About me: Queer poet and storyteller. From Wisconsin, went to school in Florida, currently live in NYC. (Writers in the city, let’s chat!)
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My writing school: Writers.com is the oldest writing school on the internet and I’ve been incredibly blessed to run it alongside my boss since 2020. If you’re looking to take classes in poetry, fiction, CNF, and beyond, feel free to DM me with questions. I also run and write a blog on writing craft, find it here!
My writing: You can find a full list of publications at seanglatch.com.
It’s easy (ish) to write about ourselves. It’s not as easy to write about others. But poetry allows us to lend our minds to lives we haven’t lived. Persona poetry is an example of this, but for this prompt, we’re going to write portraits of people who aren’t us—with a twist.
Find the full poem+prompt below, or read it at Poemancer.
Freewrite
Think of a famous person or historical figure, living or dead, whom you know about in great detail.
For 7-10 minutes:
Write down what you know about this person. Where did they live? What were they like? What was their philosophy of living? Jot down everything you can, from major life stories to tiny facts.
For 2-3 minutes:
What connect you to this person? What do you have in common with them, or how are you in lineage with them? Where does your life intersect with theirs?
Poem: “Power” by Adrienne Rich
Retrieved from her collection The Dream of a Common Language (1978).
Living in the earth-deposits of our history
Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate
Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil
She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power
Divinations
This poem is a bit enigmatic at first, but really rewarding to parse. The associative leap from the second stanza to the third is quite grand, those gaps between words feel both meaningful and random, and the poem’s own journey seems roundabout. How did we get to that (incredible) last stanza?
Let’s break down these stanzas:
Living in the earth-deposits of our history
We’re introduced to two aspects of this poem. First, the poem’s use of whitespace, which feel almost like internal line breaks. At the very least, they make the reader pause more with the language.
Second, this elegant metaphor wherein history is earth-deposited. It’s a useful image and allows what follows in the poem to be more symbolic.
Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate
Since history is layered like the dirt, these images could be both literal objects and symbols for something else. The speaker tells us the bottle is a cure for some ailment, but not what the ailment might be—and it’s “divulged” from a backhoe, which lends a strange sense of construction work to an otherwise mysterious image.
Divulged is a surprising verb. You divulge information, not hidden objects. So there’s a further sense of the real and the symbolic mingling here in images whose meanings are not yet divulged to us.
Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil
Some notes:
This is the first, and only, introduction of an “I” in the poem.
The speaker assumes something about Marie Curie’s knowledge. Why? Did Marie Curie know she was irradiating herself—and how could she, when radiation was such a new science?
Notice a subtle shift in the poem’s sounds: the thrumming b’s and p’s in “body,” “bombarded,” and “purified” to the hard, uninhabitable c’s and s’s: “cataracts,” “cracked,” “suppurating skin.”
There’s something charming, to me, about that first line. Not only is the “I” so brief that it hardly registers, it’s also true of the reader. By reading this poem, you, too, read about Marie Curie today. The “I” is a real speaker, but so anonymous that it might as well be you.
But we never fully lose that sense of the speaker, either. For example, the speaker says “she must have known she suffered.” That phrase, “she must,” inserts the speaker’s perspective in such a way that we know we are hypothesizing in the mind of someone else. Without those notes, this poem would, arguably, be more fictitious, with language that borders on being what’s called free indirect discourse.
She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power
Those line breaks are so good. A line breaks where the line is deemed a complete unit, so these line breaks emphasize the following:
Marie Curie:
Died a famous woman denying
She also died denying her wounds
Denying her wounds also came from the same source as her power
Thus, the source of her power is both the source of her life and the source of her death.
Which is true of her work with radium: it both memorialized our two-time Nobel Prize-winning Maria Skłodowska in the annals of history—and, it killed her.
But is the power her work with radium? No, it’s something deeper, more mysterious and symbolic, divulged from history’s deposits yet sacred and singular to Marie.
Portrait Poetry Prompt
Adrienne Rich’s poem offers an incredible, if enigmatic, portrait of Marie Curie. It’s as though the poem distilled Curie into her radiant, radiating essence, and bottled that essence in verse. The poem also has a briefly stated “I” whose presence, while not central, nonetheless puts Curie’s life in conversation with the speaker’s.
