A READER'S GUIDE BED to by Elizabeth Metzger - Tupelo Press (2021)

A READER’S GUIDE

        to

       BED

        by

 Elizabeth Metzger

Tupelo Press (2021)

Drawing by Lia Kohl

Biographical Note

Critical praise for Elizabeth Metzger’s poetry

Author’s Introduction and Discussion Questions

Bed Writing Prompts

Links

Biographical Note

Elizabeth Metzger is the author of The Spirit Papers (University of Massachusetts Press,
2017), winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry, and the chapbook The Nutshell Studies of
Unexplained Death (Horsethief Books, 2017). Her poems have appeared in The New
Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Nation, and
the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, among others. Her prose has recently
been published in Conjunctions, Literary Hub, Guernica, and Boston Review. She is a
poetry editor at The Los Angeles Review of Books. You can find more of her writing
at elizabethmetzger.com.

Critical Praise for Bed

Bed is a powerful book of lucid and sensual poems. Metzger’s lyric acuity
reveals, in turn, the various ways in which the act of self-consciousness is
both calm and disturbing. Her lines, in turn, and the spaces between them,
enact what’s so perilously poised in every instance of life, domestic or
otherwise. She honours these moments with what one can only call
incorrigible tenderness, of which, indeed, these poems are fiercely built, like
an ark which has touched the bedrock of our human ardour. Bed is superb
work.
—Ishion Hutchinson, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award

The wanting of a door, an exit made of the materiality and spirituality of a
tree, Elizabeth Metzger’s Bed investigates “the impermissible and the
impermanent” where what can and cannot be recounted illustrates the terrors
of intimacy and the ethereal knowing of empathy. Surface and reflection,
doors and searchlights, embers and candles, God and theory, communion
and nothingness, loss and desire, limbs and trunks and bodies, all call out
from the simultaneity of time “searching for something other than silence,”
searching for “the infinite in real time.” Metzger feeds her reader with stars
from the beautiful tines of what I imagine as a silver George Jensen fork, for
she is an “angel of wait” and though her poems dread the Kafkaesque night
and not night, they turn that human terror of existence into an ethereal sense
of meaning that uncannily soothes the soul. Her sculpted, sensuous
powerful, crafted language is a tour de force poetic enactment of what it
means to exist. Sit on the grass and look up at the sky, and then read this
brilliant book now.
—Elizabeth A.I. Powell, author of Atomizer

Prior praise for Elizabeth Metzger’s poetry

"The Spirit Papers is a haunted book. Elizabeth Metzger's striking
poems, limber and torqued, conjure phantom presences and palpable
absences, in which the dreamed-of imagines the dreamer: 'You dream
of me writing/your name on paper/adding in pencil a live.' Metzger
probes enigmas of kinship, often filial, and navigates a restless sense of
estrangement, poignantly fixed on 'the halo of what's un-begun.' The
Spirit Papers, finally, and successfully, builds a world—a world built as
much out of what's found, as out of what resists being found."
—James Haug, Juniper Prize for Poetry judge and author of Legend of
the Recent Past

"'A kettle whistles for nobody home./And the wishes you never/and the
others you will' says what's in the heart of Elizabeth Metzger's The
Spirit Papers. In these intimately naked poems love, and the
anticipation of love's inevitable losses, lets us see into the endless
facets our imaginations contrive to if not console us, to keep us going.
The book gives us the encouragement we get from feeling we are in this
together and from what's unbegun we're given some hope, maybe to
conjure a kinder us. Precision, quiet daring, a decision to not waste a
word, assigns a ceremonial aspect to poems whose lines ask us to take
with them the time it takes to let the spirit in."
—Dara Wier, Juniper Prize for Poetry judge and author of You Good
Thing

"Elizabeth Metzger's intelligence and originality are spiritual, earthy,
brave. Especially in poems addressing a very ill young friend, Metzger
expresses a wild courage that seems instinctive. Her poems are braided
with a love for this world that brings to mind Dickinson."
—Jean Valentine, author of Shirt in Heaven

