PtoP Ep 28 Corbin Edit 1
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Carrie: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Prompt to Page podcast, a partnership between the Jessamine County Public Library and the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning. I'm your host, librarian and poet, Carrie Green. Each episode, we interview a published writer who shares their favorite writing prompt. Our guest today is Sean L.

Corbin. Sean is the author of The Leper Dreams of Snow and is the Poetry Gauntlet Coordinator for the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning. His work has been published widely. He holds degrees in English and creative writing from Morehead State University and the University of Kentucky. Sean lives in Lexington, Kentucky with his wife and sons and also works in medical simulation.

Welcome, Sean, and thanks for joining us. 

Sean: Thanks for having me. This is great. 

Carrie: So congratulations on being named the new coordinator for the Carnegie Center's Poetry Gauntlet. 

Sean: Well, [00:01:00] thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that.

Carrie: Can you tell us a little bit about the Poetry Gauntlet and your role with it? 

Sean: Sure. So the, the Poetry Gauntlet was an idea and I'm not too privy to the information of how it initially started, but it, it did, it did come out of, of the brilliant mind of Christopher McCurry, , who was the coordinator before me , but also, you know, the owner and founder of it initially , initially the Poetry Gauntlet was run through , Workhorse, which was his kind of, writing collective, , company.

It still is. It's still, it's still there. , And so he ran it himself for, for several years, , before, forging a partnership with the Carnegie Center and letting the Carnegie Center sort of take the reign, so to speak, or take the lead. And then he decided to kind of take a break and after this last year, and I'm more than honored to, to be able to, to, to take over from him.

And it's a [00:02:00] big shoes to fill. The gauntlet itself is a challenge. It is a course through the Carnegie center first and foremost. So it is just kind of a mutant on steroids workshop , just like they, they have every season, which I've, I've been teaching workshops for the Carnegie Center for several years now , on a seasonal basis.

And, and so this is just like one of those only it's, it's kind of, it is, it is a mutant form. It's grown, it's, it's, it's much larger. So it's a year long course , where we meet on a monthly basis and sort of go over all things poetry , and, and sort of work through the process of what it means to be not just a poet, but a professional poet and professional, not necessarily in terms of this is your soul or primary form of income, but a professional poet, a working poet to take it seriously, to [00:03:00] treat it as a profession.

And so we're not only writing. We're not only sort of talking about that sort of ethereal magic that is writing poetry and being artists and creating art, but also the practical aspects of, okay, well, we've got this beautiful thing. Now, what do we do with it? How do we, how do we polish it? How do we, how do we strengthen it?

How do we present it to people? In terms of handing it to a friend or in terms of sending it out to the New Yorker or any other magazine in the world, how do we get manuscripts ready, how do we publish a book? You know, how do we do, how do we do a reading? How do, how do we do all of these things?

How do we promote ourselves? And so it's, it's not just the, not just the act of writing itself, but everything that's within sort of the orbit in the context of being a poet is, is, is what, is what the gauntlet is, is really concerned with. And so that's why we meet once a month for a year. That's why we meet for like four hours at a [00:04:00] time.

And we're working together virtually or remotely outside of those meetings. You know, we're, we're really, we're really putting a lot of equity into, into our art and our writing throughout the year. So that in a very long winded nutshell. That's that's what the Gauntlet is. 

Carrie: No, I don't think that was long winded at all, just thorough.

And I know that another part of it, according to the website is writing a hundred poems over the course of that year. Some listeners may be familiar with NaNoWriMo or LexPoMo, Lexington Poetry Month, where, you know, you, you try to write a lot really quickly. Well, first off, have you participated in those types of challenges?

Sean: Yes I, I've attempted NaNoWriMo and failed miserably several times. I think, I think it's kind of a rite of passage to, to try and fail at NaNoWriMo. [00:05:00] LexPoMo, I, yes, I have done LexPoMo. I would say, I mean, I think I've done it since I moved to Lexington. I've been in Lexington for this marks 10 years now.

