Day Twenty-Two

Happy Thursday, everyone, and happy twenty-second day of Na/GloPoWriMo.

Our featured participant today is again, two participants. If you all would just stop writing such great poems, I could probably get myself back down to one. Oh well! First up, we have Connect/Hook, with a rollicking and silly response to the “double deed” prompt for Day 21, and My Musings Through Life, which brings us a softer, more haunting response.

Today, our featured reading is a pre-recorded one, which you can enjoy whenever you have the time. It’s the poet James Dickey (who despite having been the Poet Laureate of the United states, is probably best remembered for his novel, Deliverance, and the film it inspired), reading his poems for the Library of Congress back in 1960.

Finally, here’s our (optional) prompt for the day. It comes to us from Poets & Writers’ “The Time is Now” column, which provides weekly poetry prompts, as well as weekly fiction and creative non-fiction prompts.

In a prompt originally posted this past February, Poets & Writers directs us to an essay by Urvi Kumbhat on the use of mangoes in diasporic literature. As she discusses in her essay, mangoes have become a sort of shorthand or symbol that writers use to invoke an entire culture, country, or way of life. This has the beauty of simplicity – but also the problems of simplicity, in that you really can’t sum up a culture in a single image or item, and you risk cliché if you try.

But at the same time, the “staying power” of the mango underscores the strength of metonymy in poetry. Following Poets & Writers’ prompt, today I’d like to challenge you to write a poem that invokes a specific object as a symbol of a particular time, era, or place.

Happy writing!