Today was our last shared prompt Thursday, which makes me quite sad, honestly. I knew going in that the Tupelo 30/30 project was going to challenge me as a writer, but I didn’t anticipate finally feeling a sense of community with other writers. I’m not an MFA, so I often find myself feeling isolated in the world of writers. The folks with whom I’m writing have been insightful, encouraging, and hilarious. We commiserate and vent when things aren’t going well, we share ideas and praise–it’s everything I think the world of writing should be when we’re able to remove the notion of the zero-sum game. I still have a few more poems left in this project, but in the event any of you wonderful writers are reading this, I thank you all so much.
The prompt for today was telegram poems. I wanted to capture what’s best about telegrams, which is also true for media like Twitter: economy of language. Telegrams and poetry are close cousins. (I might add, though, that there are apparently many poems out there praising telegraphy, and they’re wordy as hell.) Yesterday I was out for a run and I saw a older couple out for a walk, one several feet behind the other. Both smiled and greeted me, and they seemed perfectly content with the space between them. They were happy together but not in the traditional couple-space. I reflected on my own love and how I have come to understand the apart/together dynamic as an expression of confident, enduring love. Here’s “Eliminating Small Words.”