The Unused Inroduction to my Book

I have a nasty habit  of taking any essay i write and trying to make it a manifest encompassing all my opinions. This was no different. 

Back in 2017, when Mignon Ariel King and I were starting to work on The Collapsed Bookshelf, I was still calling it Tales of a Stone Soup Chef (which  makes me all the more grateful to Joanie DiMartino for her title suggestion). It's not a good idea to write the introduction to your own poetry book, but I figured I'd give it a shot. Mignon included it in the earliest draft, and I immediately wanted it out before we went any further.  

Enjoy a piece of what was left on the cutting room floor. And please consider visiting Amazon and buying my book if you haven't already.

(Unused) Introduction

In 2005, I took over Stone Soup, a poetry venue then going on its thirty-fifth year since being founded by Jack Powers in 1971. My policy was to stay off the mic as much as possible, putting the attention on both the featured and the open-mic poets. An ulterior second motive for being quiet was that I was not as prolific as I wanted to be, and I was afraid of repeating myself over and over every week. Still, people insisted more and more that I share my work.

In late 2015, an idea to write a poem every week based on what happened at Stone Soup that night. I would take part of a line, an image, an impression from each open poem and compile one poem at the end of the night. This gave me not just a prompt, but an ever-changing one.

Writing prompts are a funny thing. Sometimes, there’s just a simple instruction such as Write a sonnet. Other times, the prompt is as complex as Write an elegy to someone who isn’t dead. Or it will be something crazy like Write a poem from the point of view of a tree that’s being cut down to make your coffin.

At their best, prompts bring something new and unexpected out of you and onto the page. At their worst, they can leave you with a body of mediocre pieces with no unifying theme. They can keep you from writing the work you want to write. That aspect bothers me as I get older and have less and less time on my hands.

Modern poets have embraced writing prompts all the same. Many National Poetry Writing Month poem-a-day blogs depend on them every April. Some anthologies are nothing more than collections of poems created under a nonsensical prompt. I saw a call recently for submissions to an anthology about hats and wondered what the point was. I could work very hard on a hat poem, send it in, maybe even get it accepted. But what am I left with at the end except a poem about hats that I don’t have any strong feelings about?

That’s the way I feel about some prompts. I distrust them, but I recognize the need for them. For a poet (especially one who has a day job not in academia), it’s a constant struggle to produce work when you’re surrounded by people indifferent to your work. When we’re struggling to relocate our voices, poetry prompts might be all we have to help get us back on track.

If anything, they assist focused thinking and questioning. Well, you’ve done a poem about hats, a poem about weeds, and a poem about Hamlet written from the perspective of Yorick’s femur. What do you want to do? And if you’re lucky (or sometimes unlucky), you can share now-focused thoughts through the resulting poem. That’s what I hoped for the poems in this collection.

In the beginning, I would read what I wrote at the end of the night, but then I was in the middle of a small renaissance of new and returning voices. It was all I could do to keep up and represent everyone. Towards the end of 2016 (when I put Stone Soup on a brief hiatus), the audiences got a bit smaller, but the richness of the poetry stayed high. I’d take my drafts home to work on the next morning so I could share them on my blog.

What you hold here in these pages is a one-stop location showing the fruits of those labors. These poems kept my mind sharp; they helped me pay even closer attention to the poetry being read every Monday night. It was so satisfying to have something new every Tuesday, and I got to share myself with the audience more than I had in prior years. Some lines are more personal than others. Some are born of attempted persona pieces. Some are straight autobiography. I leave it to you to decide. Both hosting the Stone Soup series and having my own new work every Tuesday have iv been very gratifying. Thanks for letting me share with you.

Postscript: Not long after writing this, I ended up using my own joke prompt and wrote a poem called "Yorick's Femur." Haven't gotten it published yet, but I'm hopeful.