Pen & Page Prompt #6

This week: Writing in pieces

Pen & Page: Disruption as Meaning

Fragmentation in poetry isn’t just about breaking things apart. It’s about trusting the reader to move through the spaces you’ve left, to make the leap with you. In life, our days rarely unfold in neat arcs. They’re flashes of memory, half-finished thoughts, conversations cut short. Writing in fragments mirrors that truth.

photo by Hans Eiskonen

A fragment invites intimacy because it doesn’t explain everything. It lets silence carry weight. It offers the reader a place to step in, to become part of the poem’s architecture. In a way, fragmentation is an act of collaboration. The poem’s meaning is built together, between the words on the page and the mind reading them.

You can read more about fragmentation in my recent post “Fragment as Form: Exploring the Art of Poetic Disjunction.”

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Prompt #6: When the World Went Sideways

Write about a moment when something ordinary turned strange — a familiar street in a sudden fog, a dinner conversation that veered into the unexpected. Consider using a form such as a sonnet or a looser form such as a list poem, Even consistent quatrains, tercets, or couplets create form.

Now take that familiar form and interrupt it. Break the pattern with unrelated lines, abrupt silences, or contradictions that jar the reader. Let the disruption itself be part of the poem’s meaning. Let it arrive organically, timed with the disruption of the event.

Your “break(s)” might:

• Insert a surprising image that doesn’t seem to belong.

• Drop a single-line stanza in the middle of a longer one.

• Repeat a phrase in a way that interrupts the flow.

The goal is to explore how disorder, interruption, and dissonance can open new layers of meaning — just as in life, where the unexpected often changes the story.

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#Stage Notes

Upcoming Reading with Hayden Saunier, author of Wheel on August 26 at 6:00 - 7:30 PM (ET) live at the Bryant Park Reading Room (between 40th and 42nd Streets and Firth and Sixth Avenues behind the New York Public Library, NYC: Free. If you are in Manhattan on the 26th, this is the poetry reading to attend. Other poets reading are: Eve Grubin, Lesley Wheeler, and Elizabeth T. Gray.

Hayden Saunier

Hayden Saunier is the author of six poetry collections, including her most recent book Wheel, (Terrapin 2024) Her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, Nimrod International’s Pablo Neruda Prize, the Rattle Poetry Prize and has been published in 32 Poems, Southern Poetry Review, River Heron Review, The Sun, Thrush, and Virginia Quarterly Review as well as featured online on Poetry Daily, The Writer’s Almanac, and Vox Populi. Hayden is the founder and director of No River Twice, an interactive poetry performance group.

Wheel is a tour de force of craft and voice from Pennsylvania poet Hayden Saunier. Among her many published works and five other collections, this book stands out for its ingenious turns and hammer-strike endings. These are poems you’ll feel in your bones — the work of an accomplished poet fully at home with the page, the pen, and the pulse of everyday life.

John Timpane, journalist, editor, and writer, says of Wheel, “This is the work of a poet at full throttle, full voice, persuading us to join her as she stands in a winter suit of hand-me-downs amid a storm of beauty, loss, and bright abundance, feet in rubber boots, wheeled round, firmly grounded in chastening, gladdening splendor.”

Wheel is available from Terrapin Books and Bookshop.org.

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Thanks for hanging around with me today. I’d love to hear your responses to the prompt (or anything, really), so jump in there and share what’s happening.

Let your words scatter—trust that they’ll land true.

Write and thrive,
Robbin