This is the Open Write, a place for educators to nurture their writing lives and to advocate for writing poetry in community. We gather every month, today through Monday, we’ll be here. The next Open Write will be August 15-17, 2026. Let’s write together.
Our Host
Nothing new to see here. i.e. you’ve seen it all before. 😉
Glenda blogs at Swirl & Swing: www.glendafunk.wordpress.com
Inspiration
The June 26, 2025 poetry prompt from 10 Poetry Notebooks featured one of Terrance Hayes’s poems from the collection American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin. The speaker writes
I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison,
Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame.
The poem reminds me of W. E. B. Du Bois’s ideas about Double Consciousness, the idea that black people are both individual and a cogroup member and that these two “consciousnesses” often create tension one with the other, a source of “inward twoness.”
As I write this prompt, I find myself thinking about something Hayes says about his American Sonnets: “All the poems ask the question: What is an American Sonnet, and who is the assassin?” Hayes wrote the poems after DJT’s election in 2016 and says, “I think this dude is trying to kill me, and can I still love him? Can I write a sonnet for my assassin? That’s really what drives all of them.”
Process
Today I invite you to write your own double consciousness American Sonnet or duplex, a form of contemporary sonnet. Most of us live in a country in which the system is doing things we’ve denied it’s capable of doing, things that are the antithesis of our American ideals and mythologies. I’m asking the question: Can I still love this country, and can I write a sonnet for it?
As you write, consider what tone best fits your poem. Work to achieve your desired tone by your use of diction, figurative language, and/or form. Perhaps your poem will embody an accusatory? Tender? Boastful? Envious? Surreal? Tone.
Or choose a different topic and form today.
Glenda’s Poem
a woman’s sonnet for the country i occupy but no longer recognize
i digested your shining city on a hill mythology
while ingesting your duplicitous history
i swallowed your tired & huddled masses story and
regurgitated its weary be a yankee dream
i awoke shackled to pen & paper platitudes and poems
duped into believing time gifts progress
i tie you to a chair in my nightmares &
resurrect myself as your Abu Ghraib torturer
i waterboard you in a Niagara deluge &
push the barrel into the churning river that
carries you to a watery hell where you
slobber your final confession & beg for mercy
your i believe in freedom gun-idol worship mocks my faith so
i dangle you over a fiery pit like Jonathan Edwards’ worm (June 25, 2025)
Your Turn
Now, scroll to the comment section below to write your own poem. (This is a public space, so you may choose to use only your first name or initials depending on your privacy preferences.) Not ready? That’s okay. Read the poems already posted for more inspiration. Ponder your own throughout the day. Return later. And, if the prompt does not work for you, that is fine. All writing is welcome. Just write something. Oh, and a note about drafting: Since we are writing in short bursts, we all understand (and even welcome) the typos and partial poems that remind us we are human and that writing is always becoming. If you’d like to invite other teachers to write with us, tell them to subscribe. Also, please be sure to respond to at least three writers.
Powerful stuff this morning, Glenda. The irony of this being July and the 250th is strong. I love your opening line and the verbs (digested, swallowed, regurgitated) that push and visualize. I have been feeling so overwhelmed by our country (and the world) that compartmentalization has become a survival mechanism.
An
America
Collected
I take your recent offerings–red, white, and blue–
and drop them into drawers, each categorized and organized.
I take the red of Good, of Araujo, of Guerrero…
twist-tied and double bagged, and lock the compartments tight.
I take the yt and its deep, deep roots, its hoods and robes,
wrapped into bundles, rope-secured, knotted twice, and bury them deep.
I take the blue, the sea of sorrow, the wave of depression
from sea to shining sea, and pour them in, every last drop.
Your wildfire-red skies, your bleached-white fields, your fading-blue dreams –
I close them inside, in an effort to be free, to remain sane, to escape,
shut the drawers (so many), lock the locks, fling keys far and wide.
I can’t think of them today, or tomorrow, or any day, really.
unsolicited storer, witness, collector, of the land of the free.
Jennifer, I understand your survival mechanism. The news is disheartening, to say the least of it, and even in the local day to day world I’ve found myself doing my own sheltering from life going on around me with all its drama and high-cortisol-level interactions. Where is there any peace? Open Write gives us just the right atmosphere. Your poems always make me feel like I’m having tea with you, friend to friend.
Glenda, I thank you for the push this morning. Your poem pushes back. I love the line “i waterboard you in a Niagara deluge &
push the barrel into the churning river“ Woosh!
My husband tells me that more Republicans back their cars into parking spots than Democrats. I have no idea if this is true, but my visits to Walmart make me curse the trucks that are backed in (and usually well over the yellow line.)
