Love Notes
A Protesting Prompt full of Sweet Nothings
*Poet Camp is currently on a break while I move and prep for the rest of 2025, but signups are open for events coming very soon! Hope to see you at one of these events!
February Front Porch Office Hours *click on the image to join us on Sunday from Noon-1 Eastern!)
March Jumpstarts (March 10 - 14 AND, March 17-21 live on Google Meet)
And now… on to those sweet nothings!
How I love you, dear Poet Campers! Writing live with you, dreaming up new classes and fun prompts, bringing you into my little office with its messy desk and its snoring dogs enriches and beautifies my writing life.
This is one of those unfortunate holidays which has become associated with clichéd language. Maybe it’s because of the size of notes passed by hand, or the attempt to pack so much honest feeling in a few words. Love, desire, tenderness - it’s a day we’re welcomed to reveal the depth of our feelings, but what sometimes best reveals depth is a glimpse of the concrete ways they appear in their expression. We might sit own to write a love poem and find the words themselves aren’t quite enough.
Unfortunately, we’re not the only ones who forbid ourselves powerful language. A week ago a list of words was released which is clearly intended to limit the capability of scientists to best study and share their findings about what it is they find most powerful, most worthy of expression, and in so doing, deny funding to projects deigned to reach those who most need to widen understanding. This is similar to the list limiting NEA grant applications, refusing those whose projects are designed to reach audiences longing for self-expression, for change, for connection.
Take a look at some of those words, flagged from grant applications for the NSF.
See any that you relate to, which you feel strongly about, which might deny access to those who need these grants most? See any trends? See any political axes ground? I certainly do.
I love the poem below, “Queer Appalachia,” for the ways that it speaks honestly about personal experience, inviting us to enter into it viscerally, moving beyond the abstraction of identity, whether or not we relate, and into the particular, concrete feelings of exclusion and longing for belonging.
Queer Appalachia by RK Fauth Take me to the holler. I want to see the cows Big Mamaw’s grave and something about tobacco fields. I don’t recall all you said at Barley’s, but you introduced yourself with an anecdote about toothbrushes made from chewed-up willow branches and coyotes loping along a wooded backyard—Uncle Clark’s and Aunt Zella’s. Big Mamaw called you Little Tweeter and threw pollywogs in the air. Did you know in academia, everyone’s talking about queer Appalachia? And “statistically unlikely” is your best angle. You tug on all-purpose bootstraps under the table, ready to dazzle me with the story. I was baptized on the side of the road in a concrete basin. Farmers dressed in diaphanous curtains dunked me till I saw God. One time my parents decided to be American traveling gospel singers, ripping me out of a one-room schoolhouse to staple shag carpet to the metal walls of the bus we lived in. Coach, maybe, was the only gay woman I knew, and she’s still married to Earl. Take me to the holler. It just so happens that night you dragged an opossum out of the road. Not quite dead—in a poem I wrote that its life “teetered on the cusp of the longest, bluest hour.” I was knee-deep in Maggie Nelson, contemporary queen of the queers. Queen of blue I told you. Who? OK, take me to the Cumberland River where the cows pose and the ghost of Big Mamaw croons. Did you know Judith Butler is actually very attractive? Who is Judith Butler? You haul a kayak over your rippling bulk of a shoulder and set us going down the river. Kudzu vines dip beneath the tree line like ropes. Southern gothic. The river ends in a pool of long, thin men. Wading. Their ponytails whip out of the water and we dock. I hadn’t noticed the weather is hot. Even the buzzards stop and reconsider. And the current carries a fleet of crinkled beer cans toward us. Did they see you kiss me? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a real gun in my life. How fast can I load a boat? I ask myself while you take us out, you rush to take us out—to take my dumb ass out of the holler.
A Sweet Nothings Protest Prompt:
Write a piece which picks one of the abstract ideas from the list which you feel most powerfully connected to, or most drawn to. Take the word forbidden explicitly on this list, and makes it personal and particular through the lines you write. Perhaps you’ll speak to an audience who is themselves purposefully excluded by this list, a topic listed, or maybe express your feelings upon encountering yourself in this list. Reach for specifics - what’s happening outside as you read this list? Inside your house? At your desk? If you get stuck, swing in the opposite direction. Bring in a time you felt completely included. Were you with anyone? What was happening? What were you wearing? Any smells rise up in memory? Tastes? Invite us to the table. Maybe you’ll whisper the word, or maybe you will use it in your title. Bring it to the page. Take strength from knowing you are not alone in these feelings. Write a poem of resistance by flouting these rules. These words are not theirs to forbid.
As a retired clinical counselor I find this list horrifying. I would not be able to write a progress note, let alone document an intake. Without the proper words how would I advocate for my client? Listening to the press secretary re: the "Gulf of America" took me straight back to high school English and "1984."