You’ll do the same. Your prompt is to write a portrait of someone other than yourself, and only briefly include an “I” or self-insert somewhere in the poem. Your focus should remain on the person of your portrait, but also link this person to your own life. Use your freewrite from earlier to guide you.
interrupting my usual to talk a project that is dear to my heart: for the past couple years I've been working with some folks to create Poemancer, a card game that helps inspire and guide you in writing poetry! A little bit like a tarot deck and a little bit like journaling, it's a freeform tool to help you expand your poetry practice or to start your journey from the beginning.
I've put a lot of thought into the design work of this deck, and I also have had fun trying out writing my own poems for the first time since...high school? It's great fun and really versatile in its application, as I've been using it a bit for lyrics in my songwriting as well.
We're less than a week away from our kickstarter deadline, so please consider checking us out here!
Poets, poetry lovers, the poetry curious, and even those of you who disdain line breaks and metaphors:
I am so beyond excited to announce the launch of my Kickstarter for Poemancer: A Card Game for Writing Poetry.
I have been working on this game for years now and am so proud of what we've designed. Anyone with even a passing interest in poetry will benefit from these card decks, whose prompts and designs guarantee you new drafts of successful poems.
If you're interested in poetry and/or card games, please consider supporting us! You can learn more about Poemancer at our Kickstarter here:
Poemancer is a set of card decks to inspire your poetry practice and generate new successful poems.
Game by: Sean Glatch & Sergio Araneda
Art by: Yves Menshikova
Animation by: Yves Menshikova and Miyako Molinelli
Bodega guy asked if I’m ready for the weekend, and I meant to say something like “I don’t get a weekend,” but what I said was “every day is the week, man” and he was very perplexed. I did not clarify.
Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” that was written in 1950 is set on the day of August 4th, 2026 (tomorrow)!! Now’s your chance to read it around the time it’s based in!
Audio: A recording of Leonard Nimoy reading it on Internet Archive.
How steep the stairs within Kings’ houses are
For exile-wearied feet as mine to tread,
And O how salt and bitter is the bread
Which falls from this Hound’s table, — better far
That I had died in the red ways of war,
Or that the gate of Florence bare my head,
Than to live thus, by all things comraded
Which seek the essence of my soul to mar.
“Curse God and die: what better hope than this?
He hath forgotten thee in all the bliss
Of his gold city, and eternal day” —
Nay peace: behind my prison’s blinded bars
I do possess what none can take away,
My love, and all the glory of the stars.
Depending on your constitution, you either think grammar is sexy or grammar is annoying to think about. In both cases, I promise this prompt will yield something interesting in your poetry.
Read the full prompt below or find it on Poemancer!
Freewrite
What is something in your life that never seems to end?
Maybe you’re waiting for a callback. Perhaps you’re waiting in a long line. Maybe your poetry submission at The New Yorker has been pending for 2 years. Perhaps you’re “waiting on the world to change.”
Write about your subject using a single long sentence. Use every strategy at your disposal to prolong the sentence, including punctuation and conjunctions. Feel free to make your sentence run-on or grammatically incorrect, too—you’re evoking a feeling, not passing an English exam.
One-Sentence Poem: “My god, girlhood ripened” by Savannah Brown
Retrieved from her collection Closer Baby Closer. Reproduced in image to preserve formatting.
Divinations
A central tension of poetry’s form is the tension of the line break vis a vis the sentence. In poetry, the poet breaks the line where the poet deems the line is complete—and when the line is broken before the end of the sentence, we call that line “enjambed.”
A sentence only ends at a period. The omission of periods in Brown’s poem is startling: there are plenty of fragments that demand punctuation, but they are punctuated instead by whitespace, followed by the starts of new sentences with capital letters.
Nonetheless, this is a one-sentence poem. Technically, it’s not even a full sentence, since it doesn’t end in a period… but pedantry will get us nowhere. I’m interested in how this restraint of prolonging the sentence results in newer and stranger work. In this instance, the prolonged sentence reflects upon two coinciding themes: the endlessness of a soon-to-end girlhood (didn’t our teenage years seem to stretch past all our horizons?), and the desire for a tomorrow that lasts a single day.