"There is often ravishing verbal abandon in these poems: 'the halo of
what's un-begun about him.' They join this to a formidable,
discriminating narrative intelligence: 'If he's my first to go I will thank
nobody for everything.' Epigrams pierce, new-minted: 'What light is to
the eyeless / we are to the lonesome.' What unifies these poems? They
are carefully composed messages stuffed in a bottle thrown from a
plague ship."—Frank Bidart, author of Metaphysical Dog

"I've rarely come across a first book as unconditional, as exquisite, as
captivating as this one is."—Lucie Brock-Briodo, author of Stay,
Illusion

"These poems are unforgettable in their elegant reach past dissolution,
their intimation that there is a better heaven to be made than a deity's,
that there is a dream and the dream is this exquisite yet hard-faceted
grieving initiatory poetry, first-responding against death."
—Carol Muske-Dukes, Huffington Post

"This book is a book about heaven. It's about the collection of human
connections and love that make a heaven. In that case, The Spirit
Papers is its own little immaculate heaven."—Ploughshares

Author’s Commentary and Discussion Questions

There is a famous work of art by Tracey Emin called My Bed in which the bed becomes a
memorial to a particularly difficult period in her life. The bed functions as a reflection of
the artist’s interior and her universe. The disheveled bed surrounded by everyday detritus
in the center of a gallery marks a very different experience than my own prolonged bed
rest and ongoing relationship to the bed—but what my homage to the bed shares with
Emin is the bed’s universality, it’s power to both isolate and transport. At one’s loneliest,
sickest, and most vulnerable points—including sex, birth, and death, the bed is often
one’s most intimate and overlooked companion.

Though the bed is not always named in these poems as a present object, I hope its context
expands the subjectivity of these poems, becoming a texture, a feeling, a way of being, a
perspective and an audience. When bedridden, the bed replaces space, but even after
being bedridden, the bed becomes a catapult out of (or a respite from) ordinary, healthy
time. For me, it fundamentally marks both my first adult experience of grief and my
transition to motherhood.

When my second pregnancy (a journey of illness as much as creation) coincided with the
tragic loss of another dear friend, the bed itself became a surreal threat, even culprit, and
the only evidence of my ongoing and increasingly isolated reality. A reminder of
connections across time and experience and the force that disconnected me from my own
life, the bed took me out of my routines again, out of traditional work, social, and family
life. It was a place of privilege and luxury to have this time, but it forever changed my
perception of time. The transition became my experience, erasing the intervals between
bedriddenness, shifting my understanding of before and after. To give up most movement
is to give up most of the body, and yet in illness and in pregnancy and sometimes in grief
we become most our bodies.

The bed became my time and timelessness, my place and my flux: my house, my
swaddle, my lover, my clock, my secret, my grave. The bed blurred both griefs and both
pregnancies as I struggled to keep the memories separate. The “trigger” was my only
vehicle forward. The bed became the trauma time, and after the traumas, the bed where I
go to nurse or rest becomes at once a place of rest and reliving trauma, of safety and
danger, confinement and total freedom. I write to you from here.

Discussion Questions

1. The title of the first poem is “Won Exit”. What do you think this exit could be and why
is it “won”? What other exits (or endings) in these poems are won? Are there entrances
(or beginnings) that feel lost? What about in your own lives?

2. “Moses, New York” blurs the biblical story of a mother sending off her baby son with
a new mother revisiting Central Park with her baby son. What is the effect of this blurring
in the poem? Why would a biblical story be useful in exploring this intimate visit? In
what ways does the moment reflect, subvert, or revise your ideas of Moses? Are there

poems here that make you think of other stories or fables? Does the element of water
recur elsewhere? What about other elements or environmental disasters and their
relationship to language or childhood stories?

