Dear Artists,
Welcome to the very first Call and Response; we’re so glad you’re here! I’m Catherine, the older and smaller sister. If we haven’t met before, I’m an INFP and existential crisis specialist currently pursuing an MFA in fiction at UC Davis. A couple things before we get to the prompt:
First, this newsletter has been a collaborative project since its inception (most likely somewhere in the backseat of a car zooming along a highway between the Carolinas), and Steph and I intend to pass this atmosphere of conversation on to our future selves, and to all of you. We hope that the quality of our conversations here will continue to feed and inspire our making this year.
Second, re: timing. We plan to share prompts biweekly on Mondays for now, but we can tweak the timing as needed. Since this is the first letter (!!), please feel free to introduce yourself in the comments of this post; who you are, what brings you to this newsletter, anything else you’d like us to know. As we get to know each other’s work, feedback/reading recs/other ideas are all very very welcome.
Lastly, below is the prompt for this week. Please feel free to share your work in the comments. We’d love to highlight some of the responses to this prompt in our next letter.
Happy new year, and best wishes as you make something this week!
Much love,
Prompt # 1: Looking Off-Camera
Lately I’ve been wondering about what I misremember. As in, what happens if I forget the important things, or worse, never even notice them in the first place? Is the truth of the matter gone?
Remembering rises to the top of my mind when I’m saying hello or goodbye to things in quick succession. Not sure how this goes for you, but seeing family, moving, the year winding down and a new one opening, firsts and lasts — tricky. I suspect myself of paving over daily small moments and details with anticipations and dreads, reflections and diagnostics, slapping on labels to sort things out. When I look back, the labels glare at me without nuance, and yet I still sense, and miss, the details trapped underneath.
I suppose I’m asking how we can most truthfully render a thing. I want to try looking at the details around it, rather than the center of it. I’m asking for poems [read: artworks] that look outside the frame of what’s purportedly going on, or call what we think a moment is all about, into question.
Write a poem that insists that the main event— the big bad year passing, the family gathering, the rain, the nuisance snails in the garden— might not be the main event after all. A poem that calls the thing by another name. In “Cowboys,” Susan Steinberg writes about a shithole town:
“Listen. It was not a shithole. It was not that. Call it what you will, but there were cowboys there, for God’s sake, standing on corners in the biggest hats you have ever seen.”
Something like that.
Write a poem from inside the spotlight, looking off camera at the janitor drawing with water on the floor before mopping it away. I want poems about what we don’t even notice we notice.
I’m not sure how to pull this off on purpose, but in my fantasy life, it’s what I do. Ariana Reines tells us, “There are nectars hidden in your own body. Suck your own tongue.” I want to remember this. When you write, roll after any stray marbles that appear. It’s easy to get lost in “productivity”, but maybe the truth, or a more surprising and rare form of it, is hiding around the corner not taken.
In Moon: Letters, Maps, Poems, Jennifer S. Cheng writes,
“To find the center, I turned toward the edges fraying in the dark… We intuited the holes, we knew they were there, we only meant to locate them.”
Write a poem about the fringes of your attention. What if the fringes say just as much about the thing as the thing itself?
Love,
Catherine
Hi! Here's my draft of a poem. I was thinking about objects, how they can exist simultaneously at the center of a moment and also remain on the fringes, unimportant because of their "thingness". As in, nothing as grand as Love, or Truth, to be found in a literal shoe. As in, my life is both all about the sweater I inherited from my mother and nothing about that. I'm wondering about what we give meaning to, and what that inner gesture of assigning meaning can reveal. Maybe it's not what we expect. This is a poem about a mattress, a shelf, a toothbrush case. A poem about shopping. All comments welcome! In prior drafts, I played with the form. Let me know what you think - are the stanzas working?
much love,
Catherine
P.S. comments seem to annihilate formatting! I'm using // to indicate a stanza break, since there otherwise doesn't seem to be a way to show that. If anyone has figured out how to format within a comment, please lmk! If you have a poem that plays with cool formatting, feel free to email it to callandresponseteam@gmail.com (Tip: you can simply hit "Reply" to our Prompt #1 email in your inbox and it will send to this gmail account) so we can see it in all its glory and share it in our next letter.
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"For $19.99 I Toss Out the Old"
Last night I watched a woman on film, alone in a spare room
move a mattress to block the only window of light,
but imperfectly, so that there remained a slice
in the corner. Watched her
//
step back from the mattress, sit in her remaining sun.
All this in black and white. The light white. I, too, have been
rearranging furniture. Yesterday I had the most successful
shopping trip of my life. I found a gold rimmed hexagonal shelf
//
for $19.99. At home I placed it on the kitchen counter and the top
met the top of my kitchen backsplash, and the shelves perfectly
outlined the white outlet in the wall. By chance everything
fit. I want more and more. Because usually nothing fits
//
like that. My suitcase open and too much strewn about.
The last time I kissed you. When you found me holding
your toothbrush case. When you took my wet hands.
How I said, Can I take this, and you said, Of course, meaning
//
something else entirely. What could have stopped me?
If I find another piece that fits, what will stop me now?
hi! i'm rachel and i've been writing poetry for a few years but never quite had the courage to share any of it. this year, i started sharing some of it to my friends and one of my roommates, anjani, suggested this would be a cool place to get prompt ideas because i definitely struggle with subject matter.
i loved the idea of looking back at a main event/portion of my life and realizing that something i didn't even notice then could have had the potential to change the way i see my life now, so here's my attempt to capture that :) any comments/feedback are welcome!
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"earthquakes & sunsets"
when i think of high school, i think of white cabinets
staring dully into winking eyes of gold as my parents voices washed above me
tectonic plates that never quite fit together, crashing earthquakes in my mind
a flash of annoyance as the sun blazed through the kitchen windows
waiting until i could go upstairs, a quiet refuge
made me ignore everything else
sculpting me into who i am today
maybe the sunset was beautiful that day
i’ll never know, but maybe