God, that makes me feel old. But I think I've done it since it, as long as it's been happening. I've, I've participated maybe taking a year off here and there, but and I think from what I understand, you know, cause LexPoMo is also, it's another, and it's a community thing, but it's also one, another one of Chris McCurry's babies so to speak.

And, you know, I think it all comes from the same source in the, and it comes from challenges and I think being specific, you know, I didn't mention any real specifics when I was describing the Gauntlet, but there are a lot of specifics attached to it. And I think having specific numbers like, okay, LexPoMo, it, you know, you write 30 poems.

a poem a day. And, and, you know, the Gauntlet has the same thing, writing a hundred, a hundred poems in a year. [00:06:00] Lofty. It's a lofty goal. As someone who has been writing poems for 16 or 17 years now, and it's taken it very serious and has a very large manila folder full of all the poems I've written.

So I, you know, my out, I feel very much like my output is very high. A hundred poems is still intimidating, but it's, it's a worthy goal to shoot for. And, you know, the Gauntlet does everyone hit 100? Not necessarily, but it's one of those things where the, you know, the end goal is there. So that we have the journey and the journey is the point.

The, the end goal, obviously we're still working towards it. We want to get there. We want to have that victory and celebration, but the real point is the journey of it. And so taking part in LexPoMo and taking part in. You know, my MFA programs, BFA programs, all of that stuff, all of those have end goals in mind, and they're super important to, to this, this world we [00:07:00] choose to live in, this art world.

So absolutely. 

Carrie: So nobody's gonna get, get kicked out of the Poetry Gauntlet for, for not writing a hundred poems. And you also don't say that they have to be good poems, right? They just have to be 

Sean: Right! No, no, and you know, They don't, no, they're not published poems. If somebody said, you're going to write a hundred published poems in a year, that's foolish.

That's, that's not, not even professional, real professional poets with their, you know, a book a year even are able to hit that, that output. That's, that's, that's not feasible, really. It's possible. It is, of course, possible, but it's not this thing to shoot for. That's not what it is. The shoot for us to do the work and put in the sweat equity to, to put, do that work.

And hey, if it's publishable, that's awesome. If, if 10 percent of your [00:08:00] poems are publishable after the hundred, that's awesome too. 

Carrie: Yeah. That would still be a great ratio. 

Sean: Yeah, absolutely. 

Carrie: And, you know, to kind of put it in perspective, most poetry manuscripts, the minimum is 48 pages. So you know, that would, that's half of that.

Sean: Right. And when, when, when you start hitting 100 pages in a poetry book in your hands, that's when you're, you're starting to hit manuscripts I might not necessarily want to read at first or grab. That's not the first book of poetry I'm going to grab because one of the beauties of poetry is to me, this is just to me, it is sort of that that concentrated micro aspect of it.

And so I want a collection of 60 poems. I want to, you know, a collection of 60 or 70 pages. So, you know, I have a hundred, you know, that's, that's, you're starting to get [00:09:00] best of material there when you start hitting a hundred, so. 

Carrie: Are prompts, do prompts help with coming up with generating those? 

Sean: Absolutely.

Carrie: 100 poems? 

Sean: Absolutely. We are going to be prompt heavy from the first, from the first meeting. And, and I've always been a firm believer in prompts and it's hard to even imagine. And I know this was, these were a thing a hundred years ago classes or, or meetings of writers where, where you don't have something that's kind of, you can consider a prompt you know everything is a prompt.

If you sit down to write a poem you don't just sit down and pour it out. Something had to prompt you to do that. And, you know, even in. You know, even if the poem came to you fully formed, well, something had to prompt that to happen. And, and so, so having a prompt and some of the best prompts I've ever seen are just simple, simple, simple prompts.

I love you [00:10:00] know, from some of the stuff that I saw Chris do, take a poem that's fantastic. And just take one of the lines out and make it the first line of your poem or, or take like, like my favorite prompt, which we'll talk about you know, of the wild text, which is, you know, the first half of it is basically mad libs.

