Hi friends,
Welcome to the second (official) week of Call and Response! I’m Steph, the younger and more headass of the Niu sisters. If we haven’t met yet, I’m an INFJ with a penchant for anything that lives in the ocean. As of 2 days ago (!), I live in New York City, and I primarily write poems (I struggle with prose- ask Catherine).
Last week’s prompt was about looking off-camera, letting big events be defined by their peripheries, and better paying attention. Cath shared her poem, “"For $19.99 I Toss Out the Old," which feels very relevant as I laboriously stock my unfurnished apartment with things: “Yesterday I had the most successful / shopping trip of my life.”
I love the idea of physical objects resisting grandiosity in their “thingness,” even as that quality lets us point to something larger: “By chance everything / fit. I want more and more. Because usually nothing fits // like that.”
I also shared my response to this prompt, a poem called “Anti-Resolutions To Protect You In The New Year,” whose ending I am still struggling with. If you feel so moved, don’t hesitate to share responses to our first prompt even after this week! You can read Cath’s and my responses in the comments.
As a note, if you’re uncomfortable sharing your work or have specific questions, feel free to respond to this email directly. We’d love to feature work from you, dear reader, in future weeks’ newsletters. 😄
Lastly, if you haven’t noticed yet, Cath and I fully intend to use this newsletter as an excuse to slowly surface the many unflattering (and occasionally wholesome) photos of our sisterhood that we’ve amassed over the years, and I’m thrilled about it. On to the prompt.
Love,
Prompt #2: "A net that catches the stutters"
Note: this prompt is inspired by a reflection on poetic process that I originally shared with Clara C.; thanks for sparking this idea and being part of this newsletter!
I've been thinking lately about poems as negative space. In Cathy Park Hong's "Minor Feelings," she describes her first day of poetry class with Myung Mi Kim, who introduces the idea that "the circuits of a poetic form are not charged on what you say, but what you hold back." I love this image of the poem as the ground rather than the figure, as "a net that catches the stutters, the hesitations, rather than the perfectly formed phrase." This feels related to last week’s prompt; looking away from the “perfectly formed phrase,” the language on the periphery, what’s not said, might better help us make sense of something.
This summer I read the dazzlingly self-referencing book, “Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid," which describes the way negative space, rather than being a neatly-defined inverse of something, can itself be infinite. In formal systems, this means the figure (what are considered theorems in a certain system, for example) don’t necessarily contain the same information as the ground (non-theorems). In some systems, there’s no neat way to say whether something is a theorem or a non-theorem; just knowing it isn’t a theorem doesn’t necessarily make it a non-theorem. It hangs in an indeterminate state.
In an interview with “The Resistance,” Li-Young Lee calls on this idea of figure and ground. He says:
A good poem or successful poem has to create its own silence in order for the words to be heard. It has to create a kind of lift-off from the ground, so that the figure of the poem stands in higher relief to the ground.
That silence has to be made, within which the poem can be heard. So the poem, it’s a two-fold project. You have to create the silence, and then you have to create the poem, which is a part of that silence.
I’m excited by this idea of playing with silence, with what's left out, with the gaps between images where meaning must be created in collaboration with the reader. How can we create silence as a launchpad for the poem, or suggest the infinite workings of negative space, or write to catch imperfect hesitations?
For this week, write a poem that plays with negative space. Some specific things to try might include ultra-short forms, spreading words across the page to create literal whitespace, or even traditional form, which sometimes constrains in a way that allows silence to expand beyond the poem. If your poem is hard to format in a Substack comment (as many are), feel free to send it over email.
I’ll leave you with a quote from a favorite very-short poem of mine. As Dorianne Laux says in "Enough Music," "Maybe it's what we don't say / that saves us."
Warmly,
Steph
Loved this prompt! Here's a response.
"Precision and Excess"
On my phone screen, you rise briefly,
reach over and draw a curtain to block the sun.
Suddenly you fill the whole screen, your grey sweater
shifting over your stomach, thick ribbing clear to the
shimmering threads, surging as if it’s six years earlier and
you’ve just returned to me after a long waiting. Great wings,
and this small singing. I have not forgotten anything.
A curtain falls. Your sweater shifts again.
Not one but multiple floods here, spilling over.
i loved the concept of this prompt! definitely pushed me out of my comfort zone by trying to write super short poems, and playing with white space around the lines. i ultimately ended up with a poem that tried to underline all the other sounds in this moment, and use those to evoke the silence of a moment left unfinished.
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"unfinished"
fluorescent buzz of the lights matches the numbness in my ears. a minute ago, this room was filled with confusion, swirling around me until it stole the questions right from my breath. i didn’t take the click of the lock for the finality that it was. didn’t understand that my world could implode, not with a crash, but with the scrape of a wooden door across the floor. and i was left sitting there.