In a recent installment of our Ten Questions series, Maya C. Popa talks about how her palindrome poem “One Way or Another” became the opening poem of her collection If You Love That Lady (Norton, 2026) and the first one she remembers writing for it. “Its back-and-forth, snake-swallowing-its-own-tail quality would end up being emblematic of both those years and my experience assembling the manuscript,” she says. This week, write a palindrome poem in which the last half mirrors the first half. You may choose to adhere strictly to a set of lines, reversing the order halfway through the piece with no alterations, or choose to divert from this structure while keeping the halves of the poem a reflection, be it structural or figurative. How might symmetry serve as an embodiment of your poem’s themes?

“My essay on tigers started with the question of whether Blake, when he wrote ‘The Tyger,’ had ever seen a real tiger,” says Eliot Weinberger in an interview by Srikanth Reddy for the Paris Review’s “Art of the Essay” series. “That got me looking into the mythology and image of the tiger in the West.” Stemming from a deceptively simple question, Weinberger’s celebrated essay “Paper Tigers” investigates the complex history of tiger iconography and fascination with the wild animal. Write an essay that begins with a simple question and draws from a piece of mythos, whether cultural or private, that is present in your life. What associations and symbolisms does your subject conjure for you?

Sophie Kemp’s absurdist novel Paradise Logic (Simon & Schuster, 2025) follows a young woman who seeks everlasting devotion from her boyfriend and embarks on a mission to become the best girlfriend of all time. In an interview published in Columbia University’s the Blue and White, Kemp talks about drawing inspiration from one of Nobel Prize–winning author Kazuo Ishiguro’s books. “The Remains of the Day is about a guy who wants to be the greatest butler of all time,” she says. “And I was like, oh, it’s going to be like that.” Write a short story in which your main character is trying to become the absolute best in their field or pursuit. What insights can this monomania give to your character’s psychology? Is the grandiose fixation noble, deluded, ill-fated, successful, or perhaps somewhere in-between?

“I am waiting / for the meek to be blessed / and inherit the earth / without taxes / and I am waiting / for forests and animals / to reclaim the earth as theirs,” writes the late Lawrence Ferlinghetti in his poem “I Am Waiting,” which appears in his 1958 collection A Coney Island of the Mind. The speaker presents a long, meandering list of things they are waiting for, many of which are related to social, cultural, and political change and reveal a snapshot of activist concerns of the time. “I am waiting / for a way to be devised / to destroy all nationalisms / without killing anybody.” Write a poem that lists what you are awaiting, perhaps reflecting on current issues, both national and international. You may even want to reference characters from your favorite works of literature, as Ferlinghetti does with Tom Sawyer, Aphrodite, and others.

In “The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors,” a recent article published in the New York Times, Benjamin Wallace writes about philosophy scholars who have found themselves high in demand in the burgeoning field of AI ethics and this growing trend of hiring philosophers with AI training. “One of humanity’s oldest disciplines and one of its newest inventions feel distinctly made for each other,” writes Wallace. “A.I. presents a fresh way for philosophers to ask ancient questions...of truth and belief and knowledge (epistemologists); of reasoning (logicians); of mind and consciousness (philosophers of mind and consciousness).” Write a personal essay that explores your own ideas about the potential benefits and detriments of the increasing presence of artificial intelligence in all aspects of life. What ethical or moral issues come to mind when you reflect on how we should interact with AI?