Genre: Poetry

“Forget about apples and oranges—nothing rhymes with orange anyway. Never mind those plums that William Carlos Williams sneaked from the icebox. The most poetic fruit of all is the blackberry,” writes A. O. Scott, critic at large for the New York Times Book Review, citing blackberry-inclusive works by poets such as Margaret Atwood, Emily Dickinson, Robert Hass, Seamus Heaney, Galway Kinnell, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Sylvia Plath. Compose a poem inspired by what you consider the most poetic fruit, describing the textures and tastes of your selection, and its associations in the world and in other works of art. Spend some time thinking about the name of the fruit itself, its sounds and component parts and etymological roots. Does conjuring words and phrases that recall the qualities of the fruit take your poem in a surprising or unexpected direction?

“This is how the text exchange ends. / Not with an explicit farewell but with a two-day pause followed by a thumbs-up-emoji reaction,” writes Reuven Perlman in “How Other Things End” recently published in the New Yorker with an epigraph of T. S. Eliot’s famed last lines from “The Hollow Men.” “This is how the career ends. / Not with a retirement party and a gold watch but with a second career in the gig economy.” Taking inspiration from Perlman’s comedic perspective of dark times, write a humorous poem that consists of your own inventions of anticlimactic contemporary situations in which the outcome is a letdown, with more of a fizzle than a gratifying conclusion. What modern references would you include to put your own stamp on this concluding episode?