Thicc McChicken: Celebrating Pride with Poetry featuring Megan Falley
Plus 15 LGBTQIA+ friendly Magazines that want your poems. (Sub Club List # 6).
For this week’s Sub Club list, I asked one of my favorite poets, Megan Falley, to write up a little something for this celebratory Pride Poetry issue. Below you will find her mini essay on “knock your socks off” poetry endings, writing as a journey, and following your own map.
A friend texted the other day asking for advice on writing poems with “amazing endings.” This was incredibly flattering because, to me, the landing of a poem is the most important part. The landing is what determines whether a reader remembers the piece forever––or not. While one could argue that the first line is most crucial, as it must compel the reader enough to reach that glorious conclusion, it’s the last line, the holy final utterance, that is responsible for the gut punch, the falling-off-a-cliff feeling only a final few words can deliver. After all, who can forget the ending of Sharon Olds’ “I Go Back to May 1937”, or Mary Oliver’s “The Journey,” or Lucille Clifton’s “won’t you celebrate with me”?
Rather than respond to my friend with a text, I replied with a four-and-a-half-minute voice memo. That was keeping it brief. When I start talking about writing, I still get the jitters. Even though I’ve been in a long-term relationship with language ever since hearing an Annie Lennox CD at age seven, the passion is still there. Lyrics, poetry, the craft of a sentence –– it still gives me butterflies. Still sends me Valentines.
In the voice memo, I speak most passionately on how a poem should not end in the same place that it began. My friend was asking specifically about “Beginning in an Ice Cream Truck and Ending in a Court Room”, (a poem from my first collection, “After the Witch Hunt”) which is the most literal example of a poem traveling as the setting transverses two locations in the text. But more commonly the best poems embark on that emotional voyage; they trek the terrain of an internal landscape.
Collectively we agree that longer form literature, such as short stories and novels, must travel. That’s why we call it “the hero’s JOURNEY” (and not “the hero’s standstill”). We come to books and stories to bare witness to a person transformed by life’s events (so that we too can be altered by this brief embodied experience). Sometimes we forget this necessary literary odyssey applies to poetry, too. Just because poems take up less space on the page does not mean they should be internally stagnant or stunted. In fact, I’d argue the opposite. Poems have the potential to be microcosms for the human condition, where entire stories are condensed into the most emotionally-efficient language. Because of the brevity of the form, the transformation in a poem can occur at a whiplash speed. If the novel takes the scenic route, the poem teleports you.
My friend wanted to know how to write a knock-your-socks off ending, and I realized: never in my life have I known what the final line of a poem would be before writing the final line. I know when I’ve arrived at the end because I have knocked my OWN socks off, I have surprised even myself. While Writing Is Not Therapy (a title of one of my favorite essays on writing by T Kira Madden), there is a way that the process of writing a poem can mirror a good therapeutic session, which is this: the eureka moments, the lightbulbs, the Ah-Ha’s! –– they don’t happen when you know the exact narrative, the framework of your tale, your psyche. They are organic discoveries that burglarize the breath. You talk and talk and talk and talk until you ARRIVE. There wasn’t a map. You made a map from your own meandering.
I’m sure you’ve heard people say writer’s block is not a thing. I agree. But more specifically, I think writer’s block is misunderstood. It is not a dry-spell, a desert––but an unwillingness to get lost. A refusal to wander. It is believing that the way out of the woods is to sit in the center of it until a clearing appears. It is the belief that the path should be demarcated and obvious, the trail toward the picturesque summit easy to scale. Writer’s block is believing that there’s even the possibility to take a wrong turn when lost in creative wilderness. The wrong turn is a myth that only occurs when you forget that you are the trailblazer.
So, lovingly, go take a hike! Get lost! And remember this: the most incredible thing about making your own map is that when you share it at an open mic, or submit it for publication, so often it can become the map someone else needed, too.
In the weeds somewhere,
Megan
What’s Megan’s favorite sandwich, you ask?
“As for sammies, lately I’ve been obsessed with almost every recipe from Zach Rocheteau (@theflexibledietinglifestyle) He basically creates healthier, higher protein versions of every food I’ve ever loved — most of which can be made in minutes. Here’s his Thicc McChicken dupe. Enjoy! “ → RECIPE ←
Weekly Specials: 15 Magazines That Celebrate Pride with Poetry
This is one of our 6 paid lists this month so if you want to access it, you’ll need to sign up for Sub Club or upgrade on Substack.
*Or if you’re under any financial hardship, you can fill out the scholarship form on the Sub Club page.