Odd/Awed

Some News + Poem + Prompt

First, some happy news . . . LeeAnn Pickrell and I will be hosting our fourth poetry reading and open mic on Sunday, February 15 at 1:00 PST/ 4:00 EST. The event will kick off with readings from three poets whose beautiful writing you may have already encountered here on Substack—MK Creel, Sam Aureli, and Dick Whyte. After these readings, we’ll open the mic to anyone who would like to share a poem of their own. If you’ve been trying to work up the courage to read at an open mic, this could be a gentle, supportive, low-stakes way to start. The event will wrap up no later than 2:30 PST/ 5:30 EST. If you’d like to attend, please send me a DM or reply to this email, and I’ll share the Zoom registration link with you.

Also on the horizon . . . I don’t know about you, but I often find myself craving deeper conversations than the ones that typically permeate my day-to-day life. I want to feel things all the way. I want to understand people all the way and give them a chance to understand me at that level, too. I want to talk about things . . . pretty much to death. The sharper and more piercing life becomes, the sharper and more piercing this longing for meaningful conversation becomes. So I’m going to try something new! I’m hoping to make a space in which conversations like these can happen, right here on Substack. Yep, I’m getting on the Substack Live bandwagon—or at least I’m going to give it a go and see what happens. My hope is to nourish honest and open-hearted conversations about writing, creativity, culture, books, being human, being mortal, and well, really just being in general because you have to admit that it’s pretty wild, this whole existence thing.

My first conversation will be with the illustrious X. P. Callahan. We’ve set the date for Wednesday, February 11 at 2:00 pm EST, but since neither of us have ever used Susbtack Live before, you might want to mark your calendar with pencil rather than sharpie. I’m planning to do a short solo Substack Live before then to get the hang of it, so keep any eye out for that, as well, if you’d like to hear me read a few pages from my novel.

Alright, on to poetry . . .

Odd/Awed

I am nothing less than a freak
occurrence. Tiny link in a
chain of mutations—
improbable,
impossible,
glorious.
Against all odds,
this little life, this
humble slurp
from the primordial
chowder of being.   

Photo by Laura Peruchi on Unsplash

The Prompt

Today’s poem was prompted for me by a quote from the Danish author Solvej Balle. I’m not familiar with Balle’s work but read this quote in Maria Popova’s marvelous newsletter, The Marginalian:

It seems so odd to me now, how one can be so unsettled by the improbable. When we know that our entire existence is founded on freak occurrences and improbable coincidences. That we wouldn’t be here at all if it weren’t for these curious twists of fate.

Perhaps because I just finished watching a lecture on line breaks from Ellen Bass (thank you, Conscious Writers Collective!), enjambment has been on my mind. For anyone unfamiliar with the term, enjambment is simply when a phrase is interrupted unexpectedly (rather than at the end of a syntactic unit) by a line break. This can create tension when a reader is left wondering what on earth is about to come in the next line. Or it can create surprise, when the beginning of the next line is an unexpected addition to what preceded it. The phrase “freak occurrences” stood out to me in the above quote, and I thought it might be fun to break that expression across two lines to create surprise. This poem was born from that intention.

If you would like a prompt to play with today, then I invite you to try some enjambing of your own! As you go about your day, watch and listen for phrases whose meaning or feeling or weight shift significantly partway through. In particular, watch for phrases or expressions that create the possibility of surprise between commas or breaths

As an example, here is a memory from my college days, when my brothers and I all lived in the same apartment complex at BYU. We were faithful Mormons at the time, which is probably why this stuck in my mind. My oldest brother, whose style of speech often features random pauses, punctuated by unusually long blinks, began a sentence this way: “I started to sleep around . . . .”

I remember the amused suspense of waiting for what would come next because clearly my devout Mormon brother had not started to sleep around. After the long pause and slow blink, he revealed the time at which he had taken a nap.

Your friends and family might be less eccentric with their pauses. But as you listen to them speak, let yourself imagine the possibility of such pauses and the attendant shifts in meaning. Look for this, too, as you read. Scan for it in your own thoughts. When you find something that intrigues or challenges or delights you, play with it. See where it takes you.

If you’d like to share what you come up with, please do! I always love to read your poems. And if you have so much fun with this that you’re craving more prompts, then head on over to Petra Hernandez’s Substack, where you can find a prompt a day through the month of February. I forgot to jump on board with those yesterday but am hoping to start today!