3. In more than one poem in Bed, there are bits of overheard or recollected speech or
indirect speech with others, including the husband, but also the voices of the posthumous
and newborn. Why do you think these poems incorporate this unreal layer of language?
What does it do to the lyric mode? What does it reveal about the speaker? How does the
new baby become a kind of loss? How do the elegized others gain new life in the
imagination?

4. The last poem in Bed is the last poem I wrote in the sequence. The last couplet of “On
a Clear Night” includes the sentence: “No matter how much I tell you/ there is as much I
cannot tell you.” What do you think the speaker has disclosed and what is it she still
cannot? How does the relationship with what can be spoken and not spoken relate to the
other transformations that happen in Bed? How do you think this shortcoming relates to
the purpose or possibilities of poetry more broadly both individually and in our
relationships with others? Returning to the poem’s title, what makes this night “clear”?

5. In Bed, the bed is an absent center. The word “bed” is only mentioned twice. In
addition to considering these two references to bed—in “The Witching Hour” the speaker
imagines getting out of bed; in “Desire” the speaker is eager to put the children to bed—
where else do you see evidence of the bed and what it signifies? Where else do you see
transformations that turn confinement into freedom?

Writing Exercises 21 Prompts you can do from bed

What follows are mini-explications and exercises for each of Bed’s 21 poems. I hope to
take you through the transformations—some are the gifts of stillness, others are more like
selves ravaged or stolen from the seeming-eternity of bed rest and the suspense of an
unknown outcome.

1. The Real Life Rupture Exercise

   “Won Exit” was written by forcing myself to wake up at a strange time of night. This
   blurring of sleeping and waking became the blurring of many entrances and exits,
   beginnings and endings that occupied me at the time. Try forcing a shift to your
   routine, something that forces an abrupt and unexpected transition, whether it’s as
   obvious as setting an alarm for the middle of the night or more subtle and
   spontaneous like hugging someone you love in the middle of an argument or going on
   a run when you feel like a drink of water. Let the writing you do investigate what the
   change in your body’s expectations does to your thinking and feeling.

2. The Elemental Exercise

   In the poem “With Wayward Motion” wind, a traditional element and the root of
   inspiration, to breathe into, provokes a reflection and interrogation of a love
   relationship and how it has changed (evolved or devolved?) over the course of many
   experiences and conversations, including the choice to have children. The wind
   element frames or returns at the end of the poem, turning the speaker outward from
   her own love relationship to the love between others. Choose an element of your
   own—wind, rain, fire—and decide what its corresponding emotional element is—
   love, fear, surprise. In the first part of the poem translate one element into the other,
   then as this translated element evolves, translate it back transformed into its original
   element. Or an entirely new one! The key is to let yourself be confused and even
   surprised. The poem becomes structurally a metaphor and the speaker (or the poet)
   the thing transformed.

3. The Endless Question Exercise

   “Sex Dream” begins and ends with a question. Open your poem with a question that
   plagues you, then try to answer it many different, and ideally contradictory ways. By
   the end answer the question by asking a new question or not asking a new question as
   the case may be.

4. Eavesdropping Exercise

   “Exaggerated Honey” was inspired by two phrases I remembered/imagined hearing
   from childhood and beyond (and the tone of that phrase) honey you exaggerate and
   don’t talk to strangers. There seemed to be a contradiction between the accusation
   and the gentleness. What led to exaggerating or being seen as exaggerating? Not

belonging? Wanting to belong or wanting not to? Think of the language you heard as
   a child, some of the language you can’t separate from the voices that said it—a
   parent, a sibling, a teacher—and investigate the phrase and how it made you feel. If it
   made you feel like a victim, for example, try to resist victimhood. If it made you feel
   loved, try to find the dark loneliness in it. Let the words that were most familiar
   govern the music of the poem and let your poem finally change and refresh how
   others defined you. Consider a title that points to but subverts the heard language.

