[DAY SIX][POEMVEMBER 2022][Ross Gay’s “Poem to My Child, If Ever You Shall Be”]

Описание: Welcome to POEMVEMBER 2022! This video is DAY SIX (November 6, 2022) of daily poetry prompts based off of a poem by poets every in the whole world should read. [Humble! Opinion! Also! Fact!]

The challenge this month is to write one poem a day and to feel the pleasure of doing so.

Go to this link to watch / listen to this beautiful collaboration of Ross Gay’s voice / words and Jagjaguwar:    • Ross Gay - Poem To My Child, If Ever You S...  

PROMPT #1

Step 1: Open the YouTube video by Jagjaguwar and listen to Ross Gay read his poem “Poem to My Child, If Ever You Shall Be” at least three times. Find the button to “Loop” the video to do so.

Step 2: Choose a (or several) random YouTube video(s) and read through the comments of the while deeply listening to Ross Gay’s voice. Gather key moments from these comments and collage together language that feels accurate to your mood right now.

How does the language found in these comments build a landscape that feels true to you?

This prompt is inspired by my friend Jenna Knapp who told me there is a bliss in seeing how humane people are in the comments sections, especially on self-improvement videos and music-related videos.

PROMPT #2

Consider Ross Gay’s poem “Poem to My Child, If Ever You Shall Be” as a letter to the most important person to him, who does not exist. Reread the poem and find in it the structure of a letter, or an epistolary address. Your prompt here is to select someone who you do not get to speak to directly right now–whether they are far from you or you do not have a relationship with them or they do not yet exist–and offer them an intimacy off address in a poem.

PROMPT #3

For me, this poem pulls out something so specific in me, a sense that I don’t often explore: of seeing myself as the vessel for expressing humanity. Of my potential or my future or my body offering something to the world of nearly un-wordable love and joy. This last prompt is a challenge to write a poem as if speaking into existence the intensities of hope, of joy, of potential. This prompt asks you to consider yourself as the Sweetness Ross writes about. How would you speak to or about yourself if you believed in your Sweetness. As if you are, as Ross Gay writes, “worthy of gasp and joy and love”

REVISION PROMPT

Take a previously written poem and select someone to whom you are writing this poem directly to. Revise the poem as an epistolary address. See how selecting a recipient adjusts the language, tone, and purpose of the poem.

#Poemvember2022 DAY SIX
Featured Poet is Ross Gay

The poem for today’s prompt is “Poem to My Child, If Ever You Shall Be”


ABOUT ROSS

Ross Gay is interested in joy.

Ross Gay wants to understand joy.

Ross Gay is curious about joy.

Ross Gay studies joy.

Something like that.
~

Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding, winner of the PEN American Literary Jean Stein Award; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His first collection of essays, The Book of Delights, was released in 2019 and was a New York Times bestseller. His new collection of essays, Inciting Joy, will be released by Algonquin in October of 2022.

Up-coming Featured Poets:

NOV 7 CHELSEA TADEYESKE
NOV 8 FRANK O’HARA
NOV 9 ROBIN REAGLER
NOV 10 BRENDA CARDENAS

THE LABYRINTH is a community space for treating writing as a practice of returning to the self :: of unearthing what burbles beneath the surface :: of the habit of discovering. With these videos, The Labyrinth hopes to prompt what is already inside of you.

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