The Labyrinth

Welcome to #POEMVEMBER 2022! This video is DAY THIRTY (November 30, 2022) of daily poetry prompts based off of a poem by poets every in the whole world should read. [Humble! Opinion! Also! Fact!] The challenge this month is to write one poem a day and to feel the pleasure of doing so. PROMPT #1 Write a poem about a person who you know well that is most like a character from a movie. Tell us about their character quirks, their core desires, their most endearing moments. And help us feel how you feel about them. PROMPT #2 Begin a poem with the title that begins with someone’s name, then “I want you…” and use “I want you” as an anaphora throughout the poem to show us what is a persistent quality about that someone, or what you would rather have them be doing with or for you. PROMPT #3 Write a poem where you are the subject of someone else’s desires. Tell us what you know they would want you to do, whether you have done these things or not. It may support your writing if you think about how “Laura, I Want You Pulling Your Hair Back” would have been written if from Laura’s perspective. #Poemvember2022 DAY THIRTY Natalie Dunn’s “Laura, I Want You Pulling Back Your Hair” https://twitter.com/natalie_jane34/status/1566795635654856705 Natalie Dunn is a writer living in Brooklyn. Her fiction, poetry, and criticism appear or are forthcoming in The Believer, The Adroit Journal, Kenyon Review Online, Triangle House, Los Angeles Review of Books, Conduit, and elsewhere. She has received support from The Community of Writers. She is a senior fiction reader at The Yale Review and a fiction candidate at NYU, where she received the VWW fellowship. THE LABYRINTH is a community space for treating writing as a practice of returning to the self :: of unearthing what burbles beneath the surface :: of the habit of discovering. With these videos, The Labyrinth hopes to prompt what is already inside of you. Also, we’re here to build community between writers whose writing is oftentimes a too-solitary task. If you’re interested in joining our private Discord community, please contact KP Kaszubowski for the invite link. The Labyrinth is guided by poet, filmmaker, and theater-maker KP Kaszubowski. www.kpkaszu.com twitter.com/kpkaszu

Welcome to #POEMVEMBER 2022! This video is DAY TWENTY-NINE (November 29, 2022) of daily poetry prompts based off of a poem by poets every in the whole world should read. [Humble! Opinion! Also! Fact!] The challenge this month is to write one poem a day and to feel the pleasure of doing so. https://www.are.na/block/12915763 PROMPT #1 Your task is to search the internet for discussion boards around the topic of vermiculture. Read as long as it takes to gain a changed perspective on worms and the care some people take to build environments for the pleasure of worms. Write the poem that inevitably comes from this…worm hole. PROMPT #2 Think about a situation that you can contribute to for the pleasure of those involved. Find a situation where the beings involved do not necessarily know it is you contributing. Write this poem. PROMPT #3 Write a two stanzagraph prose poem with this structure: stanzagraph 1 writes about a new way of seeing a familiar thing. The dirtier, the more repelling the better. Then stanzagraph 2 writes about how this changes your eventual outcome. #Poemvember2022 DAY TWENTY-NINE Danusha Laméris’”Feeding the Worms” https://www.are.na/block/12915763 Danusha Laméris is a poet, teacher, and essayist. She is the author of The Moons of August (Autumn House, 2014), which was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press poetry prize and was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Book Award. Some of her poems have been published in: The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, The SUN Magazine, Tin House, The Gettysburg Review, and Ploughshares. Her second book, Bonfire Opera, (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize, and winner of the Northern California Book Award in Poetry. The 2020 recipient of the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award, she is a Poet Laureate emeritus of Santa Cruz County, California, co-leads the Poetry of Resilience webinars and the HearthFire Writing Community with James Crews. She is on the faculty of Pacific University's low-residency MFA program. http://www.danushalameris.com/ Up-coming Featured Poet: NOV 30 NATALIE DUNN THE LABYRINTH is a community space for treating writing as a practice of returning to the self :: of unearthing what burbles beneath the surface :: of the habit of discovering. With these videos, The Labyrinth hopes to prompt what is already inside of you. Also, we’re here to build community between writers whose writing is oftentimes a too-solitary task. If you’re interested in joining our private Discord community, please contact KP Kaszubowski for the invite link. The Labyrinth is guided by poet, filmmaker, and theater-maker KP Kaszubowski. www.kpkaszu.com twitter.com/kpkaszu

