LBI Poets Studio

Whether you are an accomplished poet or a new one, our monthly workshop will inspire you. To attend this virtual event please contact Sue Cummings via email scummings817@comcast.net.

This group meets the 1st Thursday of every month from 1:00 pm - 3:00 pm on Zoom. You may also join the program in-person at the LBI Library in the meeting room each month.

Our Prompt for April is to write a poem which takes as its subject "wind," and utilizes a word, a phrase, or a line from Lance Larsen's poem, Dear First Draft of This Poem.

Dear First Draft of This Poem

by Lance Larsen

I wrote you by hand but can barely read you now.

What beautiful cross-outs you offer

the world! Is that a comma or a smeared gnat?

I wanted to stay in you forever.

Six months later, in the teeth of winter,

you seem freshly naive. Elegy and carpe diem

competing in a lovely word salad, no need

to explain what Wile E. Coyote in stanza 1

has to do with Grandpa Mac wearing nothing

but scraps of steam and floating like balsa

in stanza 3. Mark this: I felt young in you.

And deliciously irresponsible. In your margin,

a list: bread, peaches, tofu, kalamata olives,

chips, cat food, donut holes, lemon curd …

Was I going shopping later or imagining

Emily Dickinson hanging a left at Mount

Holyoke for a stop at Market Basket?

I have no idea. Here I go again, talking to paper.

You were greedy to include everything:

Ariadne’s red thread, Sartre hiding

in his sister’s closet after he won the Nobel,

a scared hamster. Let some later me

decide what stays. Until then, help me

translate a few phrases. Kaleidoscopic arcs

of water, were they meant to be sprinklers?

Telestial gods: sparrow hawks slicing the sky

into a playground of above and below? As for

the hamster: not mine but Randy Thomas’s.

We found her after school fat with the babies

she had devoured, except for a tidy pile

of tails and feet. Is that your key trauma,

First Draft? Or me seeing my mom naked

a few lines later? I wish you’d help me

make up my mind. In you, First Draft,

I have just been born and I’ll never die.

In you, everything was still possible.

In you, I tried not to care about symbols.

The sun was literally going down. Wisps

of mist, aspen leaves quavering. Magpie

doing clever magpie things on a fence.

I was almost happy. When I closed my eyes,

flecks of blue coalesced then began to rise.

As a Bonus Challenge use three or more of the following words selected at random from Niall William's novel, As It Is In Heaven.

puzzles, throw, drafty, vast, drunken, minor, twenty, schoolteacher, wider, Puccini,  thumb, quick, slackness, crooked, astonishment, glass, lilies, brim, damp, tailoring fluctuations, clock, racket, spirits, patterns, knight, wrinkle, habits, unintelligible, searing, stole, measure, rectitude, thrumming, triangle, green, seduced, coat, propped, wallpaper, long-suffering, bandage, waved, twisted, fifteen, Aesop, lusciousness, fading, petrol, crown, impotent, version, remoteness, soured, slippery, spores, caresses, discordant, persuade, hair, season, white, continent, floating, hallway, Nelly, indigenous, contemporaneous, ruined, vanished, primal, timeless, puppet, trickle, regret, nausea, tart, enchantments, vanished, landscape, ditch

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