiments with a candle did da Vinci learn how to realistically paint light, writing that “every shadow made by an opaque body smaller than the source of light casts derivative shadows tinged by the color of their original shadow.” Inspired by da Vinci, write about a time when a deep study helped you overcome an obstacle, whether in writing or life. What kind of focus was necessary to see a solution more clearly?

Crowd-sourced video hosting website YouTube has compiled over fifteen years of a variety of content, making it an accessible resource for historical footage. From early documentaries made in the 1990s, to remastered and colorized footage from the beginning of the twentieth century, including views of Tokyo streets in 1913, Market Street in San Francisco in 1906, and Tverskaya Street in Moscow in 1896, and footage of cities around the world in the 1890s. Using one of these videos, or one of your choosing, pick out a face and write a scene in the life of that person. What concerns are specific to this era, and which are still relevant today?

Last month, Poets & Writers’ Readings and Workshops program, with support from the Hearst Foundation, cofunded three virtual literary events for the 2020 New Orleans Words and Music Festival. Due to the pandemic this year, instead of purchasing tickets, donations were suggested to attend virtual events. Proceeds from the four-day festival provide literacy resources for adults, education programs for incarcerated adults and teens, and free community programming in New Orleans through Words & Music’s parent organization, One Book One New Orleans. Here are the three events:

1. Queering the South: LGBTQ+ Writers on Home, Love, and History
A discussion and reading curated by New Orleans poet Brad Richard with a panel featuring Matthew Draughter, M’Bilia Meekers, and Megan Volpert.

2. Heartbreak, or Research? Poets on the Writing Process
A discussion and reading curated by Stacey Balku with panelists Elizabeth Gross, Skye Jackson, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Melinda Palacio, and Rebecca Morgan Frank.

3. The Power of Jazz and Place in Tom Dent Poetry: A Workshop With Skye Jackson
Writers from an earlier workshop hosted by Skye Jackson were invited to read their work, including Stacey Balkun, Joshua Benitez, Liz Granite, Sonny Miro, Kiana Naquin, and Lisa O’Neill.

Bonus: Poets, Presidents, and Pandemics: A Reading for These Times
Catch our literary outreach coordinators from Houston and Detroit, Lupe Mendez and Justin Rogers, read with Pulitzer Prize–winning author Tyehimba Jess for a virtual event I curated.

If you missed the festival or any affiliated events, you can view them at the YouTube channel for One Book One New Orleans.

Find out more about funding for events through the Readings & Workshops program.

“Everybody’s got a song / they’ve gotta sing. / So they say. So they / think,” begins Rita Dove’s poem “The Spring Cricket’s Discourse on Critics,” published in the Believer this month. The deftly enjambed poem uses the perspective of a cricket and its ability to use its legs to chirp, known as stridulation, to discuss an artist’s defense against critics believing “they can / just… crank out the golden / tunes.” Use the perspective of an insect or an animal whose abilities come naturally to examine an aspect of being a poet. Try enjambment in your poem to emphasize particular words.

“You kissed the ones you loved and the ones you didn’t even like that much, sometimes even someone you hated, just so you wouldn’t seem shady. Too much garlic was never a problem, we kissed anyway. We kissed the living and the dying, knowing that the dying were part of the living and we wanted to keep them with us.” In this passage from Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s nonfiction book The Freezer Door, forthcoming in December from Semiotext(e), she writes about the kiss greeting embedded in queer cultural norms she adopted while living in San Francisco in the early 1990s. What happens to gestures of intimacy during a pandemic at the time of year traditionally associated with family and friends, holiday festivities, and gatherings in close proximity? Write a personal or lyric essay that meditates on memories of intimacy from your past, perhaps also exploring how your perceptions or modes of intimacy have changed over the course of the past year.

“No room in Toronto is ever used in the way it was originally intended. That’s what happens in a city always trying to reinvent itself. Like it has an itch it can’t scratch. Like it has a commitment problem.” At the beginning of Catherine Hernandez’s second novel, Crosshairs, forthcoming in December from Atria Books, the protagonist narrates a missive to his lover from his hiding place in a friend’s dark basement. In Hernandez’s description of the setting—a dystopian version of Toronto where a fascist government regime has rounded up marginalized communities into labor camps—one can see the ways in which identity can be layered or transformed through time, whether applied to rooms or cities or gender roles. Write a short story in which a change that’s occurring for the main character is reflected in some way through the setting. How might an environment evolve or change shape as a person does? Conversely, how does a person’s behavior sometimes resemble the shifting characteristics of a physical space?

Hey mi gente. Hope you’re all staying safe. I’m continuing this series of interviews with Houston writers during the COVID-19 pandemic, offering them a space to respond to this question:

What have you been doing since the pandemic?

This week we hear from Ayokunle Falomo who is Nigerian, American, and the author of the poetry chapbook African, American (New Delta Review, 2019) and two self-published collections. A recipient of fellowships from Vermont Studio Center and MacDowell, his work has been published in the New York Times, Michigan Quarterly Review, the Texas Review, New England Review, and elsewhere. Falomo’s readings have been featured on Write About Now and Houston Public Media. He holds a BS in Psychology from the University of Houston, a Specialist in School Psychology degree from Sam Houston State University, and is currently an MFA in poetry candidate at the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program.

Here’s his response:

“Since the pandemic started, which feels like a decade ago now, I have mostly been (at)tending to the things that need it in my life. I’ve been reacquainting myself with beauty and truth. I’ve been learning. A lot about myself. I’ve been nursing a broken heart back to health. I’ve been teaching. I’ve been writing. I’ve been reading. A lot. I’ve been taking walks. I’ve been grieving the loss of the future I once imagined. I’ve been running. I’ve been cooking. I’ve been learning, slowly, how to embrace the future that’s mine now. I’ve been learning how to sit still. I’ve been grateful. I’ve been watching shows on Netflix. I’ve been resentful. I’ve been....”

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