NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 17]
Day Seventeen
Happy Friday, all! I hope you find that writing poetry is a great entry-way into your weekend.
Today, our featured participant is Adam J Scarborough, who brings us a wonderfully disorienting haiku in response to Day 16’s prompt.
Our resource for the day is The Walt Whitman Archive, where you’ll find all manner of material related to Walt Whitman, one of America’s most celebrated and — let’s be frank — unusual poets.
And now for our (optional) prompt! Sergio Raimondi’s poem, “Today Matsuo Basho Cooks,” plays on the following haiku by (you guessed it), Matsuo Basho:
Happy writing!
-
Note: For Day Seventeen, my offering is a response-poem braided from Dickinson, Rich, and Plath, with yesterday’s half-room still refusing to leave me alone.
After the door, the map, the mirror
After Emily Dickinson Leaves the Door Ajar
Because I could not be vast,
the room kept half of me.
Not death.
Not exactly.
Only its smaller clerks:
domestic decree,
the polite partition,
the inherited hush
buttoned up the throat.
Emily,
you made a corridor
out of a dash.
I live there now—
between said and unsaid,
between mine and permitted,
between the bed’s thin grammar
and the wall’s good manners.
A woman learns quickly
what must not clang.
even grief, here,
must enter sideways.
The window does not open.
It concedes.
The door is not locked.
It has simply been trained
to hesitate.
And I,
so long instructed
in the etiquette of less,
have become excellent
at folding.
the body into corner,
the sentence into smoke,
the wanting into something
that passes for discipline.
After Adrienne Rich, Dividing the Room
The room was split before I entered it.
Someone had already done the thinking.
One half for use.
One half for permission.
Enough remainder to hold a girl
until she mistakes arrangement
for character.
Adrienne,
I was taught to call this ordinary.
To say
the wall is just a wall,
the smaller portion merely practical,
the narrowing of self
a household skill.
But language leaves fingerprints.
What is allocated
is never innocent.
What is shared
is not always mutual.
What is kept “for now”
has a way of becoming
the architecture of a life.
So yes, Adrienne,
I have read the maps.
I know borders arrive first
in furniture,
in lowered voices,
in who gets the window,
in who learns to live
as though leftover space
were a kind of love.
The room says nothing.
Power rarely has to.
After Sylvia Plath, Entering The Room
You wrote of certain slants.
I know them too.
The room enters the body.
Not as flame.
Not as spectacle.
More intimate than that.
A slow white pressure.
A neatness with teeth.
The mirror holding my face
like an accusation
filed and refiled
under daughter,
under woman,
under manageable.
The curtains do not flutter.
They supervise.
The cupboard swells
with its patient jaw.
Even the pillow knows
how to keep a secret
pressed flat.
Sylvia,
here nothing dramatic happens.
That is the drama.
Day Seventeen
Happy Friday, all! I hope you find that writing poetry is a great entry-way into your weekend.
Today, our featured participant is Adam J Scarborough, who brings us a wonderfully disorienting haiku in response to Day 16’s prompt.
Our resource for the day is The Walt Whitman Archive, where you’ll find all manner of material related to Walt Whitman, one of America’s most celebrated and — let’s be frank — unusual poets.
And now for our (optional) prompt! Sergio Raimondi’s poem, “Today Matsuo Basho Cooks,” plays on the following haiku by (you guessed it), Matsuo Basho:
Crimson pepper pod!For today’s challenge, write a poem in which you respond to a favorite poem by another poet.
Add two pairs of wings, and look—
darting dragonfly.
Happy writing!
-
Note: For Day Seventeen, my offering is a response-poem braided from Dickinson, Rich, and Plath, with yesterday’s half-room still refusing to leave me alone.
After the door, the map, the mirror
After Emily Dickinson Leaves the Door Ajar
Because I could not be vast,
the room kept half of me.
Not death.
Not exactly.
Only its smaller clerks:
domestic decree,
the polite partition,
the inherited hush
buttoned up the throat.
Emily,
you made a corridor
out of a dash.
I live there now—
between said and unsaid,
between mine and permitted,
between the bed’s thin grammar
and the wall’s good manners.
A woman learns quickly
what must not clang.
even grief, here,
must enter sideways.
The window does not open.
It concedes.
The door is not locked.
It has simply been trained
to hesitate.
And I,
so long instructed
in the etiquette of less,
have become excellent
at folding.
the body into corner,
the sentence into smoke,
the wanting into something
that passes for discipline.
After Adrienne Rich, Dividing the Room
The room was split before I entered it.
Someone had already done the thinking.
One half for use.
One half for permission.
Enough remainder to hold a girl
until she mistakes arrangement
for character.
Adrienne,
I was taught to call this ordinary.
To say
the wall is just a wall,
the smaller portion merely practical,
the narrowing of self
a household skill.
