Welcome back, campers! Did you get a chance to play around with a found poem or two after Monday’s post? If not, no worries – you can return to earlier posts any time throughout the summer and beyond. Today, mentor poet Laura Ruby joins us with another challenge to experiment with poetic forms. 

Hermit Crabs and Angry Food 

When I was young, my mom would sometimes cook angry food for dinner. What is angry food, you ask? Well, angry food is food made with the weariness that comes from having to plan and prepare meals every day plus resentment that you’re the one tasked with the job in the first place. Angry food came in the form of casseroles made with Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup and Minute Rice, meatloafs like oversized, overcooked, under-seasoned burgers, flabby purple canned beets—always beets; to this day I can’t eat them—gray beans so soft you could suck through your teeth. Not every meal featured angry food. Only those times when my mother was most overworked and aggravated did she start slinging the casseroles and the (endless) canned beets. But I never forgot any of it.

My mom’s been sick lately, so I’ve been staying with her. It’s become my job to plan and make dinner. Though she generally enjoys my food, she still prefers her vegetables to be steamed soft and nearly colorless. We had an argument over how to cook broccoli. (She won). I wanted to write a poem about this, and about angry food in general, but I wasn’t sure how to approach it. Nothing seemed to work. My poem about angry food was not tender or wise or revealing, it was just…cranky.

And then I remembered a Lantern Review post a friend in my MFA program recommended. In this post, the poet Rick Barot wrote about a type of poem he called the “hermit crab poem.” From the post: “The prompt is a simple one. Write a poem that utilizes the structure of another text: one page of a screenplay, a multiple-choice quiz, an entry from the Oxford English Dictionary, and so on.” Using the form/format of another type of writing to contain your poetic material is a way to both get some distance on that material AND get at the emotional truth of the material. In other words, it’s an effective way of telling your story “slant.” 

I love writing hermit crab poems. I especially like writing  poems in the form of lists, but I’ve also written poems in the form of lab reports, recipes, travel guides, endnotes, etc. 

Ready to experiment with a hermit crab poem of your own?  

Some potential “crab shells” that you might want to try: a speech, list of rules, a disclaimer, fine print, field notes, recipes, dictionary entry, encyclopedia entry, multiple choice test, grocery list, owner’s manual, building instructions, letters of recommendation, ads, jingles, doctor’s note, scientific abstract, playlist, or even a weather report. 

Example “hermit crab” poems:

Recipe poems from students at the Chicago Poetry Center

Instructions on How to Leave a Town, BY GABRIEL JESIOLOWSKi

DICTIONARY (AS THE MAP OF OBSTACLE) BY M. ALEXANDER TURNER

A two-time National Book Award Finalist and long-time teacher, Laura Ruby writes fiction and poetry for adults, teens and children. She is the author of the Printz Medal Winning novel Bone Gap, as well as Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All. Other works include the Edgar®-nominated children’s mystery Lily’s Ghosts, the ALA Quick Pick for teens Good Girls (2006), and the York trilogy. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Diode, Sugar House Review, Fantasy Magazine, Poetry South, The Dallas Review, The Nassau Review, Passengers Journal, Prism Review, and Clackamas Literary Review. She is on the faculty of Queens University’s MFA program and Hamline University’s MFAC program. She makes her home in the Chicago area. 

Note from Kate: Teachers Write has always been and will always be free, but it does take many hours of work from me and our guest authors. Please say thanks by buying our books!