5. Playground Exercise

   “You’ve Been On Earth So Long Already” was written on bed rest with my first son.
   I was terrified of losing a pregnancy and suddenly also of having a child. The image
   of a playground seemed shocking to imagine. I hadn’t been to one in years and now I
   saw that place as a physical meeting point of past and future, my child and my
   childhood self. Think of a place that has significance for you whether it’s somewhere
   you go frequently or have only been once. Let it be an imaginary setting for the poem
   in which the speaker or other people get to intersect and reflect, ideally from different
   time periods or different emotional states or real and imagined versions of people. For
   example, the beach might become a place where an old love meets a new love, a
   friend and an enemy, a dead relative and a stranger. In this intersection the place itself
   will reveal your self and how you connect these disparate forces, how the polarized or
   otherwise separate forces come together through you.

6. Metaphor Metamorphosis Exercise

   I think of “First Wound Kept Open” as a childbirth poem, but it is as much about
   rebirthing oneself as a mother. One’s own childhood pain becomes the birth canal so
   to speak. Imagine your own physical process or any transformative experience, then
   explore it from a new perspective either within or outside yourself. Consider playing
   with surrounding context or scale shift. For instance, if you experienced surgery you
   might imagine the experience as the surgeon rather than yourself and instead of
   hospital equipment, you might find the patient surrounded by gardening tools. Or if
   you are writing about a sexual experience you might imagine the bed is another
   surface and write about the experience from the perspective of that surface. These
   perspective shifts may not only shed new light on the experience but also expand the
   lyric “I” to a more inclusive or collective subjectivity.

7. The Pilgrimage Exercise

   I wrote “Moses, New York” after first visiting the central park boat pond as a mother.
   My son was six months and it was such a peculiar experience to share this place with
   him. I felt in that moment like I had to push my own child self aside even as the place
   and moment brought the memory closer. I thought of Moses being sent off in a basket
   of reeds, as if superstitiously I would have to send part of myself off, keep a distance
   from this familiar place, in order to share it fully with my son and see it through his
   eyes. Okay, this one is best if you can get out of bed. Go somewhere you haven’t

been in a long time. It could even be spending time in a part of your home you
   haven’t spent time in for a while.

   Write down 12-21 observations, words, sensory details that come to mind. In a poem,
   don’t mention the place directly but let some of these observations, feelings, and
   sensory details motivate an address of a person you don’t know but wish you did or a
   person you love but don’t know entirely. Think magically. What would you have to
   lose or let go of in order to gain access to the unknown aspect of the other? The place
   becomes a kind of soul, a bridge between the familiar and the unfamiliar, you and the
   significant other.

8. Berserking the Quotation Exercise

   “I rode through the snow, do you read me
   I rode God far—I rode God
   near, he sang,
   it was
   our last ride over
   the hurdled humans.”

Paul Celan, trans. by Nikolai Popov and Heather McHugh, Glottal Stop

   “The God Incentive” takes its inspiration from this stanza of Paul Celan’s, which I
   had tried a million times to use as an epigraph for poems, but the poems never
   seemed tethered enough so I’d end up cutting the quotation. At a very distressing
   moment suffering from Hyperemesis and unable to drink water for months, I
   considered the IV fluid to be akin to God. Not seeing the liquid flow through the tube,
   and often not feeling it, I thought of the relationship between doubt and faith. I began
   to think about whether I considered myself a believer or not and ultimately realized
   that I had a strong incentive to believe that felt akin to having a relationship with god.
   It reminded me of baked potato, a comfort food for many, that as a child I tried to
   force myself to enjoy but never could.

   Think of a line of a poem, story, or song that sticks with you repeatedly. Try to
   translate it into your own context, either by changing the meaning and keeping the
   music, or letting its imagery seep into your language. In the course of the
   response/translation, consider something you have had a long conflicted relationship
   with whether god, a food, garment, or estranged relative.

