Pen & Page Prompt #4
This week: Letting silence, disruption, and space shape your poem
#Pen & Page: A Preview
Coming up August 7, the next bi-monthly edition of my full-length newsletter will arrive featuring deeper reflections, a curated booklist, and the expanded Frame & Phrase prompt. The focus this time? Fragmentation in poetry—as both a theme and a form. Today’s prompt offers a small preview, a first step into that layered terrain.
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Prompt #3: What the Break Reveals
Write a poem that emerges from fragmentation—of thought, memory, relationship, place, or identity. Rather than smoothing the pieces into a whole, allow the breaks to show.
Consider:
Begin with something already broken: a photo, a sentence, a bowl, a silence.
Consider what was once whole—and why wholeness might no longer be possible or desirable.
Let the poem lean into disorder: what does the break reveal that continuity cannot?
Craft Options:
Form: Try a fragmented structure—white space, stanza breaks, interrupted lines, or floating phrases.
Syntax: Use sentence fragments intentionally. Let silence and disjunction do some of the emotional heavy lifting.
Imagery: Choose concrete images of breaking, scattering, or piecing together—mosaics, echoes, shrapnel, puzzle pieces.
Perspective: Allow shifts in point of view or tense to mirror uncertainty or disruption.
Challenge:
Begin with a single line you’ve written in the past that felt unfinished or abandoned. Let it be the piece from which the whole grows.
#From the Stacks
High Jump as Icarus Story, by Gustav Parker Hibbett, Banshee Press
I am very excited to share with you the details of a first book of poems that is making quite a splash. Gustav Parker Hibbett’s High Jump as Icarus Story has been garnering prizes since its publication in 2024 including shortlisting for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Seamus Heaney Poetry Prize for a First Collection.
Hibbett’s work has been of special interest to me as editor and as an avid reader of new voices since the publication of two of his poems in River Heron Review: “Black Purity” and “Lake Nicol, Late Summer”. In his work, I find vulnerability and vision and I am looking forward to following the development of his voice in his debut volume.
from the back cover of "High Jump…
“In High Jump as Icarus Story, Gustav Parker Hibbett gifts us visions of flight and falling. This stunningly accomplished debut deconstructs and redefines notions of Blackness, queerness, and masculinity through the lens of myth, pop culture, and that most transcendent of sports – the high jump.
Formally inventive, these poems speak in a vulnerable, rapturous voice that urges us to reimagine our possible selves, while navigating a labyrinthine America that conjures its young into monsters. Taking us from the arroyos of New Mexico to a West Cork farm in winter, these meditations on beauty and the elusive nature of love are insightful, and hard-won: the spirit triumphs, even when body falls.”
Here, in this poem, “High Jump as Flow State,” whose title speaks to the volume itself, the speaker recounts the movements of the high jumper as in a state of flow, “as an altered state of being” and culminates the poem naming prayer as “a special privacy between the jumper and their own ambitions.”
High Jump as Flow State By some accounts, I was an artist above the crossbar, pure potential. Coaches from other places would approach my dad at State, tell him with that form they’d have me jumping six, eight inches higher within months if I went and trained with them, though it was never possible for me to quit my life and study high jump as an altered state of being. Still, all I cared about for years was how my body moved over the bar, my mind’s eye annotating energy with cartoon physics diagrams, from run to planted foot to torso, diverted up and back and over, devotee to the feeling — diamond needle in a record’s groove — that anything worth doing is worth doing beautifully. Most nights before bed I’d watch YouTube compilations of the perfect form, slowed down so I could see the moment when the jumpers flipped their heads back: oftentimes they’d close their eyes until their legs cleared, the language of this prayer a special privacy between the jumper and their own ambitions.
I encourage you to take a leap of your own and trust in the revelations and insights in Hibbett’s debut book to lead you to your discovery of that elusive spiritual plane.
Thanks for reading my post. May today’s prompt and Gustave Parker Hibbett’s poem open something new in your writing this week. I’ll meet you back here soon, fragments and all.
Write and thrive,
Robbin
Ohhh! This looks fun!