Welcome to #POEMVEMBER 2022! This video is DAY TWENTY-EIGHT (November 28, 2022) of daily poetry prompts based off of a poem by poets every in the whole world should read. [Humble! Opinion! Also! Fact!] The challenge this month is to write one poem a day and to feel the pleasure of doing so. PROMPT #1 For the folks out there who love prompts around structure or form, utilize Dunkle’s structure of questions and answers with bracketed asides: If _____ [_______] ______________– Would________?  Would_______? The ______ believes ___________  [____________]. This _________________  requires  ____________. Have you ________________?  The _________, beyond ________, ________.  I am _________. _______says. [Have ________________?]A _________is ____________. How to ______  [_________-s] the___________-. Be sure to utilize the title as adding context for the call and response quality of this structure. PROMPT #2 Take the concept of the robot being its own moon suit when sent out to space. Write the poem where being a robot would have made a situation in your life much easier, more natural. PROMPT #3 Think on a lesson you’ve learned while in conflict in a relationship – recent or no – and write this lesson as a poem in questions and answers. Write these questions and answers as if the people involved are not in the same room but are asked to speak with each other. #Poemvember2022 DAY TWENTY-EIGHT Iris Jamahl Dunkle’s “Marriage Lesson: Wormhole” https://nightheronbarks.com/fall-2020/iris-jamahl-dunkle/ Iris Jamahl Dunkle was the 2017-2018 Poet Laureate of Sonoma County, CA. Her newest poetry collection West : Fire : Archive will be published by Mountain/ West Poetry Series in 2021. Her other poetry collections include Interrupted Geographies (Trio House Press, 2017) Gold Passage (Trio House Press, 2013) and There’s a Ghost in this Machine of Air (Word Tech, 2015). Her biography Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer is forthcoming from the University of Oklahoma Press. Her poem “Listening to the Caryatids on the Palace of Fine Arts” poem will be featured on 100 buses as part of the San Francisco Beautiful and Poetry Society of America Muni Art 2020 campaign. Her works have been published in Tin House, San Francisco Examiner, Fence, Los Angeles Review of Books, Split Rock Review, Taos Poetry Journal, Pleiades, Calyx, Catamaran, Poet’s Market, Women’s Studies and Chicago Quarterly Review. Dunkle teaches at Napa Valley College and is the Poetry Director of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. Iris Jamahl Dunkle is an award-winning literary biographer, essayist, and poet. Her academic and creative work challenges the Western myth of progress by examining the devastating impact that agriculture and over-population have had, and continue to have, on the North American West. Taking an ecofeminist bent, her writing also challenges the American West’s male-oriented recorded history by researching the lives of women. She obtained her MFA in poetry from New York University, and her PhD in American Literature from Case Western Reserve University. https://www.irisjamahldunkle.com/ Up-coming Featured Poets: NOV 29 DANUSHA LAMÉRIS NOV 30 NATALIE DUNN THE LABYRINTH is a community space for treating writing as a practice of returning to the self :: of unearthing what burbles beneath the surface :: of the habit of discovering. With these videos, The Labyrinth hopes to prompt what is already inside of you. Also, we’re here to build community between writers whose writing is oftentimes a too-solitary task. If you’re interested in joining our private Discord community, please contact KP Kaszubowski for the invite link. The Labyrinth is guided by poet, filmmaker, and theater-maker KP Kaszubowski. www.kpkaszu.com twitter.com/kpkaszu

Welcome to #POEMVEMBER 2022! This video is DAY TWENTY-SEVEN (November 27, 2022) of daily poetry prompts based off of a poem by poets every in the whole world should read. [Humble! Opinion! Also! Fact!] The challenge this month is to write one poem a day and to feel the pleasure of doing so. PROMPT #1 Take a piece of found language (advertisement, a passage from the Bible, a political speech, or possibly an e-mail newsletter from a person or company you do not connect with) and add footnotes of dissent or critique. PROMPT #2 Take a piece of found language that feels especially grounded in the tangible world and add footnotes that mythologize the context, or add mysterious elements to complicate the reality expressed. PROMPT #3 Write a poem with two voices. Though, the first voice cannot hear the second. Have the first voice speak on what they believe this line means to them: “We were made for these