9. Spell Exercise

   In “The Witching Hour,” the bed, which was literally a place of confinement,
   becomes a vehicle of the imagination. The mundane begins to feel cosmic. The
   difficult evening hour in which babies become cranky, almost unsoothable, often left
   me unable to think or hear my own thoughts, a helplessness that reminded me of
   being in bed just months before with a high risk pregnancy. And yet, the strange

distorted sense of time this hour holds is named the witching hour, which made my
   helplessness feel like a power, and the baby’s misery seem like a power. If I thought
   of it this way, I could escape a sense of guilt and imagines the cries as a kind of spell
   or transcription of cosmic connectedness.

   Write a spell poem by taking a sound you hear that baffles you a strong feeling, or
   otherwise captures your attention--—whether neighbors moving furniture,
   construction noise outside your window, the feedback from someone else’s cell
   phone, or an eavesdropped conversation in public in a language you can’t understand
   and try to translate this incomprehensible or non-linguistic noise into a spell or
   prayer. What sense can you make or beg for when you feel senseless or not sensible?
   By translating noise into thought and feeling, language can make us more connected
   to the very things that most confuse us. It is this cusp or precipice that poetry so often
   brings us toward.

10. The Mid-Drift Exercise

   “Mercy Later” combines a real lived experience in which closer analysis dramatically
   altered my initial reaction to a scene with an image that has consistently given spaces
   I’ve inhabited meaning over various phases of my life. The experience was my
   toddler’s excitement over a series of emergency vehicles followed by my learning
   that a pedestrian was killed in the emergency. The physical detour caused by the
   event created a strange emotional detour as I moved from sharing in my son’s delight
   to lamenting the death of a stranger. The image is a small winged armchair I found in
   an antique store in Providence, the only piece of furniture I’ve taken with me in my
   lives in New York and California.

   Write a poem in which your understanding of an experience shifts mid-poem and you
   have to reread not just the moment but something greater about yourself or another as
   a result. Open or close the poem with a separate image of something whose meaning
   you think you understand that must be revised somehow by the shift in your narrative
   experience. This poem is about revising or rereading your own state/life/identity
   because of a single moment.

11. Impossible Braid/Widderruf Exercise

   When the poet Lucie Brock-Broido died, I wrote this poem to her. It is equal parts
   elegy, invitation to her ghost, and apology. The title comes from a Kafka aphorism
   and the poem explores Lucie’s death as one of impossibility and possibility. Lucie’s
   poetry and vivid imagination were so often about grief and fear of death, that her own
   death seemed at first a feat of imagination. I recommend reading her books,
   especially her last Stay, Illusion. Imagine something impossible (walking on water
   for ex.) then imagine an unbearable feeling (a sublime first kiss, a heartbreak) then
   braid the two together so the impossible action becomes impossible to detangle from
   the real event and the unbearable reality takes on a new avenue of power and
   intention you never before imagined.

*Lucie was a masterful teacher. She called it in “widderruf” when a poem was in
   conversation with another artist or poem. As an extra layer, do this exercise by first
   finding a poem that knocks you to your knees, overpowers, baffles, confounds,
   crazes, or destroys you. Then write against and with it so that your poem becomes a
   diagram of its own power over you. Self-portrait of the poet unraveled by the poem.

12. Four Way Exercise

   In “Early Rising” written while California was being threatened by wildfire, the first
   line relates earth to fires and the second relates to the “I” or speaker/self to “bodies.”
   Make up a crazy four-way analogy (making something singular plural may add to the
   excitement), then unpack it in all manners until you undo the analogy completely and
   discover your truth. The strange phenomena of climate change seems to me
   particularly rich for intersecting with lyric turmoil. It is often very challenging to
   make sense of such environmental or internal traumas and yet the two insist on
   speaking to each other.

   Choose something that makes intuitive sense to you, but is not exactly logical. The
   poem’s goal is to make a felt logic—think of an imaginary dictionary entry or
   textbook explaining a made up law of physics. For example, if your words are horse,
   hair, demons lie, you might start by saying when demons lie horses lose their hair,
   then you might explore how the hair lies or flies back in the wind, how demons lie
   under the trampled hooves, wild and strange/out there, until finally discovering that a
   lie is a kind of speed for ending the trust of a relationship with a parent. Come to
   some felt sense via a kind of desperate magic or magical desperation.

