Pen & Page Prompt #5

This week: Poems like letters, like messages, like missives

Pen & Page: The Epistolary

The epistolary poem, or letter poem, is one of poetry’s oldest and most intimate forms. Rooted in the Latin epistola, meaning "letter," these poems are written as though addressed to a recipient, sometimes real, sometimes imagined. The form invites vulnerability, direction, and voice. Because it is inherently communicative, it opens a natural space for direct address, storytelling, confession, or confrontation.

photo by Towfiqu Barbhuiya

One of its strengths is the relationship it creates between speaker and addressee. The reader gets to overhear something private, urgent, or unresolved. Even when the recipient isn’t human, the act of writing to something (a nation, a body, a weather system, a season) infuses the poem with presence and tension.

Prompt #5: Reviving the Tradition

Write a poem in the form of a letter addressed to something non-human. This could be a place, a season, a species, a machine, a river, a border, an illness, a language, or even a concept like silence, gravity, extinction, or hope.

Let this poem carry a message of urgency, reverence, reckoning, or plea. What must be said to this entity, about the world, about what’s vanishing, about what we long for or fear?

Craft Options:

• Use the direct address ("Dear X") to ground the reader in the epistolary form

• Let the tone reflect the message: formal, pleading, angry, loving, grieving, hopeful

• Use imagery and metaphor that reflect the nature of your addressee

#Margin Notes: Extending the Understanding

Using the epistolary form, Danez Smith uses his poem “dear white america” to confront racial violence, historical trauma, and erasure with power and fury. It is a poem of indictment, lament, and a visionary call for liberation. What makes this piece work is his use of the refrain “i’ve left earth” and his hallmark blending of the personal and political.

i’ve left Earth to find a place where my kin can be safe, where black people ain’t but people the same color as the good, wet earth, until that means something, until then i bid you well, i bid you war, i bid you our lives to gamble with no more.

The language retains urgency and specificity throughout leaving the reader/listener acutely aware of a black person’s experience of America. “dear white america” is included in Smith’s National Book Award Finalist volume Don’t Call Us Dead, a particularly provocative book that confronts racism and calls urgently for change.

The use of direct address, as in Smith’s poem, has the power to engage the reader on a personal level. An eavesdropping. A secret knowledge. The reader is invited into a confessional space creating a powerful duality: the poem is both private letter and public testimony. The reader becomes witness.

And in bearing witness, we are changed.
We are called not just to read—but to respond.

---

Wishing you a generative week until my next full length newsletter where I will delve into “The Fragment as Form: Exploring the Beauty of the Broken.” I am looking forward to sharing my thoughts and discoveries with you. I do so enjoy the journey!

Write and thrive,
Robbin