For Your New Year
Five Poems and a Prompt
‘And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been.’
Rainer Maria Rilke
The New Year is a tricksy time. It’s a numerical threshold imposed by the calendar, but New Year is informed and influenced (in England at least) by the natural world’s cyclical shifts—midwinter’s strange, bare hinge beyond which spring and light begin very, very quietly to crescendo.
Growing up, I had a good friend whose family tradition was to dance to James Brown’s ‘I Feel Good’ at the stroke of midnight each New Year. The lead-up always made her feel uncomfortably melancholy. The turning of the year tends to make us conscious of time and mortality—of losses, maybe—but a new year can also mean hope and the potential for transformation. The urge to make new promises at this time is an old, old one. We might think about how we’ve grown or changed. What do we want to carry with us, or leave behind? We might need company, food, drink, music and noise to help us cross the threshold. Or, we might want to do it alone.
For a few years pre-pandemic, some friends and I met each January for a New Year ritual. We wrote down and spoke out loud the things we wanted to leave in the past, and the things we wanted for the future. There was a lot of scribbling and stick-person drawing to reflect back each other’s wishes, a bit of setting fire to the past in a saucepan (outside), and a lot of laughter and love. I’m a big believer in the potential positive value of rituals: communal and personal, traditional and made to measure.
The connections between poetic language and ritual are old and deep. And, although a poem might make nothing happen in an immediate, instrumental sense, in the writing poets tend to shift into a more contemplative mode of thought, to begin to access and work with what might seem beyond reach in the rush of everyday life. Here are five poems and a prompt to help you cross the threshold this New Year.
Midwinter by Thomas Transtromer (translated by Robin Fulton).
‘There is a soundless world/ there is a crack…’ I love the sparse, surprising imagery in this poem.
Winter Solstice by Ellen Bass
for its insistence on paying attention to and valuing the minutiae of everyday experience—as well as focusing on the bigger picture.
on new year’s eve by Evie Shockley.
‘The competition shimmerwise/ of champagne and chandeliers…’ Stunning use of form and sound to evoke New Year’s tension and drama.
Burning the Old Year by Naomi Shihab Nye.
‘So much of any year is flammable,/ lists of vegetables, partial poems.’
After the Gentle Poet Kobayashi Issa by Robert Hass.
A perfect haiku for those underwhelmed by the new year.
Prompt
Write down a list of all of the things you’d like to leave behind when you cross over into the new year. You can include anything you like: real physical objects, ideas, hopes and dreams, stories or myths, specific memories, conversations, personal habits, particular visual images or sounds or other sensory experiences. Include anything you like, but try to make sure you include at least one concrete image (for example: ‘my blue walking boot with the cracked heel’).
Now, working in the same way, write down a list of all of the things you’d like to carry with you into the new year.
Take what interests you from these lists and begin to work it into a poem draft. You might choose to include everything from your notes, or only a selection. You might make a more straightforward list poem, or create a narrative or frame to incorporate the items. Or, you might choose to focus on and expand a small part of your notes to make something new.
Happy writing! I wish you all the very best for the New Year.
I’ll be sharing more in-depth writing prompts in Poetical Workshop, a new craft-focused online poetry community. The first small cohort starts on January 5th, with a month on ‘Writing the Body’ and a guest prompt and mini-lecture on touch from Sarah Howe. You can find out more and sign up for the early access list here.
Happy New Year Kate!