What Carries You, After Emily Jungmin Yoon’s “What Carries Us”
Time yourself as you write in some way (with a timer, the length of a song, or the length of a page). Write for roughly 2 minutes in response to the following questions. Try to write for the whole time, without stopping, in sentences, with no line breaks. Work to get all of your thoughts on the page, without worrying about what you are writing, or how. It is encouraged to follow wherever your mind leads.
What carries you? Write a list.
Take a moment to go over the list of what carries you. Select the one thing that you found most surprising, interesting, or strange. You will be focusing on that one thing for the rest of this prompt.
- Describe this thing in as much detail as possible. Imagine you are describing this thing to someone who has no knowledge of this thing: an infant or alien.
- What do you know about this thing?
- What questions do you have about this thing?
Write a list of comparisons for your thing, using the construction “[Thing] is like______________” with the blank a list of items that are different than the thing. For example, try to stay away from comparisons that are logically true: “My car is a vehicle.” Try to write at least 20 comparisons for your thing.
Read Emily Jungmin Yoon’s “What Carries Us” out loud, several times.
A few questions to consider, on your own in writing, or in discussion with others:
- Why does the speaker focus on the horse in this poem? What associations do you have with horses? What else carries the “us” in the poem?
- Who is the “you” in this poem? What is this person’s relationship to the speaker?
- How does the speaker define metaphor in this poem? What is the connection between metaphor, and the rest of the poem?
Write a poem about a thing that carries you. You can address the poem to a specific person, or even to the thing that carries you. You can research the thing to learn more about it, but you also want to use your imagination to learn more about what carries. Weave at least two comparisons into your poem.
Maggie Queeney (she/her) is the author of In Kind (University of Iowa Press, 2023), winner of the 2022 Iowa Poetry Prize, and settler (Tupelo Press, 2021). She received the 2019 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize, a Ruth Stone Scholarship, and an Individual Artists Program Grant from the City of Chicago in both 2019 and 2022. Her work appears in the Kenyon Review, Guernica, the Missouri Review, and The...