13. Surrogate Image Exercise

    At the center of “Marriage” is the image of the cut flower. Look around the room
   you’re in, preferably from a bed. What do you see that seems somehow conflicted,
   hidden, contradictory, disappointing? Let the image become a surrogate for someone
   you live with or yourself. How can the conflict of the image capture the conflict of
   the self. Is it an image that can bring both self and other together or an image that
   occludes the beloved while representing them? If the image becomes the relationship
   by the end of the poem open to a new question or revelation about the other, self, or
   relationship by changing the image. Do you think of a flower outside vs. inside? Do
   you clean the dirty dish? Do you realize your toddler is wearing the empty fruitbowl
   as a hat?

14. Animal Emotion Exercise

    “Rolling Out” began with the first simile. Use the simple template emotion-verb-
   like- animal. From there let the verbs relating to the animal drive the poem and see
   what the reveal about the initially mentioned feeling. When the verb doesn’t seem to
   line up with the feeling, don’t erase it. Let the action stay and include the revision or

denial in the poem. By the end of the poem, has the feeling become more or less like
   the animal? Has it changed the animal? Has it become the animal’s feeling or has the
   animal become an internal force itself? Play!

15. Confession Exercise

   The California wildfires coincided with a long process of IVF and personal grief. I
   was often governed by the rhythms of artificial hormones and injections and it was
   the strange beginning of a sequestering or estrangement from the world, especially
   the natural world. I felt a tension between how disturbed I was to see the human and
   animal loss from the fire and my own internal focus on pregnancy and avoiding loss
   at all costs. I felt impotent and self-absorbed (fear can bring this survival mode out)
   and wrote this poem to confess and get back in touch with suffering outside myself.
   Write your own confession poem with the main rule, do not let yourself become the
   victim. Better yet, choose a moment in which you see yourself as passive, vulnerable,
   or victim-like and in the poem find your darkest part, make yourself a guilty agent. If
   you remember when your sister pushed you off a swing, confess to spending life after
   that trying to push away a new love. By reversing roles at your most vulnerable you
   may expand empathy.

16. Godface Exercise

   A placental abruption means a lot of blood. Half the placenta was detached from the
   wall and whether it tears off, remains half attached, or heals is a question mark and
   means every movement feels risky. “Godface” was provoked by the terror of sitting
   down on a toilet, provoking a hallucination of or visitation from my dead best friend,
   the poet Max Ritvo. Max was both scientific and spiritual so it was his ghost’s
   explanation of the god I should trust that allowed me to get through the moment of
   bending onto the toilet. He told me god was like a face made up of all the dead, but it
   was individual for each person depending on one’s intimacy with the dead. For
   example, the eyes are made up of one’s lost beloveds and the chin is made up of
   strangers.

   It’s a fairly surreal idea but begin your poem with the idea of your “godface.” It
   doesn’t have to be made of dead people, but it might help to sketch a diagram of a
   face. What would belong in each part if it is meant to represent the power and unity of
   all that is lost and fragmented. You might make the lips your first secret crush, the
   nose a fear you have overcome, and the forehead your own old nickname. Without
   calling it god or face, write a love poem to this force. At some midpoint let the force
   take over by voice. What does it surprise you by interjecting?

   I highly recommend Max Ritvo’s The Final Voicemails and Four Reincarnations for
   this prompt and for any imagination brewing, especially if making experiences of
   trauma, illness, or suffering dynamic, alive, expansive, or hilarious is your jam.

17. Window Exercise

“Almost One” is an elegy that was provoked simply by looking out a window at night
   and seeing myself before I could make out anything in the dark. Do you know those
   moments when you see yourself or your own space reflected in glass before you look
   through it and see the outside? Sometimes this happens in an airplane or a shop
   window, or maybe it happens looking into somebody’s eyes. Write a poem in which
   what you see reflected and what you see through the glass blurs so that the glass
   becomes connective tissue rather than a boundary, or maybe it is both. Maybe the
   interior and exterior blur into a third scape or another memory of a window?

