Christal
Cooper 1,606 Words
Erica Goss
“Cornfields of Vibrant Writing”
“Poetry is my cheap
means of transportation. By the end of
the poem the reader should be in a different place from where he started. I would like him to be slightly disoriented
at the end like I drove him outside of town at night and dropped him off in a
cornfield.”
Billy Collins
“Billy Collins wants his
readers to feel like he’s driven them to the edge of a cornfield, and left them
in some strange place. They started out
one place but ended up in something else in the end. And hopefully that is what these poetry
prompts will do.”
Erica
Goss
This past April of 2014 PushPen Press published Vibrant
Words: ideas and inspirations for poets
by Erica Goss, Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, California and author of the
chapbook Wild Place. (https://finishinglinepress.com/product_info.php?products_id=97)
“I post poetry prompts
on my poet laureate Facebook page every Friday.
I had people asking me if I collected those prompts into a book. Then I bumped into PushPen Press
representatives at a lunch party last fall.
I told them my idea and they said they would do a book. The book came out March of this year which is
lightning speed for publishing a book.”
Vibrant Words is a book of poetry
prompts for poets of all levels, but geared toward poets who are facing some
form of writer’s block, which Goss believes every writer has at some point.
“The point of the book
was not to have long complicated writing instructions. I wanted it to be pretty
punchy, and straightforward. I wanted the readers to pick up their pen and
start writing after reading the second sentence.”
Goss did not encounter poetry prompts until she
was an undergraduate student taking poetry classes at San Jose State
University, where she was pursuing her degree in English.
“I thought they were
great. They didn’t always work for me, certainly, but they had me thinking.”
A poetry prompt is an exercise one does to take that first
step into writing. An example of a
poetry prompt is from Vibrant Words excerpted below:
Haiku
At the Friends of the Los Gatos Library
Bookstore, I found Oasis in the Heart: Haiku with Exposition by Toshimi Horiuchi
(Shambhala Publications, 1995). In his
introduction, Horiuchi writes, “The true
poet views the world with keen insight, sees much in little, and feels rapture
even in what others might consider trivial or meaningless . . . a true haiku
has something of an incantatory charm to store up spiritual and emotional
energy in the human system.”
Sometimes I go on haiku-writing
binges. Here are four from the same day
in September:
The
zinnias
want to
die
I keep watering
autumn fires
a woman calls for help
once she stuttered
digging
roots in damp soil
white hair
date on a penny
the year my father was born
worth more then
Haiku contain as much energy
as possible, squeezed into as few words as possible. They are powerful little packages, beautiful
and provocative. To this day, Japanese
haiku poets gather in walks called ginko,
where they meditatively walk around fields and hills in order to create poetry.
Take a walk outside and
write down what you see, hear, smell, and touch. Create several haiku from a paragraph of
reflection about nature. Share them with
friends.
Pages 45 -47 from Vibrant Words: ideas and
inspirations for poets.
Copyright granted by
Erica Goss
Erica Goss recognizes that there are two schools
of thought when it comes to poetry prompts – those that believe in it and those
that don’t.
“My theory on why there
is such a conflict about poetry prompts is that it demystifies the writing of
poetry. I think that it reveals the
craft element to writing poetry. When we
look at a piece of furniture and don’t know how it was put together we are
impressed. If we know how it was put
together it might not be as impressive or as interesting.”
Goss believes poetry prompts are applicable to
beginning and seasoned poets.
“I think poetry prompts
are absolutely appropriate. You might
end up with something totally different, but you write and think of all the
possibilities. And that’s the main thing
– to write.”
Vibrant Words contains 51 poetry
prompts by Erica Goss, Dave Bonta, Jennifer Swanton Brown, Ellaraine Lockie,
Connie Post, K.S. Hardy, Eileen Malone, Kelly Cressio-Moeller, Evelyn A So, and
Pushpa MacFarlane. Majority of the
poetry prompts are written by Goss. One
of her favorite prompts is “I left My Heart in the Los Angels Basin” which is
excerpted below:
I Left My Heart in the Los Angeles Basin
Have you ever been
completely in love with a city? It’s no
wonder that people leave their hearts in San Francisco, fall in love in Paris,
and endlessly adore New York, in all of its various moods and guises. In his poem “Chicago,” Carl Sandburg wrote,
“Come and show me another city with lifted head singing/so proud to be alive
and coarse and strong and cutting.” Who
can forget the “Floral loops/Of the freeway” and the “calligraphy of cars” from
Gary Snyder’s “Night Song of the Los Angels Basin?”
