Writing Prompt: Nontraditional Media and Supports
If you’re feeling weighed down by language and the page, try the following:
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Choose your medium and support. For Super Bubble 1 (after Mallarmé), I chose different-colored pens and a black Posca marker as my media and gum as my support. Mallarmé chose ink as a medium and stones, fans, Easter eggs, and jugs as supports. I recommend anything that seems fun and easy to come by.
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Do some test runs to see how your medium and support interact.
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Start to write.
I hope the visceral joy of the activity will allow you to think in ever-deepening and illuminating alignments with the materials themselves. Questions to consider: How will you (if you will) preserve the poem? Will it stay a singular work or be photographed, transcribed, etcetera?
“Not Too Hard to Master” is a series of poets writing on form and sharing a prompt. Read Robert Fernandez’s “Fire, Paint, Pastels | Stones, Fans, Gum.”
Poet and editor Robert Fernandez was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and grew up in Miami. He earned an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is the author of the collections We Are Pharaoh (2011), Pink Reef (2013), and Scarecrow (Wesleyan University Press, 2016). He is also the co-translator, with Blake Bronson-Bartlett, of Azure (2015), a translation of the work of Stéphane Mallarmé. In poems that...