Poetry Prompt: Accidents of Language

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Hi, poets! After a brief hiatus, I’m back and plan to be more regular with this newsletter—I’ll be sending a prompt a week, plus occasional craft essays and other bits of inspiration as they arise. As always, let me know how these prompts are working for you, what kinds of help you’d like in your poetry writing, or if you write and publish to any of these prompts.

Table of Contents

• Freewrite

• Poem: "[Voice Mail—died on June 24, 2009,]" by Vic …

• Divinations

• Prompt

• Other Updates

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.

Freewrite for 8-10 minutes. Generate a list of times in your life in which language was corrupted or misheard and the wrong thing got communicated.

This is an open-ended prompt, so interpret it how you like. Perhaps you saw letters burnt out on a neon sign and the sign said something funny, or perhaps something got miscommunicated to you through a game of telephone, or maybe you said the wrong thing because of a typo. Freewrite about accidents of language that have occurred in your life.

Poem: "[Voice Mail—died on June 24, 2009,]" by Victoria Chang

Retrieved here. 

Divinations

This poem appears in Chang's collection OBIT, a series of poems/obituaries for all of Chang's losses, written in the immediate aftermath of her mother's death. And wow are these poems gut-punches.

There's so much to be said about self-expression through a lament, obituary, or elegy, but what I'm most keen on in this poem is its use of form and technology. It's no secret that technology has yet to meet humankind's capacity for language, but in this poem, the accidents of language created by transcription are new windows into understanding. First there's this movement:

I love that Chang willingly anthropomorphizes the technology that clearly lacks human capacities, giving it human feelings anyway (based on the "low-confidence" note). And then the metaphor for the Beta's blindness reveals so much about the gap between words and understanding.

This is such a rich movement. What would it mean to transcribe dementia? What would that look like? What modes of understanding does dementia demand of human and non-human listeners alike? And again with a brilliant, insightful metaphor, the violence in it subtle, yet profound.

I love how this poem ends. It very succinctly summarizes an idea in Lacanian linguistics about the gap between language and reality, something I touch upon here. And it reinterprets the absoluteness of death, not to make it less absolute, but to yoke the moment of understanding and oblivion into the same moment, a realization that also relies on a human understanding of language and the deep-seated wisdom poets seem to share.

Accidents of language are everywhere. A sign warning drivers of a snowstorm has its B burnt out to say "lizzard warning." The French word verge can mean "cliff" or "penis"—be careful to explain what "verge" you're on. In Credence Clearwater Revival's song "Bad Moon Rising," John Fogarty is not warning you of "the bathroom on the right" (a mondegreen). And, a voicemail transcription can mistake "juice" for "love", and what does that mean?

Prompt

Write a poem that generates insight through accidents of language. Take the list you generated in your freewrite, and use at least one of those accidents as a doorway into insight. What can you discover from how words were butchered to say what they don't mean?

Other Updates

I’ve added a feature to our prompts page: every time you refresh it, a different prompt will appear randomly. If you don’t know what to write to, let the poetry Gods decide. Check it out here! https://poemancer.com/divinations/