times.” Then, have the second voice pull apart the first voice’s ideas with vivid and searing imagery. Utilize rhetorical questions to question the logic of the first voice’s arguments. It may support your writing to consider how the two Gollums speak in “The Lord of the Rings.” #Poemvember2022 DAY TWENTY-SEVEN Bethany Price’s “Mistaking Embalming Fluid for Perfume” Bethany Price is a poet, stylist and creative director. Her previous publications are “all I wanna do” through Pity Milk Press, and “Terror” through Vegetarian Alcoholic Press. http://vegetarianalcoholicpress.com/titles/terror-by-bethany-price https://www.papeachupress.com/product-page/unicorn-burning-by-bethany-price https://woodlandpattern.wordpress.com/2015/04/10/april-poetry-month-day-10-bethany-price/ Up-coming Featured Poets: NOV 28 IRIS JAMAHL DUNKLE NOV 29 DANUSHA LAMÉRIS NOV 30 NATALIE DUNN THE LABYRINTH is a community space for treating writing as a practice of returning to the self :: of unearthing what burbles beneath the surface :: of the habit of discovering. With these videos, The Labyrinth hopes to prompt what is already inside of you. Also, we’re here to build community between writers whose writing is oftentimes a too-solitary task. If you’re interested in joining our private Discord community, please contact KP Kaszubowski for the invite link. The Labyrinth is guided by poet, filmmaker, and theater-maker KP Kaszubowski. www.kpkaszu.com twitter.com/kpkaszu

Welcome to #POEMVEMBER 2022! This video is DAY TWENTY-SIX (November 26, 2022) of daily poetry prompts based off of a poem by poets every in the whole world should read. [Humble! Opinion! Also! Fact!] The challenge this month is to write one poem a day and to feel the pleasure of doing so. PROMPT #1 In her essay “Poetry Is Not A Luxury,” Audre Lorde writes that poetry is a form of “revelatory distillation of experience.” Take this poem as a revelatory distillation of a moment in the speaker’s life. Panna Maria is a Polish ghost town in Texas. The speaker connects what they’re seeing–two immaculate churches of Polish origin in the midst of a ghost town–and connects this to what they know about what it meant to pick up their lives and flee to Texas. Each of the prompts ask you to write a distillation of an experience. Prompt #1 is to locate a building or large physical object that sticks out as strange or foreign or incongruent to an environment you’ve visited. It’s important that this distillation of an experience includes you as visitor. PROMPT #2 Distill the experience of when you had to leave. With or without your desire to do so. PROMPT #3 Distill the experience–capture it in a small bottle–place the experience of being promised something that did not “shake out” in your benefit in oil so it is preserved long enough to be a message for others in the future, when they will need to understand. #Poemvember2022 DAY TWENTY-SIX Jane Creighton’s “Where There Is No Else (Panna Maria and Cestohowa)” Jane Creighton is a poet and creative nonfiction writer. Her work has been published in the journals Ploughshares and Gulf Coast, as well as in the anthologies The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth Century British; American War Literature; Still Seeking and Attitude: Critical Reflections on the Work of June Jordan; and Close to the Bone: Memoirs of Hurt, Rage, and Desire. She is professor of English at the University of Houston—Downtown, where she also serves as the director of the Cultural Enrichment Center. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/68623/writing-war-writing-memory http://saintjulianpress.com/jane-creighton.html Up-coming Featured Poets: NOV 27 BETHANY PRICE NOV 28 IRIS JAMAHL DUNKLE NOV 29 DANUSHA LAMÉRIS THE LABYRINTH is a community space for treating writing as a practice of returning to the self :: of unearthing what burbles beneath the surface :: of the habit of discovering. With these videos, The Labyrinth hopes to prompt what is already inside of you. Also, we’re here to build community between writers whose writing is oftentimes a too-solitary task. If you’re interested in joining our private Discord community, please contact KP Kaszubowski for the invite link. The Labyrinth is guided by poet, filmmaker, and theater-maker KP Kaszubowski. www.kpkaszu.com twitter.com/kpkaszu

