Monster Poetry (MoPo!)

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Table of Contents

• Freewrite

• Poem: “Monster Body” by Laura Hershey

• Divinations

• Prompt

• Archive

Freewrite

With this freewrite, as well as all freewrites, do not put any pressure on yourself to be good. You are simply getting thoughts on the page. You can write in poetry or in prose, but feel free to write poorly, sloppily, redundantly, and with cliches. Now is the time for ideas—we will eventually sculpt those ideas into art.

In what ways have you been made to feel monstrous?

Is this monstrosity tied somehow to your body? Your identities?

What about you is Othered by the context you find yourself in?

Freewrite for 8-10 minutes about your sense of monstrosity—the ways in which your selfhood threatens or is threatened by the society around you. “Monster,” here, is very fluid: you can root your freewrite in lived experience, or be more metaphoric and give yourself horns and venom. Go where your pen goes.

Poem: “Monster Body” by Laura Hershey

Retrieved from an archive of Chest Journal.

Divinations

What does it mean to be made monstrous? When does the monster know it’s a monster? In the case of this poem, monstrosity stands in for the speaker’s experiences of disability: what it means to have your humanity questioned vis a vis your body.

I’m keen on the monster as a metaphor for our own experiences of otherness. I think it’s a useful doorway into identity, as it reveals what the norm of society is, what deviation looks like, and what that deviation means.

In Hershey’s poem, deviation and monstrosity go hand in hand, and we end up with a speaker whose humanity is intertwined with otherness. These passages in particular strike me as powerful examinations of selfhood:

That opening line is so bold—it creates the needed distance between speaker and humanity, and also calls into question the speaker’s own perspective. After all, the disabled body is still a human one, so for the speaker’s body to mock the human form is shocking, to say the least.

A similar logic here: we see the speaker’s body, imperfect but undoubtedly human—only to arrive at a monstrous conclusion.

The speaker’s introduction of the mob doesn’t just introduce societal perspective, the cause for the speaker’s self-perception, but it brings us to that brilliant like, “vulnerability shocking as violence.” Isn’t that, in so many ways, the core problem here? How we view vulnerability; that what makes us scary to others is also what makes us unsafe.

And then, this sudden movement:

Repatriates is a really interesting verb here. In truth, I don’t know how I feel about it, if only for its nationalistic connotations. But if the verb means to signify a repatriation of humanity, of being accepted back into the nation-state of species, then at the very least I love this moment for its honest self-affirmation. Even so, it is interesting to conflate nationhood with species, not least because the borders of a country are also a form of Othering.

One text this poem reminds me of is “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, who argues that our conceptions of monsters, especially in pop culture, reflect certain truths about our society. The first thesis is this:

The Monster’s Body is a Cultural Body.

What this means is, a monster’s body reflects a culture’s anxieties, particularly those reflecting a certain socio-cultural moment. It is no small coincidence that movies about vampires were so predominant in the 80s and 90s; the AIDs crisis was in full swing, and vampires—twinkish, diseased Others who turned others into corpse-ish monstrosities—manifested our understandings of the queer body.

Our culture similarly struggles to understand disability and integrate it into a kinder understanding of humankind. “Monster Body” is a poem about the culture’s body, the body the culture fears.

Prompt

Identify or construct a monster whose features, struggles, and identities resemble yours, then write a poem from that monster’s perspective, blurring the lines of self and other.

Interpret this as broadly as you like. While Monster Theory is actively interested in topics of Otherness and marginalization, don’t feel trapped into writing about any singular aspect of your selfhood.

Archive

Check out our full archive of prompts at the Poemancer website!