Poet Laureate Poem Prompts

Anis Mojgani is the current Poet Laureate of Oregon. A two-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam and winner of the International World Cup Poetry Slam, he has been awarded residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, Caldera, AIR Serenbe, The Bloedel Nature Reserve, The Sou’wester, and the Oregon Literary Arts Writers-In-The-Schools program. A recipient of an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellowship, Anis has done commissions for the Getty Museum and the Peabody Essex Museum; and his work has appeared on HBO, National Public Radio, and as part of the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day series. His work has appeared in the pages of the NYTimes, Rattle, Platypus, Winter Tangerine, Forklift Ohio, and Bat City Review.

Known for his performances and well regarded for them the world over, Anis has performed at hundreds of universities across the U.S.; festivals around the globe such as the Sydney Writers Festival, Jamaica’s Calabash festival, and Seoul’s Young Writers Festival; and for audiences as varied as the United Nations and the House of Blues. The author of five books of poetry and the libretto for Sanctuaries, his first children’s book is forthcoming from Holiday House/Neal Porter Books. Originally from New Orleans, Anis currently lives in Portland Oregon.

Bio from the Piano Farm

This is for the fat girls. This is for the little brothers. This is for the schoolyard wimps. This is for the childhood bullies who tormented them. This is for the former prom queen. This is for the milk crate ball players. This is for the nighttime cereal eaters. This is for the retired elderly Wal-Mart storefront door greeters.

Shake the dust.

This is for the benches and the people sitting on them. This is for the bus drivers, driving a million broken hymns. This is for the men who have to hold down three jobs, simply to hold their children. This is for the night schoolers, and the midnight bike riders who are trying to fly.

Shake the dust.

For the two-year-olds who cannot be understood because they speak half English and half God. Shake the dust. For the girls with the brothers that are crazy, shake the dust.

For the boys with the beautiful sisters, the gym class wallflowers, the twelveyear-olds afraid of taking public showers, the kid who’s late to class ’cause he forgot the combination to his lockers, for the girl who loves somebody else, shake the dust.

This is for the hard men, who want to love, but know it won’t come. For the ones who are told to speak only when spoken to, and then are never spoken to, the ones who the amendments do not stand up for, the ones who are forgotten:

Speak every time you stand, so you do not forget yourselves. Do not let a second go by that does not remind you that your heart beats nine hundred times a day, and there are enough gallons of blood to make you an ocean.

This is for the police officers. This is for the meter maid. This is for the celibate pedophile who keeps on struggling. This is for the poetry teachers. This is for the people who go on vacations alone, and for the crappy artists and the actors that suck, shake the dust.

This is for the sweat that drips off of Mick Jagger’s lips, for the shaking skirt on Tina Turner’s shaking hips, for the heavens and the hells through which Tina has lived. This is for the tired and the dreamers, the family that’ll never be like the Cleavers with the perfectly-made dinners and the sons like Wally and the Beaver. For the bigots, the sexists, and the killers, the big-house pint sentence cat becoming redeemers, and for the springtime, that always comes after the winters.

This is for you.

Make sure that, by the time the fisherman returns, you are gone. Make these blue streams worth it, because, just like the days I’m burning at both ends, and every time I write, every time I bike through the night, every time I open my eyes, I am cutting out a part of myself to give to you. So shake the dust, and take me with you when you do, for none of this has ever been for me.

All that was placed inside, that continues pushing like waves, pushes for you. So take the world by its clothespins and shake it out again and again, jump on top and take it for a spin, and when you hop off shake it out again, for this is yours.

Make my words worth it. Make this not just another poem that I write. Not just another poem like just another night that sits heavy above us all – walk into it. Breathe it in. Let it crash through the halls of your arms, like the millions of years and millions of poets that course like blood, pumping and pushing, making you live, making you live, shaking the dust, so when the world knocks at your door, turn the knob and open on up, and run into its big, big hands with open arms.

Reprinted with permission from the author, from his collection Songs from the River (Write Bloody Publishing 2013).

Stacy Boe Miller, the current poet laureate of Moscow, Idaho, is a poet, essayist, and editor originally from a small town in the northeast corner of Wyoming. She holds a BA in English from the University of Minnesota, a BA in Secondary Education from the University of Idaho, and a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Idaho. Her poetry and creative non-fiction essays can be found in Terrain (Terrain.org), Copper Nickel, Mid-American Review, Frontier Poetry, and elsewhere. Several times a year she teaches poetry workshops to students from 4th-8th grade. She serves on the board of High Desert Journal.

sucking into themselves like I shied
inward when asked, How
is your father? like my father’s shoulders

collapsed toward his ribs.
I rubbed them softly
while mom magneted
Do Not Resuscitate

to the fridge. I learned
to sleep everywhere—plastic
chairs, a bench at the end
of his hospital bed,
even with the fourth of July
outside, helicopters daily
landing on the roof. I pulled

food into myself with a new
desperation—dark pudding with skin
on top, papery rice noodles,
fresh cherries until
I was sick. In the last days,

his mind went back
to work. He worried about the concrete
truck waiting, asked my mom to feed
his crew, fell asleep exhausted from
cleaning out the shop. I watched

his hands move in his sleep, his lips
fretting measurements. It’s OK, my mother said,
just let your father work.

 

This poem was first published in the Bellingham Review, June 2022, and is reprinted with permission of the author.

Sandra Alcosser has published seven books of poetry, including A Fish to Feed All Hunger and Except by Nature, which have been selected for the National Poetry Series, the Academy of American Poets James Laughlin Award, the Larry Levis Award, the Associated Writing Programs Award in Poetry, and the William Stafford PNBA Award. She is the National Endowment for the Arts’ first Conservation Poet for the Wildlife Conservation Society and Poets House, New York, as well as Montana’s first poet laureate and recipient of the Merriam Award for Distinguished Contribution to Montana Literature. She founded and directs the MFA program at San Diego State University, and has been a writer-in-residence at National University of Ireland, University of Michigan, University of Montana, Glacier National Park, and Central Park, New York. She received two individual artist fellowships from the NEA, and her poems have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology.

From Pacific University MFA Faculty Biographies (https://www.pacificu.edu/about/directory/people/sandra-alcosser-visiting-faculty)

Friday night I entered a dark corridor
rode to the upper floors with men who filled
the stainless elevator with their smell.

Did you ever make a crystal garden, pour salt
into water, keep pouring until nothing more dissolved?
a landscape will bloom in that saturation

My daddy’s body shop floats to the surface
like a submarine. Men with nibblers and tin snips
buffing skins, sanding curves under clamp lights.

I grew up curled in the window of a 300 SL
Gullwing, while men glided on their backs
through oily rainbows below me.

They torqued lugnuts, flipped fag ends
into gravel. Our torch cong
had one refrain–oh the pain of loving you.

Friday nights they’d line the shop sink, naked
to the waist, scour down with Ajax, spray water
across their necks and up into their armpits.

Babies have been conceived on sweat alone–
the buttery scent of a woman’s breast,
the cumin of a man. From the briny odor

of black lunch boxes–cold cuts, pickles,
waxed paper–my girl flesh grows.
From the raunchy fume of strangers.

From Excerpt By Nature published by Graywolf Press, 1998. Copyright ©1998 by Sandra Alcosser. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.