Prompt: Party

Last month's prompt with all its quotes and allusions to other poets was like flipping through my copy of The Norton Anthology of Poetry. I played with that prompt and I did page through that old anthology. T.S. Eliot caught my attention. he was an important poet for me in my undergraduate days. I loved the puzzles and allusions in his lines. I like it less today. But his poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is still one I love and some lines are deep in my memory.It was first published in 1915 and later included as the title poem in his collection Prufrock and Other Observations.

The poem is a dramatic monologue whose speaker relays the anxieties and preoccupations of his inner life, and his romantic hesitations and regrets. It is considered one of the defining works of modernism. That literary movement had writers experimenting with form and plumbing the depths of alienation, isolation, and the confusion of life at the turn of the 20th century.

Though Eliot’s poem is less about external events and more about inner drama, rereading it this past week, I saw in my marginalia that I imagined myself walking with Eliot to a party. December is a month of parties. I saw myself walking through town to a party where "the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo." Sounds like a good literary party.

The poem is a dramatic monologue where middle-aged Prufrock wanders the streets. The party is just a moment. And it is a moment surrounded by anxieties, indecision, and fear of rejection. That also fits into some parties I wandered into in my youth!

Our call for submissions this month is for poems about a party. We can be going to the party, at the party, leaving or just remembering a party. It's a story, a narrative, perhaps an inner monologue. But where is the meaning in this party?

Prufrock wanders through fog, smoke, cheap hotels, restaurants and a party. (though my notes seem to doubt that there even was a party.) And he is fearful about his thinning hair, aging body, and inadequacy. He doesn't know if he even dares to “disturb the universe.” He thinks “there will be time” for decisions, revisions, and to confess his feelings to a woman. He knows he is “not Prince Hamlet” but a minor character. Poor J. Alfred. He should have gone to a party and had some fun. (And why is the poem a "love song?")

Read the entire poem

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Thomas Stearns (T.S.) Eliot was born in 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri, and became a British subject in 1927. He is the author of the groundbreaking poem, The Waste Land, the brilliant Four Quartets, and Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (which is the basis for the musical Cats!), along with numerous other poems, prose, and plays.
Eliot won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948.
T.S. Eliot died in 1965 in London, England, and is buried in Westminster Abbey.
You can browse all his books on Amazon, and buy his Collected Poems, but you can also get his complete works on Kindle for free. 

 

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Poets Online Nominations for the Pushcart Prizes

December is when literary journals submit their nominations for Pushcart Prizes. Poets Online participates in this competition and in the Best of the Net Anthology competition. The Pushcart Prize was founded in 1976 by Bill Henderson, and being nominated, as well as being published in the annual, is considered one of the most coveted honors in the realm of small press literature.

Of course, nominations from our little online journal face some big names both in the other journals and in the poets nominated. (Pick up a copy of previous prize anthologies and see.)

I ask four other poets to review the issues from the past year, and along with my vote, we select poems with the most votes.

The Pushcart Prize is a prestigious literary award that celebrates outstanding writing published in small presses and literary magazines in print and online. It is not exclusive to poetry but also honors works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Each year, editors of small presses and literary magazines nominate works they have published. The original idea of the prizes (which may have become a bit lost) was to showcase voices that may not receive attention from larger publishers. That is certainly true for our nominations. Poems and poets who are nominated are a select group, and winning or being included in the annual Pushcart Prize Anthology often brings significant recognition and helps elevate a poet's career. 

Our nominations, if chosen for the Prize, will appear in the 2026 edition, which is the 50th year of its publication.

Our Nominated Poems and Poets 
Marking Moments by Rose Ann Higashi (November)
Beside the Gorge by Albert J. Reeves (September)
Unlike Cicadas by Rob Friedman (July)
Dear John Donne by Lianna Wright (April)
Awakening by Leslayann Schecterson (October)

Ken Ronkowitz, Editor

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

This Quarter Century of Poetry

It is quite a show of confidence to make a list and title it "The Best American Poetry of the 21st Century (So Far)"  The "so far" is more of a nod to so much century yet to come, rather than an acknowledgement of the tricky task of saying what are "the 25 most consequential collections from the past 25 years." 

