"We'll Always Have Canton: New Work"

 

Prompts for the Lit Cleveland Fall Festival Audience:

1.      A sense of your childhood

Draw a picture of a place from your childhood. (If you have crayons around, use those, and use periwinkle and sea green liberally, along with any other favorite crayon colors, unless you are younger than I, and then use markers in pathetically fewer colors.)

Draft a poem about a regular event that took place there. In revision, focus on at least one of your five senses in the moment.

At the end of your poem, quote something an adult said or did OR say something you as a child didn’t say at the time and are saying now.

 

See Diane Kendig, “Reedurban, Ohio”

https://aboutplacejournal.org/issues/rust-belt-tales/growth-and-some-death/diane-kendig/

 

See also Elizabeth Biller Chapman, “On the Screened Porch”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=178&issue=4&page=24

 

 

2.      Mashup

Write about a sacrament in the religious sense (baptism, marriage, anointing the sick, confirmation, communion) or the personal sense (marriage, divorce) as an episode of a reality show you have seen. Use the format of the show as the format of your poem

OR
Draft a poem that combines lines from a famous classical poet with contemporary slang. (My favorite these days is from a black out poem from Shakespeare:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day/Thou art…/hot.”

Based on Diane Kendig, “Epithalamion.” and “Next on Dateline: At the Swan and Hoop”(p10):
https://www.thebrokencitymag.com/archive.htm

(Click on “The Silver Screen” for pdf)

 

3.      Call and Response, Listing

Choose a color and research it, listing its features, pronunciation, literary associations, any associations, personal associations. Try a color weirder than Lynn’s and mine. Try mauve, for example. Then, try organizing your lists somehow, anyhow: by stanzas or as a shaped poem. Find a title. Find an end line.

 

See Lynn Powell, “Kinda Blue”
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/42180/kind-of-blue

And Diane Kendig’s rip-off, “Green, I Want You Green”
https://redwolfjournal.wordpress.com/2025/07/29/green-i-want-you-green-by-diane-kendig/

OR

Choose a poem by a contemporary poet and respond to the poet with a list, a poetic list. It may be why you agree with the poet. Or why you disagree. Or what you are adding to what they have to say.

Diane Kendig, “Des” in Comstock Review

ALSO, CHECK OUT “Read + Write: 30 Days of POETRY”
https://cuyahogalibrary.org/blog/poetry