You know, you have half a sentence, you have the first half of a sentence, finish it like 10 times. And so, you know, it doesn't have to be this super elaborate, you know, use, use each of the senses in your poem. That's cool. That's a great prompt. And I'm going to, I'm going to steal it from my own mind right now.

I'm going to use it, but like, it doesn't have to be this, you know, this, like here's a list of items that you have to use, and here's all this like elaborate kind of preamble it's, it's just, Hey. Look at that wall. Well, cause that's a weird color. What's, what do you think of? And that's, that's sort of what I like to use in [00:11:00] prompts.

Cause I very often, like I, I will sit down with nothing and just sort of wander around and, and space out. Cause I know I need to write. But some, a lot of days it's just not coming and it doesn't want to come. And, and what do you do? Well, you don't necessarily force it, but you sit down with an open mind, you take a deep breath and you prompt yourself visually, you know, so just a visual prompt but also, you know, I have books of prompts and I have old prompts saved from my mentors and my old teachers and such, and, and I always fall back on.

A prompt like the one I just mentioned, you know, the best prompt in the world is just to grab a book of poetry, what is a poem that you love, steal something from it. Steal an image, steal a word, steal a title, whatever you need to do, but just take something from it. 

Carrie: Well would you like to talk about your favorite prompt since you mentioned it?

Sean: Sure. Sure. You know, I have a few prompts. [00:12:00] I worked on one in preparation. But you know, there are a few prompts. I do love sensory prompts. I love I love ekphrastic prompts because I also, sometimes I, I foolishly call myself a visual artist, but I love visual art and I love ekphrastic and reverse ekphrastic work which is something Crystal Wilkinson taught me.

It was really take inspiration from works of art, even if you know, the works of art from your kids, you know work from that and, and music and things like that. I love, I love that. And I could talk all day about things like that. Songs I've chosen to use as prompts and stuff, but the one I worked on, so not to ramble too much the one I worked on, it's, this is a an exercise.

I don't know its origins. It could have come from a million places, but its origin for me was from George Eklund. Who was one of my great mentors at Morehead. He's a wonderful poet. I love him dearly and a, and a wonderful friend. He and [00:13:00] his, his approach to poetry is very spiritual and very open minded, very creative.

He always talks about, one of his favorite quotes of mine is he was just sitting there and like, Oh, just think. Feel all these wonderful new proteins growing in your mind. And it's like, it's little things like that, where you're just making connections that are just completely unexpected. And so this comes from that, and this is called the wild text exercise.

And it's a two part exercise. So the first part is, is a sentence stem, which I've mentioned already. The sort of the Mad Libs thing. So you start and basically you start with the subject of the sentence. You don't have, it doesn't have to be the subject. You can take a sentence fully formed and just chop off half of it or, or the middle of it or whatever you want.

But at some point there's. There's a blank in the sentence, and your job as the writer is to fill that blank with a sensory detail [00:14:00] or a, or a, an action of movement, something that you can see or feel or sense in some way. And as a, I would consider myself whatever your contemporary imagist poet, everything is about the image to me.

That's what I want is something very image heavy. The second part of the prompt. Is what George calls the assemblage and so to me, and it's been tweaks and whatnot, but taking, taking all the stems because you do it over and over and over again, my, my minimum is 10, you do it 10 times, taking those, you've got now a pile of 10 images.

Now it's assembling yes, assembling them. So making an assemblage and it doesn't have, you don't have to follow the syntax, you don't have to use them exactly, but what you have now is this big ball of something out of nothing. That you [00:15:00] can look at and that can inspire you and make connections and, and you can manipulate it however you want.

Cause guess what? It's yours. It's, it's not this, this fixed thing. It's, it's completely your imagery, your answers. And so you can, you can find whatever poem wants to come out of those. And so, yeah. So that, that's the basic gist of it. I did it earlier today, if you wanted to hear the results. 

