Genre: Poetry

“Sometimes colors become points of departure to go into stories or anecdotes from things that I believe correspond to those colors,” says writer and comedian Julio Torres explaining the origins of his solo theater project, Color Theories, in an interview with Douglas Corzine published in the Brooklyn Rail last fall. In the show, Torres performs a memoiristic blend of stand-up and art lecture that “engages with the idea that colors are a form of classification, like saying something is a mineral, animal, or vegetable, something is either red or blue or yellow or green, et cetera.” Launching off from this idea, compose a series of short poems, each focusing on a different color. Incorporate ideas, moods, people, and abstract things in the world—such as systems or cultural concepts—that you associate with that color. How might vastly different objects and memories be categorized as the same color?

“You were almost apologetic when you said it today. / We were having coffee, checking e-mail, & the grapefruit / Juice shone with pulp,” begins Rachel Eliza Griffiths’s poem “I Might Not Be Here,” published this month in the New Yorker. The five words in the poem’s title have presumably been spoken by the narrator’s spouse, the “you” addressed throughout the poem, and the tension of those words hover over the scene. Later, the narrator remarks, “Five words / Stalk my future with you.” The poem shifts between details of the room where the words were uttered to thoughts related to senescence and the trajectory of love, life, and art. Write a poem that expounds on a short sentence that carries a lot of weight between two people. Recount details of the place in which the words were said to sit in the moment.

In Sanam Sheriff’s poem “The Emperor Pats His Lips with a Napkin,” published in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, each line ends with renditions of the words, “object” and “subject,” a constraint the poet uses as a kind of outline. “Given that you are the object / of the emperor’s touch; given that you object // to his learnt repetition of love; given the abject / shame of a body entered by another body’s object // permanence,” begins Sherrif’s poem. Using a similar type of constraint, compose a poem that plays with different renditions of words that stem from the same or parallel roots. Play with the different verb tenses and homophonic meanings of your chosen words to paint your own portrait.