Eschewing the period results in some really funky transitions and line breaks. I’m especially keen on this one:
The images are great, of course. “atlas psychedelic labyrinths”!! Stunning language. But I love the play with page space: the progressive indentations evoke that feeling of “soberly walking through / the family planning aisle”—and then we’re jarringly back to left-flush alongside a self-aware leap that speaks directly to the reader.
Many of the leaps and pivots in this poem do this: move towards a different subject, a different address to the reader. But these fragments also feel like memories, or at least diversions of thought. We’re either in the mind of a teenage girl, or the mind of a girl who still has access to her teenage mind, complete with the weirdness of coming-of-age online—and experiencing the disempowerments of sex.
Strategies for Prolonging a Sentence
Poetry is, first and foremost, an attempt to say something in a way that conventional language fails to. We’re using line breaks, literary devices, and other strategies to push past the boundaries of language.
As a result, I want you to feel empowered to break the rules. Screw grammar! Phooey to normativity! (Of course, don’t break the rules for the sake of breaking them… but having fun is always a good reason.)
Here are some ways of prolonging your sentences in a one-sentence poem:
Lists: Some lists can go on forever, aided by commas and conjunctions.
Colons and semicolons: Both : and ; are punctuation marks where a period could have been placed, but the sentence demanded to go on. The colon : is particularly useful for preceding an explanation, demonstration, or list.
Em-dashes: The Swiss army knife of punctuation! Em-dashes—always useful for interrupting thoughts, generating surprise, or just keeping the sentence moving.
Line and stanza breaks: Both can be used as a form of punctuation.
Lacunae: a fancy word for “gaps,” leaps of white space can also be a way of punctuating language without using an actual mark, much like Brown does in her poem.
Prompt: The One-Sentence Poem
Write a poem that’s a sentence long. Challenge yourself to write a poem that is at least one full page in length, but also, see how far you can get with it.
Your freewrite is one way of making the one-sentence restriction topical, but feel free to peruse our other poetry prompts for inspiration.
“I’ll just list ways you can accomplish this [radical revision] when you are working on a poem. Dig up some old ones and see what happens (it’s best to use old ones to start, as you are no longer emotionally attached to them): 1) If someone tells you you have too much in your poem, add more. 2) If someone tells you you have too little in your poem, take out more. 3) Take the last line and make it the first. Rewrite from there, keeping whatever works in what’s already there. 4) Expand your poem: add subordinate clauses using who, when, until, if, while, before, after, as, since, whenever, where, etc. Also use coordinating conjunctions: and/and/and; or/or/or; but/but/but (think of it as a list that keeps going). So, for example: “The man, who once loved me, who once told me___________, and __________, and ____________, and ______________…” so you’re pushing the syntax and the comfort of the line/sentence. Actual listing - must make a qualitative progression (light to dark, big to small, for example); can’t be random. Push the list, see what you come up with. Repetition - repeat what you just said. Maybe repeat it again. Contradiction - say the opposite of what you just said. 5) Compress your poem: Negation: use the word ‘not.’ When you do this you get both the thing named and its absence. You can also use other words that negate - ‘un’; ‘never’; ‘less’; 'without.’ Neologisms: (what I like to refer to as kennings - used in Anglo Saxon poetry): put words together to create a heightened adjective, a metaphor: 'the shutmouth mother,’ 'the sorrowfence.’ Possessives: use possessives: 'how the sun’s poultice draws on my inflammation’ (Plath) or 'the wind’s rebuke’ and 'the leaves’ exhalation’ (Brigit Pegeen Kelly). Shift the parts of speech: Use a noun as a verb or vice versa. Use an adjective as a verb, etc. Cut and paste: radically rearrange your poem. Find new combinations! EXERCISE: Go over your poem and underline any lines you feel jump out with lots of energy. Pick three of those lines. Make one the first line of a new poem, one a middle line, and one the last line. Now, using some of the above strategies (minimum 3), write a new poem.”
The diary of Clive Wearing, an amnesia patient living the first moment of becoming conscious and aware every 10-30 seconds for the past 36 years. He only remembers that he loves the piano, and he loves his wife.