18. Deep Future Exercise

   “Last of Kin” was written after having my first son, while working with the sculptor
   Michael Jones Mckean on his project Twelve Earths. What sort of messages would be
   worth leaving to the deep future? What would we want the inheritors of earth to
   know? Are these beings human, and if so, what makes them so? What are the
   assumptions we can have about life far into the future? Will they have language? Will
   they have to translate it? In this suspension of disbelief—writing in English—I aim to
   connect and move beyond the preverbal bond between mother and infant to consider
   the postverbal wonder of earth’s future progeny.

   If you were leaving a note in a time capsule for the deep future, what would you want
   to say and how would you have to change the way you say it? Would you want to tell
   about one person yourself or speak to many about humans more universally? Would
   you tell of love first or of fear, the way we kept time or how we lived in cities? Think
   about the order in which you say things, references you make that won’t be
   understood, shifts to syntax, what you must explain, and then carve out a poem from
   this anxiety. In essence, give up for there is no way to know how to leave language
   for someone that far away. By the end of the poem come to terms with the fact that
   the poem is for your own beloved, your own child, your own ancestor, or yourself.
   The biggest scale shift in the poem is a shift from the beginning to the end, visible or
   invisible, between intended and eventual audience.

19. Off the Ledge Exercise

   Being bedridden affords one much time for fear and fantasy. “Say Nothing” wrestles
   with fear of two natural disasters in my new environment, earthquakes and fires,
   while fantasizing about going home and bringing the dead back to life. Instead of
   trying to choose, I think of Dickinson’s multiple word options and meanings. Talk
   yourself down from the ledge of your fears by realizing your fantasies. If for instance
   you’d like to fall in love and you’d like to fly but you are also afraid of drowning and
   loud sounds, write a poem in which you fly through love? The more ambiguous the
   better because it is in the mystery of following desire that you might feel your own
   fear differently. Maybe love is an element you can fly in that is not a sky, but
   something loud and makes you feel like you’re drowning.

20. Vows Exercise

    “Desire” is a love poem but it is also a poem about drifting apart, the kind of desire
   that can increase in one partner and diminish in the other as a result of great change,
   trauma, or having children. Make a promise to a beloved in the first line then try to
   keep it, fail to keep it, be met by the beloved’s own promise. If a vow is a repetition
   and echoing or filling in the expect promises, traditionally mirrored on both sides, let
   this be a broken or asymmetrical vow. Let the I and You move in two separate
   directions with a shared objective ongoing between them.

21. Final Speech Act Exercise

   “On a Clear Night” is one of the more formally compressed poems in Bed. It
   acknowledges that no matter what revelations take place, our sense of our place in the
   world (with each other, the environment, and ourselves) is a sense we make up. Order
   is shaped largely by the unknown. Begin your poem with an impossible speech act:
   the dead talking, you hearing your own earlier voice, a question you could never bear
   asking your parent, a baby speaking in a full sentence at birth. From the wisdom of
   the impossible, acknowledge the impossible, reveal yourself behind the curtain
   inventing and making sense. Listening is like this. Bow to what you don’t know. Cut
   the end of the poem. Try again but fail. Open.

Links to audio of three poems from BED

“Won Exit” on Poets.org
https://poets.org/poem/won-exit

“Moses, New York” in The New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/07/moses-new-york

“Roach” in The Common
https://www.thecommononline.org/tag/elizabeth-metzger/

Professional Links

Elizabeth Metzger’s website
elizabethmetzger.com

Elizabeth Metzger on Twitter
https://twitter.com/anelizabeth2

Elizabeth Metzger on Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/elizabeth.metzger.161/

Elizabeth Metzger on Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/elizabethmetzger

Elizabeth Metzger’s page on the Tupelo Press website
https://www.tupelopress.org/product/bed/