Carrie: Actually, I was.

Curious if you had an example, so that's perfect. 

Sean: Yes, I did one. I did it today. So the poem is, I'm sure awful, but because it hasn't had any time to marinate. But I did do this and so I'll, I'll, I'll read it very quickly. So my sentence stem, and it's literally as simple as this, the sun is. And that's where we always started something is, and then you just come up with these metaphors.

So, so the list I had was the sun is a fist rising over the hills, a drop of saliva from a dog's [00:16:00] maw pouring its blood over mountains and valleys. Arcing through the early lavender sky. Very fresh, sorry. A shark lurking in the pre dawn hours. A ball of beeswax on my tongue. Spilt merlot. The plasmatic mother sauce of my hollandaise, watching traffic flow past on US 60, painting the rolling hills in warm hues.

And I stopped at 10. So I used a few of the, but none of them, like, there's no line in the poem that comes and you'll notice that says the sun is. But I use these and you know, there's, there's very short ones. There's very long ones. There's more general ones or more abstract ones and more very, very specific ones.

So then that's the beauty of it. It's just piling up, piling up. And the poem I came up with it's called Badging in for the Day. And so it's about [00:17:00] coming to work. First thing, I leave my car and look to the east. Watch the sun rise over the hills like a clenched fist, spilling paint in warm hues over the mountains and valleys I left in the dark.

The light traces its finger over my forehead, my temples, the faint line of stubble just behind my ears. Like a dog licking me after a long absence. I cannot shake the flakes of lavender that fall on my skin like ash and soak through. The morning sky is a weathered old Atlas, its folds always tracing back, back to where I slid into the driver's seat and turned the key and made fire.

So that's, so you can see, but you can see, okay, there's like a few [00:18:00] of those, a few of those stems are in there and a few of them are manipulated, but just like, I didn't have any of that waiting. I just had this, I just had the stem. And then I had the STEM with its answers. And then I had the answers that kind of just melded into something that I didn't have before.

And it's an assemblage. It's, it's, it's nothing more than that. It's just, it's almost like a kid playing with Legos and just boom, there you have something you didn't have before. And so that's, that's why it's my favorite prompt because something from nothing.

Carrie: No, I love that. I mean, I love the poem that you read and, and that's great that it, that you were able to generate that so quickly using that prompt.

You're kind of creating your own little word bank or your own little form to, to make your own poem. That's really cool. 

Sean: Yeah. And it's you know, and it comes from this, I would never use like military terms with George because he's pacifist and they, you know, just [00:19:00] beautiful, spiritual man. But in terms of the poems you know, he has this one thing.

That I latched onto and do that every day, do it, do it like clockwork, do it in a militaristic fashion, even though it's art and it's beautiful, but, and then it kind of, it flows from you and it felt, it felt great to do it. And I felt out of practice, but I also felt like, Oh, Oh yeah, this is that beautiful thing I used to do every day in college.

I, I, I need to do more of this and, and I'm the instructor of a, of a poetry class, you know, I'm writing poems all the time, but I don't, sometimes I just. Forget that it's all a prompt, you know, and, and kind of, so, so slowing down and doing it step by step, I was like, Oh yeah, that's why I do this. That's great.

Carrie: And when you first started doing it, did it take you a little while to kind of get into that rhythm or did, [00:20:00] did it sort of happen quickly for you in the, from the beginning? 

Sean: For the, like in school or the beginning, like today? 

Carrie: No, just when you first started doing the prompt. Yeah, learning the prompt and.

Sean: Yeah, no, it it's, it's sometimes you, you have to learn how to get out of your way. It's like meditation and, and a lot of times people are like, yeah, I need to meditate. And yeah, everybody needs to meditate. Yes, I will go, I will get on my horse there and preach that. But when you first sit down and do it, it's like anything else.

