Prompt: Instant Odes
Poet and teacher Matthew Burgess has made a discovery: when it comes to poetry, first graders can teach college students a thing or two! In his delightful essay, “Serious Play: Odes to the Everyday,” Burgess writes about his own experience as a poet-in-residence in New York City elementary schools and as a college professor of creative writing. Since one of the aims of writing poetry is to defamiliarize the familiar, younger writers have a natural advantage. They already live in a world in which an overturned chair can become a rocket or the filling in a tooth can pick up a radio station on Mars. In other words, they know how to play. But when it came to encouraging his older students to draw on that playful imagination in one’s writing, Burgess wondered, “How could I get the college students to behave more like the children?”
One way was to create an atmosphere in the classroom that encourages play. Another was to devise writing prompts that require students to, in Burgess’s words, “emphasize process over product, that challenge strict notions of authorship, and that nudge us out of our familiar style or mode and keep us on our toes.”
So here is the challenge for us this week: write an ode to an object or feeling you encounter everyday. Begin by reading Matthew Burgess’s article. Since we are not in a room together, we can’t exactly follow his assignment, so instead, we will adapt it slightly. Look around the room and write your own everyday ode to an object within sight, if not within reach. The more ordinary, the better. The goal is to be spontaneous and playful. In your first go, spend no more than 30 minutes writing, then put your ode away. Wait a day or two, and take it out again. Read it aloud. Revise if you like, but for no more than 30 minutes. Then release your poem to the ether as you might blow on a dandelion puff–and post it here.
Hmmm, I don’t know about you, but that laundry basket has just gotten a whole lot more interesting….
Happy Writing!
Rivertown Dispatch 
A response…
Ode to a Laundry Basket
You hold
the dirty laundry
that everyone
wants to see
except
the one who wears it.
O Keeper of secrets,
here
are the cast off, creased
not yet deceased
articles
from the newspaper
of our lives.
Not to mention
the unmentionables:
underwear
printed with stars,
jeans that burn
with light, hot
from the dryer
along with that
gray cotton shirt
who never dreamed
it would once
be taken off by a lover
and folded neatly
on a chair,
its finest moment
caught
unaware.
O Laundry Basket
you fill me
with gratitude.
Knowing
that always more
fresh,
straight off the press
articles of clothing
will come back
with space
for the day
not yet written.
And another one…
Ode to the Dark Side of the Moon
My eyes
are dry hands
running
along the bedpost
searching for
the blunt objects of day:
keys,
email left unanswered,
laundry
to be put away.
Every night
I travel to
the dark side of the moon
with its promise
of scarcity.
I cannot hope
to see.
Swinging open
the door
my toes
tentatively ask
which way to turn.
All is lost,
the crone keens
by the stone wall.
All is lost, says
my younger self
ambling home
from the hair dresser’s,
the library, the bar.
How could
this have happened?
Voices that tug
at the loose thread of my body:
awake!
How could I have known
that brittle jaws
crack even at this age?
Stomach muscles can ache
from tears
pressed out like flowers?
A garden
all the same color
in the dark.
Twenty years ago
I never stayed
awake late
enough to discover
the time,
but now
it is my thumb
which absent-mindedly
traces a circle
clockwise.
My eyes
are dry hands.
O Dark Side of the Moon,
who cannot be known
by sight,
you announce
your presence
in the incessant hum
of a stalled train
a few blocks
from my house.
Even so,
I can sense
your spotlight
left shrieking
at the reckless
green
foliage by the tracks.
A blazing green
which shelters
nothing
but absence.
Hides nothing
but the self
from the self.
Do you roll
your eyes
when I ask:
What is on the other side
of you,
illuminated
by the sun?
I will wait for
your answer
in the dark
while
so many
urgencies
call to wake up:
Do not slumber!
See the invisible
before you
even as
it is stripped away.
Ode to a Dishwasher
So loud
Like an artifact
Of the industrial revolution
A listener expects
A smokestack
Churning iron gears
And a stooped, shirtless man heaping coal into its fiery maw
But no
It’s just creaky —
And any day now it’ll quit
With a steamy heave
Leaving dishes still dirty
But very, very hot
And an old repairman will heap invective at modern machines, built to break
It is, after all, a Frigidaire
So maybe in its soul
It is a refrigerator —
Confused and hurt
It whines and cries
And gnashes gears
As scalding water fills what — by all rights — should be its crisper
— Jonathan Graham