Day 25 - 30
Senior Moderator: Kimberley Chia Qin
Pick one prompt from your week. What was your process in coming up with this prompt?
Day 29, the I Have Loved Everyone I Have Ever Known prompt, was probably my most vanilla prompt but I thoroughly enjoyed reading the poems it inspired—I think what I was really (indulgently) doing was trying to reverse engineer some of my favourite poems. I had been looking at a couple of pieces that I often find myself returning to—among them Elhillo’s “Spring”, and Al Mamun’s “On Saturday I Held a Flag”—and trying to distill what moored me to them across time; what about them hitched my breath. I figured that it was, quite plainly, kinship and affection, and how they were written about even (and especially) amid affliction, and/or however fleeting the resultant moment. Most of all, I wanted to see what that looked like to and on different people.
What were you looking out for, and what kinds of poems were you expecting?
Vulnerability, inevitably and importantly.
In particular, I hoped for poems that spoke to a closeness that often feels intuitive but elusive for all of us, where writers were candid and astute in articulating that push and pull. I was also interested in ones that gestured to a warmth buoyed and made by the currents of grief, by making space for both those things within.
I was keen for a sonnet or two as well, hence the bonus prompt—a form fitting for both the great and little loves of our lives. And I ended up being granted more than two!
Can you share 1-2 poems that surprised you and why?
It was a divine experience to read Mirya S. Chua’s to the non binary baddie who hugged me in front of the hachiko statue, and others. Not only for the sheer inventiveness of having the option to toggle between the recurring “always/likely/maybe/never” and what that consequently asked of the reader, but also because every turn of phrase was so stark—each at once a delight and surprise (“there will be some small love always/ we will participate always in genuinity/ always with you with the pretty glasses” was a highlight for me). Also: excellent use of the gushing bonus with a rhythm that lent itself to varying sentiments, depending on which word you toggled to (I saw it as affirmation/ hope/ desperation/ grief).
Bonus shoutout: I feel like I should’ve expected this, but I was warmed and surprised by how many poems spoke of the community they found through writing and SPWM. Every one was such a treat to read and a little universe on its own.
Select 1-2 poems responding to your favourite prompt. Were there any lines/poems you wished you had written yourself?
I adored Chrystal’s Strawberry Prompt (after Kimmerer’s “The Gift of Strawberries”), where she invited writers to write about a nonhuman being that raised them. We don’t give enough credit to many nonhuman things (read: TREES) that inform the ways we interact with the world. I particularly enjoyed when writers treated the prompt with an expansiveness that birthed poems both absurd and warming.
Esme Sedket, in YOU WERE BORN TO OUTRUN A STEEL BOX GOING 100KM/H, chose to write about being raised by the colour green, which was such a fun take on the prompt. I liked how they reckoned with/ unpacked the notion of being raised by, and the relationship between colour, instruction and autonomy. A very distinct voice that gathered rhythm with each revelation, up till its ending refrain “i am green i am green i am green”.
Pamela Seong Koon's the details was also endlessly beautiful and heartbreaking.
I do wish I wrote Conan’s socks (link to SPWM Discord) from day 3:
”how you disrupted my sadness like a savage/ monkey swinging from class to class/ like you were always arriving somewhere in the recesses of my heart”
ARE YOU KIDDING ME.
I also wish I wrote Jack Xi’s All of Us Icemen, which I selected as one of the winners for The Pain Prompt (Day 25) prize, for its distinctly luscious and lyrical storytelling (see: “Ötzi* didn’t die alone. We know/ from the arrowhead/ asleep in his wound./ Even copper age air traffic/ knew how to be cruel”).
*I also learnt from this poem that Ötzi is the world’s oldest natural mummy! Got to love a poem with pedagogical value.