January Poetry Prompt - What will we remember

I find the following poem by Gary Snyder incredibly beautiful. I think that the stasis of it, a frozen past moment captured in the photo, is part of that, as is the rhetorical question in the first line. In haiku writing there's a term 'wabi sabi' which means, as far as I can be sure, a combination of beauty and loss. Memories often have that quality.

Looking at Pictures to Be Put Away

Who was this girl
In her white night gown
Clutching a pair of jeans

On a foggy redwood deck.
She looks up at me tender,
Calm, surprised,

What will we remember
Bodied thick with food and lovers
After twenty years.

Gary Snyder
from The Back Country
© New Directions, 1957

I wrote a poem for my grand-daughter called 'What we remember' parallelling my childhood memories with what I imagined hers might be:


What We Remember
(For Summer)

How Dadcu wore his belt buckled at the back, pulled
so tight around his skinny waist the tops of his trousers

fluted like piecrust; how he swallowed raw eggs, breaking
the yolk in the chamber of his throat; how the fire roared

behind yesterday’s paper stretched across its mouth
and Granny melted cheese in dishes on the grate,

kept an open tin of condensed milk for tea. The lumpy
featherbed, the musty wardrobe, a chocolate coloured fur coat.

And what will she remember? Her granddad throwing her
in the air, the fat china woman on the edge of my bath,

the window at floor level in her bedroom looking down
on red tiled roofs, sheep in long grass, the apple orchard?

Or the day we smeared our faces with burnt cork
and she said You are my best friend. But no,

that is what I’ll remember, and how she asked
Why do you make that funny face when you look in the mirror?


Perhaps these two poems will help inspire a poem of your own about one or several past memories.

Free write in the first instance from the phrase - What will we remember... then, when and if you feel you're ready to start shaping your words into a poem, think about form.

Short lines or long lines?
One block, or couplets, or tercets or quatrains?

Experiment with different shapes and try and identify the form that suits what you're saying, the emotional tone of the poem. And, if you'd like to, when you post your poem, add a few notes about why you've chosen that particular form.

Write well.
Lynne x

April Prize Poem

Working with form is an interesting process. It restricts by virtue of its pre-determined shape, yet it liberates because we can focus more on what we want to say, our ideas and language choices, rather than deliberating at length over the line breaks as we would during the making of a free verse poem.

In the poem prompt based on Gerald Manley Hopkins’ poem I said:

And of course the other important thing is to write about something that will be served by the form and rhyme I’m asking you to use.

And for this reason I’ve chosen ‘Peace of Mind’ by Mary Rose as April’s Prize Poem.

The poem is both a lament for someone lost (‘amid grieving’) and a poem of perseverance in the face of that grief (‘the only way’). It bears witness to the strength of the human spirit, but does not idealise it, as the last line movingly states: ‘the blessing of night’ brings relief from the harsh situation that the light of day all too glaringly reveals.

The long third lines in each stanza are particularly effective in this poem as they both contain ‘lists’ and the accumulation of the items adds to the atmosphere of someone keeping busy.

I also admire the line break after ‘peace to be won/’ – the fall to the next line works very well with the emotion expressed there as well as slowing us down as readers to feel the impact of what is said.

I wasn’t sure, at first, about the title – is it too familiar a phrase, verging on cliché, perhaps? But when I read the poem again I realised how the familiar phrase is being concretised by the poem, and that the activity of gardening IS the peace of mind the poet seeks, although what is also interesting about this poem is that there’s no specific point of view. For me this choice contributes to the universality of the poem: the poem was written in response to one particular person’s grief yet we are all included, we have our own memories of keeping going, or we feel comforted by the fact that we are not, or we will not be, alone.

Many congratulations, Mary Rose. Your prize will be in the post next week.

Peace of mind

It’s a garden for today
where work waits to be done.
There’s a stream to keep clear, weeds to uproot, peace to be won
amid grieving, the only way.

There’s a bonfire to light,
seeds to be sown,
plenty to leave for another day, edges to trim and grass to be mown.
First the blessing of night.

Mary Rose