But language leaves fingerprints.
What is allocated
is never innocent.
What is shared
is not always mutual.
What is kept “for now”
has a way of becoming
the architecture of a life.
So yes, Adrienne,
I have read the maps.
I know borders arrive first
in furniture,
in lowered voices,
in who gets the window,
in who learns to live
as though leftover space
were a kind of love.
The room says nothing.
Power rarely has to.
After Sylvia Plath, Entering The Room
You wrote of certain slants.
I know them too.
The room enters the body.
Not as flame.
Not as spectacle.
More intimate than that.
A slow white pressure.
A neatness with teeth.
The mirror holding my face
like an accusation
filed and refiled
under daughter,
under woman,
under manageable.
The curtains do not flutter.
They supervise.
The cupboard swells
with its patient jaw.
Even the pillow knows
how to keep a secret
pressed flat.
Sylvia,
here nothing dramatic happens.
That is the drama.
 |
| Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (entry dated April 17, 1956) |
April again.
Morning again.
Morning comes anyway.
I gather my limbs
as though from poorer ground.
The body rises here
less like waking
than being recalled
to an arrangement
it did not survive.
The old labour of rising
as if from a grave
into a room
already waiting
to resume its claims.
Morning, and again
the small exhumation of self.
Limb by limb,
I assemble obedience
from the graveyard shift
of sleep.
Morning again.
Morning comes anyway.
I gather my limbs
as though from poorer ground.
The body rises here
less like waking
than being recalled
to an arrangement
it did not survive.
The old labour of rising
as if from a grave
into a room
already waiting
to resume its claims.
Morning, and again
the small exhumation of self.
Limb by limb,
I assemble obedience
from the graveyard shift
of sleep.
A life can be halved
without blood.
A mind can be trained
to sit in its designated portion
and call that poise.
By afternoon,
light enters
like a verdict.
silence is laid out
white as a sickbed.
the soul—if that is still
the word for it—
bruises quietly
against its assigned perimeter.
No carriage waits.
No clean rebellion either.
Only the old arrangement:
one portion for breathing,
one for obedience,
and a narrow seam between
through which the mind
keeps trying
to escape unfollowed.
~ Oizys.
Afternote: I came across an article about Toni Morrison today, who once said, rather sharply, with a kind of necessary impatience, “Don’t do that. Don’t write about your little life.” I have been thinking about that sentence all day. This poem begins in the half-room, but I hope it does not stay there as mere confession or anecdotal. Rooms are never only rooms. They are blueprints of hierarchy, rehearsals of obedience, small domestic states where power learns to appear natural. So I hoped this poem could extrapolate from the room-cage outward: toward lands partitioned, peoples pushed onto the smaller side of history, and the brutal interruption of continuity, memory, and inheritance that follows when a place is carved up by force.
I really liked your take on it and your response to each poet. So many beautiful lines, I especially like your description of Emily's dash as a corridor.
ReplyDeleteSmitha, thank you so much! I am really glad the braid between the three poets came through for you because I was afraid I went a bit extra. And I am especially happy that Emily’s dash-as-corridor line stayed with you; that image felt like the truest doorway into the poem for me.
DeleteThat’s an interesting combination of poems for inspiration, and I enjoyed what they inspired. I especially enjoyed the lines:
ReplyDelete‘Emily,
you made a corridor
out of a dash’;
‘To say
the wall is just a wall,
the smaller portion merely practical,
the narrowing of self
a household skill.
But language leaves fingerprints’;
and
‘The mirror holding my face
like an accusation
filed and refiled
under daughter,
under woman,
under manageable.’
Thank you, that combination felt a bit like walking a tightrope, so I am glad it resonated. And I am especially happy those lines stood out to you. They were some of the ones that arrived with the most clarity, almost as if they insisted on being written that way. “Language leaves fingerprints” in particular felt like a quiet thesis for the whole piece, so it’s nice to know it lingered.
DeleteI am struck by how your sitting with Toni Morrison’s quote wove itself here in all three of these poems with the small life of curtains, walls and cupboards unfolds revealing the much larger picture of oppression and power creating the small lives that we are assigned and often assume it is all there is. Thanks for continuing to explore what exists beyond the our confinement.
ReplyDeleteThank you so much, Michelle. You have named exactly what I was trying to sit with. That uneasy way the so-called “small life” is constructed so carefully that it begins to feel natural, inevitable, even intimate. Morrison’s words kept pressing at the edges while I wrote, and I wanted those domestic details of curtains, walls, cupboards to feel more like instruments of assignment. I am really grateful that the poem opened out for you into that larger picture of oppression and power because I wanted that to happen, hence the extrapolation. That movement, from enclosure to recognition, feels central to what I have been trying to explore.
Delete