Spice Level 10½
after Vince Gotera
I like my chili peppers hot, but stop before I burn my tastebuds off and yell for bread or milk or lemon’s acid tang.
The mild jalapeno’s but a prop that grants the diner bragging rights, but hell— my peppers need more bite—a sharper fang.
In scorpion, I’ve met my match, then some— the waiter, worried, asks me, “Are you well?” Glares, disapprovingly, at laughter from the gang. Florid-faced and tearful, I succumb— a whimper, not a bang.
This poem was inspired by Vince Gotera’s curtal sonnet, “Papa’s Chili.” He has been trying to get me to write a curtal sonnet for two years. I have stubbornly resisted. I have been trying to coax him off his shadorma kick for a few months, so when he wrote “Papa’s Chili” how could I not relent and try a curtal sonnet?
Vince, by the way, thought I cheated on the last line of this curtal sonnet form, developed by Gerard Manley Hopkins. It’s supposed to be a 10½ line sonnet, but my original draft was “with a whimper not a bang” (six and a half feet). Picky, picky, picky. I would rather it flow, rhythmically, and say what I mean to say than to strictly adhere to the form. That said, I finally settled on this version. I don’t think much is lost by adding an em dash and removing “with.” Neither did Vince, who suggested almost the same thing, in a small poetry group we belong to, after I rewrote this. Great minds, or something like that…
Editing and refinement are half the fun. However, it is so easy to get stuck in a sort of holding pattern, because a poem may never be truly “done.” If we fret, revise, add, and subtract, we’ll never deem it worthy of publication. It will rot in a drawer, as so much of my writing has done over the years. And once it’s released in the wild, opinions on whether it flows better with an extra metrical foot or needs an ellipsis rather than an em dash are nearly as numerous as the readers who’ve seen the thing. I say “nearly” because I suspect most readers, unless they are writers or avid poetry scholars, themselves, won’t notice or care so long as the writer’s last choice doesn’t trip them up like an unexpected speed-bump on a rural road.
I mentioned the other day that I’m rarely inspired by “prompts.” Lately, I’ve been approaching them the way a recalcitrant student might approach a tedious assignment, with a mix of michief, rebellion, and smart-assery. Just “git ‘er done,” right? But I’ll admit I enjoy tossing a gauntlet back and forth, for fun, with my fellow poets. Not a prompt, a challenge – be it a topic, a response, a form, or some other constraint. I enjoy writing collaboratively, as well.
Poets responding to other poems is an old tradition – using the original poem as a prompt, a springboard, an invitation to a conversation. I have been doing this with my friend, Necia Campbell, for a couple of years, now. I once sent Vince critique on one of his sonnets – and wrote it in sonnet form. If the usual type of “prompt” isn’t working for you, be it in poetry, short fiction, or other forms of writing, consider that the whole world is nothing but prompts. Talk to it. Talk about it. Argue with it. But whatever you do, pay attention to it.
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