Begin by listing your impressions of a city you
love. Why
do you love it? Are there details about
the city that only you know? Make us
want to be there so much that it’s all we can do not to jump in the car, drive
to the airport, and take the first plane there.
Here is a beautiful poem from Joie Cooke, who
left us February 24, 2013:
There Are Nights In San Francisco
There are nights in San Francisco
When even the bedbugs come out to pray
Amongst the forest that is life here
And streets I believe I’ve been on before
Become hallucinations,
Every steep hill climbed,
An applause for gravity. . .
But I’ve taken it for granted
For over 30 years
The seven hills, the cable cars,
The view from twin Peaks
On a crisp, November night. . .
I fall in love with cities
The way most people fall in love,
Shamelessly hopeful; in the beginning,
Careless, naïve and blind . . .
And there are nights in San Francisco
I would wish to forget
Like a waning romance,
Waiting to crash,
Never looking back
At the wreckage behind.
Pages 23-25 from Vibrant Words: ideas and
inspirations for poets.
Copyright granted by Erica Goss
What makes “I left My Heart in Los Angles
Basin” special to Goss is that she’s
lived on the southern and northern coasts of California since she was a baby.
“It’s
like my child. I’ve written about San
Francisco. I’ve lived near San Francisco
the last years of my life (and) to me it has a distinct personality. Los Angeles has a distinct personality and
San Jose an even different personality.”
These days Goss has been having plenty of
rich ideas based on her own personal life:
she is wife to her husband of 27 years, Don, and mother to their sons
ages 23 and 15.
“Writing
about being a parent is always a very rich topic. When you have your first baby, that caring
hormone is within you to make the world safer and better for your
children. You learn your children are
not carbon copies. They are definitely
their own people. You change your
expectations and try to be flexible. You
have to constantly shift roles.”
It wasn’t until her 30s that Goss went to
college to get her bachelor’s degree in English and her master of fine arts
with a focus in poetry and in nonfiction.
“I
stopped working when my oldest son was five and I went to school full time only
to find out I was pregnant - a big surprise.
I took a couple of years off. It
took me a long time – very slowly – one class at a time – to get my bachelor’s
in English. Then it took me three years
to get my MFA in 2007. I was 47 years
old then. It was a very slow process.”
With degree in hand, Goss worked as a
poetry student coach at a local high school for five years.
“It
was a program strictly for poetry. I
gave them poetry prompts. I worked with
them individually one on one and would talk with them about their drafts. The students that were there wanted to be
there because it was an elective, not required, so they were very dedicated
writers.”
When the program ended after five years,
Goss decided it was time to move on to other things and worked as a grant writer
for the Poetry Center of San Jose for four years. She also had her first book, Wild
Place, published by Finishing Line Press. https://finishinglinepress.com
Now Goss’s days are more structured and
her routine not so chaotic – she is able to spend more time writing. She’s at her desk by 8 a.m. and starts the
day off by writing a haiku every morning, her favorite time of day.
“It
really has to be quiet when I write. I
have to feel like I have a sacred place of my own, a place I can come up with
ideas and I don’t have to share it with anybody. The rest of the day goes from that point. You
get up and show up and you do the work everyday – even if you have to do it
between doctor appointments.”
Goss is presently working on her poetry collection
Timelocks,
which focuses on the last year of her life.
She described some of the poems in Timelocks as tight haikus.
“All
writing is done one page at a time. It’s
not too mysterious – just a lot of hard work and discipline.”
Photograph
Description and Copyright Information
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1
Erica
Goss
Copyright
granted by Erica Goss.
Photo
2
Billy
Collins at the 10th annual Calabash Literary Festival in St.
Elizabeth’s Jamaica.
May
10, 2010.
Photograph
attributed to Suzannah Gilman.
CCASA
3.0 Unported License
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Jacket
cover of Vibrant Words: ideas and inspirations for poets
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4
PushPen
Press website logo
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Jacket
cover of Oasis In the Heart Haiku With Exposition
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6
Erica
Goss at a book singing for Vibrant Words: ideas and inspirations for
poets.
Copyright
granted by Erica Goss
Photo
8
Poet
Joie Cook.
Fair
Use Under the United States Copyright Law.
Photo
11
Erica
Goss guest teaching at her cousin’s English class in Germany.
Copyright
granted by Erica Goss.
Photo
12.
Jacket
cover of Wild Place
Photo 13
Erica Goss in her office
Copyright granted by Erica Goss
wonderful job....
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