I'm not a fan of "best" lists, but they can be a good starting place for arguments and also as a guide to poets to sample. I have read nine of these collections, but I only own one. Poets are supposed to buy other poets' books, but I just don't want more books in the house. I love books, and it pains me to give away ones I have, but the reality is that I'm never going to read 90% of them again. There are ones I bought and never finished or even started reading! I'm in that phase of life when you are getting rid of things.

The one book from the list I own is The Shadow of Sirius by W. S. Merwin. I don't know that it is the best of the best on this list (which puts it down at #23), but it was one I read parts of in a bookstore and wanted to take home.

The article describes it like this:

"Merwin implores us to see that “the past is not finished / here in the present / it is awake the whole time.” The poet’s recollections include the texture of his mother’s hand at the piano, the image of an old dog running in the hills “like an unmoored flame,” the graciousness of a roofer named Duporte, now long dead. But the act of remembering always takes place amid natural as well as personal history: Merwin’s poetry has an ecological awareness that he sharpened through decades of work restoring and conserving palm trees in Hawaii. His careful stewardship of local flora helps make these poems’ descriptions—of the passing days and returning seasons; of birds and trees; of his wife, Paula, and the life they made together—tangible. That same tactile quality is what makes these verses’ sadness at the finality of loss so pointed."

Still, such a list, carefully made and annotated, is an invitation to read a poet that you have never read before, or a collection by a favorite that you missed. 

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To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

The Poems of Seamus Heaney

This month, The Poems of Seamus Heaney, was published (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and it is a heavy volume of 1296 pages. Published in a single volume for the first time, the collected poems of the Nobel laureate's long career run from his first book, Death of a Naturalist (1966), to poems written for Human Chain (2010), his twelfth and final book.

Seamus Heaney (1939–2013) was born in rural County Londonderry, Northern Ireland, the eldest of nine children in a farming family. His upbringing in Mossbawn deeply influenced his poetry, grounding it in the rhythms of rural life. 

After studying English at Queen’s University Belfast, he became a teacher and lecturer, publishing his first major collection in 1966. Heaney went on to teach at Harvard and Oxford, gaining international recognition as one of the greatest poets of his age. 

Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995, he balanced academic life with prolific writing, producing acclaimed collections such as North, Field Work, and Human Chain, as well as translations including Beowulf. He lived in Dublin from the mid-1970s until his death, remembered as a poet who bridged Ireland’s rural traditions with universal human themes.

Heaney’s poetry is marked by lyrical beauty, ethical depth, and sensory richness. His early work vividly evokes rural labor and natural landscapes, transforming everyday experiences into profound meditations. He combined traditional forms with modern concerns, often weaving Irish myth, history, and the political turmoil of the Troubles into his verse. 

He trusted the local and parochial as sources of universal meaning. His style balanced reverence for the past with openness to classical and global influences, from Anglo-Saxon cadences to Dante and Virgil. While he sometimes resisted being cast as a political spokesman, his work consistently explored the intersections of personal memory, communal identity, and historical struggle.

One of Seamus Heaney’s best-known poems is “Digging”, the opening piece in his debut collection, it is often regarded as his signature work, where he reflects on his family’s farming tradition and contrasts the physical labor of digging with the intellectual labor of writing poetry

DIGGING

Between my finger and my thumb   

The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

 

Under my window, a clean rasping sound   

When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:   

My father, digging. I look down

 

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds   

Bends low, comes up twenty years away   

Stooping in rhythm through potato drills   

Where he was digging.

 

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft   

Against the inside knee was levered firmly.

He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep

To scatter new potatoes that we picked,

Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

 

By God, the old man could handle a spade.   

Just like his old man.

 

My grandfather cut more turf in a day

Than any other man on Toner’s bog.

Once I carried him milk in a bottle

Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up

To drink it, then fell to right away

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods

Over his shoulder, going down and down

For the good turf. Digging.

 

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

Through living roots awaken in my head.

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

 

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.

Hear him read the poem

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
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