Asked where great poems come from, Alice Notley, who passed away last month, responded in a 2024 interview for the Paris Review’s Art of Poetry series: “I think the real answer has to do with suffering, and how you perceive things after suffering. You might just freeze, but if you don’t, other worlds open to you.” In remembrance of Notley, write a poem that considers how your perceptions may have shifted in subtle or substantial ways after a time of loss or sorrow. Notley spoke of “hearing the dead” in dreams and receiving advice. What new worlds have opened up to you as a result of this difficult experience? How can you use lyric form to give voice to your emotions?

In the 1997 film Face/Off, an FBI agent survives an assassination attempt that kills his young son and is out for vengeance and justice. To foil this criminal’s next plot to bomb the city, the agent undergoes a secret surgery to replace his face with that of the criminal, only to have him surgically don the agent’s face, effectively creating a mirrored switch in physical identities and an epic showdown. Notable for its flabbergasting premise, another aspect of the film’s cult popularity is director John Woo’s signature style and trademark motifs: balletic action sequences, doves and churches, deadlocked gunfights, and coats blowing in slow motion in the wind. Write an essay about a dramatic situation from your past in which you insert small details and observations of physical description that complement the tone of your piece. How might you translate a slow-motion effect in cinema to a slow-motion moment in your storytelling?

“This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper,” concludes T. S. Eliot’s 1925 poem “The Hollow Men,” described in his obituary in the New York Times as “probably the most quoted lines of any 20th-century poet writing in English.” When considering the ending of something enormously consequential, the expectation might be that the external drama of that conclusion match one’s internal turmoil, however the sorrow of Eliot’s sentiment comes through in the idea of ending not with something explosive and abrupt, but with something much smaller, anticlimactic, and quiet. Write a short story that revolves around an ending of some sort—whether it be the world, a war, or a relationship—and include some portion of these last four lines of Eliot’s poem.

In storytelling, the narrative strategy of beginning in medias res is to launch into the middle of a plot. Frequently applied to the composition of contemporary novels and films, such as Fight Club, Forrest Gump, and Raging Bull, the storytelling device can be traced back to Homer’s Greek epic poem The Iliad, which opens at the tail end of the Trojan War. This week write a poem that begins in medias res. Think of a story you’d like to recount in narrative verse and then select a starting point that may be much later than the logical or conventional beginning of the action. Sprinkle in flashbacks and recollections of memory to fill in any necessary pieces of context that allude to earlier events.