Welcome to #POEMVEMBER 2022! This video is DAY TWENTY-FIVE (November 25, 2022) of daily poetry prompts based off of a poem by poets every in the whole world should read. [Humble! Opinion! Also! Fact!] The challenge this month is to write one poem a day and to feel the pleasure of doing so. PROMPT #1 This poem as a whole charged me with an important notion: “I can only love my comrade if I live” Write the poem where you commit to living, and living well, in order to love your fellows, your comrades. Tell us how living well will help bring justice and equity to all of us. Or, maybe I just want to read more poems where the writer tells us they commit to living. PROMPT #2 Consider how Jordan Jace used the anaphora “I want” in this poem as a motor or driver that connects the different ideas, creating a center of desire or urgency in connecting with others. For this prompt, write a poem that uses anaphora (be it “I want” or not) that allows you as writer and speaker to express a bouquet of ideas, images, or emotions under one repeated context. PROMPT #3 For this prompt, I’d like you to consider what “humanize” and “dehumanize” means to you. What does it mean to be dehumanized? What examples do you have of this? What measures do we use in concept when we use the word “dehumanized”? Write the poem that pulls apart dehumanizing structures in our world and point at the origins and wounds of it. #Poemvember2022 DAY TWENTY-FIVE Jordan Jace’s “I want” https://poets.org/poem/i-want Jordan Jace is a Black poet born and raised in Los Angeles. They currently live in Providence, Rhode Island and are an organizer with the Party for Socialism and Liberation. https://www.smokeandmold.net/jordan-jace https://www.poetryproject.org/people/jordan-jace Up-coming Featured Poets: NOV 26 JANE CREIGHTON NOV 27 BETHANY PRICE NOV 28 IRIS JAMAHL DUNKLE THE LABYRINTH is a community space for treating writing as a practice of returning to the self :: of unearthing what burbles beneath the surface :: of the habit of discovering. With these videos, The Labyrinth hopes to prompt what is already inside of you. Also, we’re here to build community between writers whose writing is oftentimes a too-solitary task. If you’re interested in joining our private Discord community, please contact KP Kaszubowski for the invite link. The Labyrinth is guided by poet, filmmaker, and theater-maker KP Kaszubowski. www.kpkaszu.com twitter.com/kpkaszu

Welcome to #POEMVEMBER 2022! This video is DAY TWENTY-FOUR (November 24, 2022) of daily poetry prompts based off of a poem by poets every in the whole world should read. [Humble! Opinion! Also! Fact!] The challenge this month is to write one poem a day and to feel the pleasure of doing so. PROMPT #1 For this prompt, consider an important event in your life that has happened 3 or 4 times. Look at this as a pattern. Tell us how these 3 or 4 iterations of the pattern are similar. Tell us how you felt in all of these iterations. Then, tell us how each iteration was different from the other. Tell us how this pattern can be seen in other parts of the world, or nature. PROMPT #2 Write a poem that tells us about the most beautiful thing you will do in this lifetime. PROMPT #3 I’m struck by Catherine Esposito Prescott’s mention of science knowing more about how an embryo holds in it the cells of the mother and also of the grandmother, a knowledge new to us. Consider a piece of scientific knowledge or theory that was not known when you were born but is widely known now. Write a poem that connects the new knowledge with a new understanding in your life– profound or mundane. #Poemvember2022 DAY TWENTY-FOUR Catherine Esposito Prescott’s “Ordinary Offering” https://www.southfloridapoetryjournal.com/issue-17-may-2020.html ABOUT CATHERINE ESPOSITO PRESCOTT Originally from Long Island, New York, Catherine Esposito Prescott’s poetry collection, Accidental Garden, won Gunpowder Press’s 2022 Barry Spacks Poetry Prize (selected by Danusha Laméris) and is forthcoming in 2023. She is also is the author of two chapbooks, Maria Sings (dancing girl press, 2017) and The Living Ruin (Finishing Line Press, 2012). Recent work appears or is forthcoming in EcoTheo Review, Green Mountains Review Online, MER VOX, Mezzo Cammin, NELLE, Northwest Review, Pleiades, Stirring: A Literary Collection, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verse Daily, and West Trestle Review. Her second full-length collection, How We Disappear (formerly titled We Were Never Here and My Sweet Atlantis), was a finalist for Michigan State University’s Wheelbarrow Books Prize, The St. Lawrence Book Award (Black Lawrence Press), and the Texas Review Press Southern Poetry Breakthrough Prize, and a semi-finalist for the Hilary Tham Capitol Collection competition (The Word Works). Prescott earned an MFA in Creative Writing—Poetry from New York University. A writer who loves to see different art forms and mediums in dialogue, Prescott is a serial collaborator. She published two fables in collaboration with the Brazilian artist Adriana Carvalho - 101 Dresses, which became the catalogue for the artist’s retrospective at the ArtCenter/South Florida, and Little Rose and the Giant, which was exhibited at Art Live Miami; her poems have been featured in Momentum Dance Company's Poetry Project, a dance-poetry collaboration; and she has worked with visual