Kelle Groom moderated this heartening reading and discussion with Sharon Olds and Mark Doty in Provincetown June 10th, 2017. Listen to Sharon's odes in this video. She admits she doesn't know what an ode is (which I don't believe). You don't need to know what one is either in order to write one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOqclDvC3Ac
According to the Poetry Foundation, an ode is "A formal, often ceremonious lyric poem that addresses and often celebrates a person, place, thing, or idea. Its stanza forms vary." English Romantic poets "often address an intense emotion at the onset of a personal crisis or celebrate an object or image that leads to revelation.
Ode to the Tampon by Sharon Olds
Inside-out clothing;
queen’s robe;
white-jacketed worker who clears the table
prepared for the feast which goes uneaten;
hospital orderly; straitjacket
which takes into its folded wings
the spirit of the uncapturable one;
soldier’s coat;
dry dock for the boat not taken;
seeker of the red light of stars
which have ceased to be before we see them;
bloodhound;
unhonored one; undertaker;
secret-keeper;
you who in the cross-section diagram,
before the eyes of a girl child,
glide into potential space,
out of the second-stage rocket’s cardboard cylinder,
up beyond the atmosphere,
where no one has gone before;
you who began life as a seed in the earth,
you who blossomed into the air like steam from a whale’s blowhole,
you who were compressed into a dense calyx,
nib which dips into a forty-year river;
mute calligrapher—we write you here.
Today's prompt: celebrate or praise an object, person, image, place, intense emotion, that you experienced during a Coronavirus shopping outing. You do not need to express a revelation, or you can.
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