I was sitting at my dining table this morning with a cup of coffee looking out over the still smoky and haze-ridden sky we had experienced on the Olympic Peninsula for a week because of fires in Eastern Washington and in British Columbia. Sometimes we couldn’t see the islands so close to our shores here in Port Townsend, couldn’t see the sun but for the smallish round orange in the sky that eye specialists said not to stare at because even though we could see it through smoke, the smoke didn’t remove the rays harmful to the eyes.

The air had been discouraging, the days weird with the numbers of people staying inside, their windows closed, and the numbers wearing N95 face masks in their cars quadrupling steadily at the grocery stores and banks, and on our streets, something like in a science fiction body-snatcher film. Is this a welcome to the new normal, our future summers? We have had low-grade headaches and felt prickles in our eyes. Summer camp sports games and flights have been canceled. Though the air this evening is finally rated good again with our customary offshore breezes carrying the smoke away, we are worried. What have we been breathing in? What are the long-term health effects as this becomes a new summer normal?

These questions in the forefront for me, I opened my email and found the Poem-a-Day project had sent me one. I read “As in We Will Not Pass” by Amy Sara Carroll and immediately wanted to abandon my email and write my own poem inspired by the structure of Carroll’s short prose poem. Please click over and read her poem before you read on to what I wrote.

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I admired her short phrases and the way she associated one line to the next, from flour to flower (homonyms), from glowered to glowed (wordplay), from dichroic (listed as a misspelling of diachronic) at the start to the properly spelled diachronic at the end (a word that means “exhibiting two opposite traits at different times”). A word without the “n” an accepted misspelling and the word with the “n” the correct spelling, one word presenting itself correctly and incorrectly at different times.

What would I do if, in my current mood of despair concerning the skies and the future, I was to play in writing the way Amy Sara Carroll seems to have?

Though The Forecast Called for Clearing Yesterday

Smoke again. Ash on the car. Directions: Brushing it off will scratch the paint.
Not the normal way. Townspeople wear N95 masks. Thieves have robbed us of our science.

Muffled voices of the many who know the world will end in fire. And in floods. Hurricanes.
My mother’s hurricane lamp, candles protected from sudden drafts. Chills up my spine.

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Want to stop being afraid of poetry? Want to branch out from poetry that obeys the intention of line breaks helping the poem move along? Want to see what happens? Try emulating Carroll’s poem on a subject you ponder. Then click over to the several links below. Each talks about the prose poem as a form and each has links to prose poems by famous poets. Read as many of the poems as you can.

We learn by letting our ears hear what the poet does with words and cadences and structure. We listen to best learn how we might incorporate some of what we admire in a work into our own work.

So, write a poem inspired by Carroll’s and then read about the prose poems, especially sampling those of various poets and write some more. Here are the links:

The Poet’s Revolt: A Brief Guide to the Prose Poem by Danielle Mitchell
She categorizes types of prose poems and provides links to many by famous poets.

The Poetry Foundation provides a very short definition and many links to the literary devices a prose poem uses and to prose poems by several famous poets.

The Academy of American Poets offers an excerpt from Edward Hirsh’s book The Poet’s Glossary. There are many excerpts of prose poems in this essay about the form.

Eastern Iowa Review has a page with many links to prose poems and the warning that a prose poem has to make sense and speaks in poetic language. They admit that the prose poem is sometimes a lot like flash writing.