artists, including the letterpress artist and Miami legend, Tom Virgin, to create broadsheets for the SWEAT Broadsheet Collection. Over the years Prescott has worked as a copywriter, editor, book seller, activist, fundraiser, event organizer, organic garden founder, professor, and teaching artist. She is co-founder of SWWIM and editor in chief of SWWIM Every Day. An RYT 200-HR yoga instructor with a 300-HR yoga philosophy certification, Prescott teaches vinyasa yoga and yoga philosophy and leads yoga and writing retreats. A mom to three beautiful humans, Prescott lives with her family in Coconut Grove, Florida. http://catherineespositoprescott.com/ Up-coming Featured Poets: NOV 25 JORDAN JACE NOV 26 JANE CREIGHTON NOV 27 BETHANY PRICE THE LABYRINTH is a community space for treating writing as a practice of returning to the self :: of unearthing what burbles beneath the surface :: of the habit of discovering. With these videos, The Labyrinth hopes to prompt what is already inside of you. Also, we’re here to build community between writers whose writing is oftentimes a too-solitary task. If you’re interested in joining our private Discord community, please contact KP Kaszubowski for the invite link. The Labyrinth is guided by poet, filmmaker, and theater-maker KP Kaszubowski. www.kpkaszu.com twitter.com/kpkaszu

Welcome to #POEMVEMBER 2022! This video is DAY TWENTY-THREE (November 23, 2022) of daily poetry prompts based off of a poem by poets every in the whole world should read. [Humble! Opinion! Also! Fact!] The challenge this month is to write one poem a day and to feel the pleasure of doing so. PROMPT #1 This prompt is for those who like to get freaky. 1) Think of someone you want to impress. Maybe it is a few people. Collect 4 phrases you would want them to say about you. 2) Make a list of 6 adjectives to describe something you want to be like. 3) Imagine you are witnessing something unfortunate, though not ghastly, and you make a comment to the person next to you. What would the clever-most, sexiest comment be that you could utter? 4) What is there too much of? 5) What could your enemy be a little less of? 6) What is an often used phrase of admonishment or praise you received when you were younger? 7) Select someone to address. Make sure this someone will never listen to you. 8) Connect all these items into one poem. PROMPT #2 Loop a wordless song that has a tempo that feels like you could keep pace with as you write. This prompt asks you to write automatically first. The first task is to collect language without editing yourself. Write as if the words are liquid coming out of your fingers in a steady flow. Nothing has to make sense right now. Just get the language down. You may want to assign yourself with an emotion or a specific memory and take “jabs” at adding description to these. Your goal is to type out a full page of language. This is why the song is on loop. It could take you a couple minutes or several. The result will be satisfying either way. The second step is to go back in and highlight images, phrases, or moments that feel especially interesting to you. Copy and paste these highlighted sections. Third step is to arrange them in a way that feels rhythmically exciting to you. You may want to use the word “I” or “you” or “it’s” to connect some of the phrases. Fourth step is optional. Make it make logical sense. Fifth step is optional. Erase phrases that were added just to make it make logical sense. PROMPT #3 Take the title of this poem “Girl on the corner street of my mind” and write your version of it. What is this girl? Why is this girl? What does she do? What does she say? How do they talk about her when she can’t hear them? #Poemvember2022 DAY TWENTY-THREE The poem for today’s prompt is Annie Grizzle’s “Girl on the corner street of my mind” http://pankmagazine.com/piece/girl-on-the-corner-street-of-my-mind/ https://anniegrizzle.com/ Annie Grizzle is a multimedia artist interested in the nonsensical intersection between the mappable and the abstract. Her aim is not to control a medium, but to create a disorienting space in which to discover and test its limits. Up-coming Featured Poets: NOV 24 CATHERINE ESPOSITO PRESCOTT NOV 25 JORDAN JACE NOV 26 JANE CREIGHTON NOV 27 BETHANY PRICE THE LABYRINTH is a community space for treating writing as a practice of returning to the self :: of unearthing what burbles beneath the surface :: of the habit of discovering. With these videos, The Labyrinth hopes to prompt what is already inside of you. Also, we’re here to build community between writers whose writing is oftentimes a too-solitary task. If you’re interested in joining our private Discord community, please contact KP Kaszubowski for the invite link. The Labyrinth is guided by poet, filmmaker, and theater-maker KP Kaszubowski. www.kpkaszu.com twitter.com/kpkaszu