HOW TO MAKE POEMS OUT OF QUEER FAILURE

Nols takes a register of ten artists, poets, and authors who were told by courts, critics, markets, and silence that they had failed. They had not failed. This is their work. Read it. Look at it. Go toward it. Nols improvises ten poems in response to their stories and encourages you to do the same. Send your responses to nols@makepoetryweirdagain.com

prompts below

provide list of prompts in one sentence

Markievicz Write about a love you were not allowed to name in public.Cahun Write about a self you constructed deliberately.Hall Write the first page of the book that would have saved twelve-year-old you.Turing Write about what it costs to be useful to people who do not love you.Arenas Write about something you made in secret.Blake Write about making something with your hands when the official channels were closed to you.Kafka Write about a system you are inside of.Van Gogh Write a letter to the one person who believed in you when no one else did.Akutagawa Write about a vague anxiety about your future.Angelou Write about a defeat you survived.

01 CONSTANCE MARKIEVICZ

1868–1927 · Revolutionary, painter, poet

Her prison letters — written on single sheets in tiny handwriting, incorporating drawings and poems — are the primary document of her interior life.

→ Prison Letters of Countess Markievicz — Internet Archive (free) https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.176226

→ Her political writings — Marxists Internet Archive https://www.marxists.org/archive/markievicz/index.htm

→ W.B. Yeats: "In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz" https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43279/in-memory-of-eva-gore-booth-and-con-markiewicz

Eva Gore-Booth, her sister and lifelong love, was also a poet and radical. Her collected poems are harder to find online — seek them out.

02 CLAUDE CAHUN