I lock you in your white Ford truck backed in
over the yellow line
You are not my kind, hefty and trumped
on four jacked-up off-road tires
designed to crush little people like me
with your oversized parts.
I won’t hitch up my skirt to take a ride.
I park nose front & take my time
not to cross the line. I return
the wire buggy to the cart-horse paddock,
flash a fake smile to the sweaty boy
maneuvering the train.
I hold my superiority under my side slung purse
where my soft belly holds verses of quiet fortitude.
Margaret— do you live in my head!!? The oversized parts, the cart horse paddock, the last two lines. Those last two are the best!
Margaret, I love your nod to the simplicity of travel and the called-out wastefulness and entitlement of oversized trucks. I am not a fan of the new fad of the jacked up wheels and double-parking-don’t-ding-doors mentality of those who drive them. I’m drawn back to the provocative skirt hitching line and each time I read it another meaning comes sidewinding its way in – – I love it!
Clever and fun line “I won’t hitch up my skirt to take a ride.” Love the layered refusal there. And then the “flash a fake smile to the sweaty boy/maneuvering the train” affirming the social culture and need for consideration. It is incredible how there is a holding or even a kind of swallowing of our stances in these public dances. I will say that Dan does not hold his tongue and is at his wits’ end with humanity after a year of travel.
Glenda, thank you for hosting us today! I’m enjoying reading more about the American Sonnet….I’m still stuck in the aabbccddeeff gg ten-syllable line structure….old habits die hard. Love your poem and your inspiration and encouragement. A sonnet for a Saturday can change the world! Note: I am not a knitter. I have no idea where this muse hid.
Instructions for Knitting a Poem
knit one, purl two, I hook words as I write
cool peace, with shades of panic-level fright
these variegated colors of yarn skein
like phases of moon cycles: wax and wane
crack of thunder harkens a derecho
aftermath: look up and see a rainbow
cast on, bind off ~ weave from all this SABLE
knit one, purl two, count along a cable
change skeins ~ dye lots show unstable jogging
tug trail legs: necessary frogging
sometimes we can’t undo what has been done
new leading legs knit common threads as one
a cozy mitten pair: rich mosaic
poetry can change the dull prosaic
Kim, I am loving this extended metaphor of knitting as you imagine it to be. It certainly works as a double consciousness. The legs and hands are beautiful “new leading legs knit common threads” and the “a cozy mitten pair” — all of the weaving toward prosaic. So many beautiful words here, Kim.
the winged girl knew she was part machine
da Vinci’s ornithopter strapped to back
she nested in borrowed pigeon holes
not knowing which was a slaughterhouse
barely disguised as medieval free range
nor did she know streets were rife with home hunters
throwing dimes that choke drains during rest hours
she was lulled by salt breezes in the distance
rotting the rods that held her hole open,
and was never to detect a heat could reach
degrees to boil her flesh from bones
a seeker she fled on machined wings cursing
her weight in grief as spires pierced her gut red
pondering airbus fare or drinking jet fuel
she opted to paint her steel parts cloud white
Sarah, a powerful poem that on the first read felt harsh. When I read it again, I felt more sympathy and kindness toward the seeker in grief painting the steel white. Your imagery amazes me.
Sarah, I sense the experience of travel and art museums here in your poem today, and I gave a quick search to the winged girl of daVinci’s art, wondering so much about all the rich art you have seen in your sabbatiment. I like the modern blend of the unintentional consequences that we never consider – risking life and clogged drains in our quests for adventure and tradition. I’m intrigued by the final line – – a new start of purity or angel wings reborn, and the way the reader can decide. Pure inspiration!
Glenda
It’s been a long time since I tried my hand at the sonnet, with its rules of rhymes and syllables. I went with a traditional (I think) Shakespearean form (14 lines, 10 syllables per line, 3 quatrains + 2 couplets)
Kevin
A Sonnet For Charlie Parker
A Bird of free range flying through the night
wrapped in chords of compositional scratches
and tangled like roses, thorns as sharp as flight;
yet within noise, the melody flashes
I am an earbud audience, in awe
of the way the sound moves in near motion
so that when I close my eyes — not a flaw –
only quick winds and waves on the ocean
Yet he remains a complicated man,
a puzzle of complexity, a wire
who could channel beauty on the bandstand
while nearly losing himself to the fire
Some music that’s played becomes a life, lost,
and listeners often forget the cost
Sonnets are hard and since they take so much time and attention, I don’t usually write them. You have done a wonderful job with the rhythms and rhymes. That last line hits hard “listeners often forget the cost.” So true!