Poetry Prompt of the Week: The Interruption

In this generative prompt, interrupt one experience with another and see what happens.

For a poem to function well, it must be its own sensory experience, not simply the relaying of one. Frank O’Hara’s gift is making your inhabit his—he is infectious with his perspective. Never is it more true than in his “The Day Lady Died”:

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days

I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness
and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

The magic of this poem is the way O’Hara yanks the reader around through the cacophony of everything his speaker (a thinly-veiled, maybe not even veiled O’Hara stand-in) is doing and thinking about on this New York day in July 1959—his pedestrian anxieties until he is accidentally confronted with a memory so tender and powerful it cuts through all that, stopping everything in its tracks—and of course, here’s the magic at the heart of the magic: the memory is of another moment where everything stopped in its tracks, which amplifies the effect. O’Hara takes a fast-paced poem and grinds it to a halt, changing tenses (from present to past), leaving us to focus on one moment—an absence of breathing.

The (generative) prompt: Start a poem telling one story and interrupt it with another, changing everything about the poem in the process: the pacing, the tone, the mood. Find a bridge between these stories that seems pertinent to you. Ideally, the movement between these stories is what you are really trying to show the reader.