Submit a Stanza
108
The country we live in cannot be like this anymore;
No-knocks pull us from bed.
In a country we built ourselves from steel and ore,
Now shaped to pierce our heads.
Blake Laymon
Please add your voice to the American Gun poem! The original poem was 100 stanzas, but we'd like Chicagoans to continue to voice their ideas about gun violence in the city. American Gun is a pantoum, a poetic form where every line repeats twice. We'd like you to write a four-line stanza that incorporates the rules of the pantoum where lines 2 and 4 of the previous stanza become lines 1 and 3 of the next stanza (your stanza). Refer to the stanza above and create two new lines based on the sense and sound of the two lines inherited from the previous person. If you read two stanzas in a row from the poem, you'll get the idea!
Next Steps
Fill out the form to submit your draft of American Gun’s next stanza. Submissions will be reviewed in the order that they are received, and we will notify poets before posting their stanzas to the website. In case we receive multiple stanzas at once we reserve the right to reach out to poets to rework their stanzas for inclusion in the poem.
To create the best possible submission, make sure your stanza is short, appeals to the five senses, and builds on the previous stanza in an interesting way. And don’t be afraid to slightly tweak (or shorten) the lines you’re inheriting from the previous stanza.