You're not going to be perfect the first time. And if you sit down and try to meditate, and after three minutes, you're thinking about all the terrible things your boss did that day, then, and you give up, it's not worth it, but eventually, Oh, you get into that rhythm. And at first getting out of your head.

With this, with this prompt is really hard because, because filling it, you know, even with like Mad Libs, it's funny to just add random words, but you kind [00:21:00] of Mad Libs are written in a way that tells a story. It might be ridiculous, but it tells a story. And so your mind naturally wants to make a narrative.

Or naturally wants to make it so all these images are the poem and you can do that. It can be a litany poem and it can be this kind of repetitive spiritual thing if you do it right. But most of the time that it's if you just leave it at that, that sometimes it's laziness because you don't know what.

You can get out of the assemblage if you didn't take the pile and make something completely new out of it. And it's, it's forcing yourself to do that and not stopping halfway through, doing it all the way through. And then doing it again and doing it again. That's yes, that's absolutely, it builds a rhythm.

And then before you know it, you have poems that might not win awards, but they're stronger than the poem you wrote yesterday. Right. And it's, and it's like clockwork. It's it's, and that, and that's how you progress. [00:22:00] 

Carrie: Yeah. And I, I think that that prompt would probably be useful for people writing creative nonfiction or fiction as well.

Sean: Yeah. Oh yeah. 

Carrie: It just wouldn't be quite so concentrated, you know, like you.

Sean: Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah. Right. And it's you know, it's, it helps if you're surreal a little bit, I love surrealism, it, it helps to. You know, if you are concentrated a little bit, you know but like I said, the natural tendency is to try and tie these things together into a narrative.

So if you're trying to write narrative, yeah, sure. I think all of these things will work. I think any prompt for any art. It could work for any other art, if you, if you, if you just tweak it just enough. So. 

Carrie: Yeah. Well, do you have any final writing tips for our listeners? 

Sean: No, hang in there is my main tip. Things get hard and that's a big thing that the Gauntlet tries to

not necessarily fight because you can't [00:23:00] fight it. You can't fight the world. You can't fight the life of a grown up adult life and having to take care of your responsibilities and not just being able to sit around ensconced in the art world, you know, giving yourself some time every day, which I struggle, struggle with, but I know I need to, because I know if I do it, I feel better.

I just naturally feel, but it's like exercise. It's like meditation. It's, it's like eating right. It is, it is, it is ingesting and releasing the right things in a natural and healthy way and, and, and doing it consistently is, you see progress, just putting in the work, putting in the sweat. I used to say when I was in school, I would say I have to write the crap until the good comes out.

And that's what I was doing. I was just writing every day, just like three poems a day, four poems a day, just getting it out. And I don't necessarily look at it like that anymore. But like, I wouldn't call it [00:24:00] that anymore, but I do know I have to write and I have to write as much as I can to stay sane and, and to.

To, you know, progress in what I want to progress that and, you know, it's the same as if I wanted to bench press a certain number. Well, I need to get there and do the work. So that's, that's, that would be my, my biggest suggestion. And then just finding a, finding a community, the Carnegie Center is wonderful for that.

And hey, we're not just the Gauntlet. We have workshops. I teach workshops too, still, and, and and other wonderful, wonderful instructors. And so finding not doing it in a cave is, is good too. And things like, you know, the things like this, things like podcasts, things like reading books and things just connecting in different ways.

That's what I can say. 

Carrie: Right. Well, thank you so much, Sean. I really appreciate it and I'll be trying that prompt myself. 

Sean: Awesome. Awesome. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.[00:25:00] 

Carrie: Thank you for listening to Prompt to Page. To learn more about the Jessamine County Public Library, visit Jesspublib.Org. Pub lib.org. Find the Carnegie Center for Literacy and learning at carnegiecenterlex.org. Our music is by Archipelago an all instrumental musical collaboration between three Lexington based university professors.

Find out more about Archipelago Songs from Quarantine volumes one and two at the links on our podcast website.

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