Wednesday, March 04, 2015

The Sideways Door: March Prompt Column

This month, with vacations a scarce month away, I am thinking of letters and so this month's prompt column calls for a letter poem.

It takes a line from one my most favourite poems, Primo Levi's ;To My Friends' and you can find it here: 'Stamped by everyone.'

As I was writing this column, I discovered that a poem I had chosen and was quoting in full, by a young girl, was in fact a response to a prompt and so took the entire first stanza from the original. But I was sent this poem without also being told this crucial piece of information. 

Naturally, while I've used that kind of teaching tool in class, I couldn't include a result in a column like this. I might still post that poem separately at some point because even with its similarities to the original, it was still quite good.


2 comments:

Arihant Verma said...

I write letters too! I write to college senior, a friend and my predecessor of my college magazine's (NIT H's SRIJAN) editor. She has always been secretive about sharing certain things in words or in socialized media text, but amazingly we started exchanging letters, and it became sharing of the monologues of the mind voice (filtered a little of course). We stopped talking over the phone and social media and decided this to be the only way of communication between us. It keeps something not very much known, alive.

Thank you for the prompt. Looking forward to submit the poem!

Space Bar said...

Arihant: look forward to your submission.