Craft & Play Vol. 59

Dear friends,

Can the root of this text break through the screen to touch your retinas? While your skin ripples, and the stickiness of apple juice won’t leave your fingers. Or is this block of text an essay about nothing but the weather? It’s true, it hasn’t rained in months, and the drought is chewing through the dirt as though it’s a piece of cheap particle board.

For this week’s Craft & Play, we are writing a prose poem. Prose poems are a block of uncanny text that cannot be categorized as a short story or essay, but somehow it is a poem, a stolen dialogue merged with a fragment of a dream that confronts you like the mysterious monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Under the prose poem entry in The Essential Poet’s Glossary by Edward Hirsch, he quotes Charles Simic: “The prose poem is the result of two contradictory impulses, prose and poetry, and therefore cannot exist. This is the sole instance we have of squaring the circle.”

Instructions:

1. Make a word bank for each color in the ROYGBIV spectrum

2. For each color, write a separate prose poem, about the length of a postcard each. We recommend using pen and paper/index cards.

3. Find common themes between all six prose poems and revise to make the common threads apparent

4. Format by fully justifying the text. In Google Docs, we indented the right margin by 5 cm. It looks very satisfying this way.

Here is our poem:

May you all have a blessed weekend!

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For our paid subscribers, this month’s zine, Mood Ring, is available for download here.