🌊 Prompt #2: The Syllabus is Flammable

A lyrical call to burn the syllabus, compost the canon and let your tongue become the match.

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The Syllabus Is Flammable

Every writer who’s ever sat in a classroom knows the moment: a teacher recites a “great” poem, and something in you refuses to kneel. You sense that the canon wasn’t built for your tongue — it was built to contain it. These poems can still teach craft, history and stamina. The canon offers technique, lineage, and context — real lessons. But it also leaves absences. The point isn’t to discard them; it’s to read them critically, learn what’s usable, name what’s harmful, and repair the record so more voices belong.

But the canon is not a natural formation; it’s a monument built out of erasure.

And any monument can be burned down.

Fireside at N’Zi Lodge, Bouaké: A controlled burn.

This month, I invite you to light a match.

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🪶 Notes toward a Controlled Burn

To write against the canon is not to destroy art —it’s to repurpose it. To reclaim what’s buried in the “classics” and let it feed something new. Literature didn’t begin in Cambridge or the Sorbonne; it began around fires and front steps, on buses and in kitchens where women hummed. It began in tongues no archive bothered to spell, where the oral and the sacred shared a single breath.
When we center those origins, we’re not being anti-intellectual. We’re being accurate.

Writing against the canon is a form of archival repair — it asks:

Who decided what “literary” means?

Who gets a footnote and who gets a monument?

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✏️⚡ Prompts: A Few Ways to Start the Fire

To write against the canon is not vandalism. These ten experiments invite you to compost, remix and reseed the page — each one a small act of literary arson disguised as craft.

1️⃣ Counter-Anthology

Build a playlist instead of a reading list. Choose five songs, sermons or spoken-word pieces that shaped your language but never made it into a classroom. Use their lyrics, riffs or refrains as the poetic spine.

#AudioCanon #Intertextuality

2️⃣ Forgotten Chorus (Cento)

Compose a poem entirely from lines by writers who’ve been sidelined or erased — elders, small presses, community radio, zine poets.

• No author appears twice.

• Include at least one non-print source (audio, mural, etc).

• Try a bilingual cento: alternate languages; don’t translate.

• Credit sources briefly; ask consent when possible.

#Cento #ChorusWriting #ArchiveRecovery

3️⃣ Redacted Translation

Take a poem in a colonial or dominant language.

Translate only the words that refuse obedience — let silence and resistance shape the syntax.
(Colonial or dominant = any state-sanctioned “standard” tongue — Queen’s English, metropolitan French, Castilian Spanish, Lisbon Portuguese — used to rank or erase local speech.)

#TranslationAsResistance

4️⃣ Oral Archives

Reach out to an elder or family member. Ask: “What saying or line do you repeat without knowing where it began?”
Break their reply into verse or weave it into your poem.

#OralArchive #IntergenerationalVoice

5️⃣ Canon Funeral Pamphlet

Design a one-page obituary for a literary rule you’re ready to bury — objectivity, standard English, the lyric I. Include hymns (quotes) and a date of death.
#ConceptualWriting #DeathOfTheCanon

6️⃣ Decolonial Prompt Generator

List ten “forbidden” writing rules (Never code-switch, Always show, don’t tell). Delete every other word. What remains becomes your new manifesto.

#ConstraintPoetics #ManifestoLab

7️⃣ Counter- Lexicon

Invent three missing words your language deserves — hybrids, mistranslations, compound inventions. Define them poetically.

pagefire (n.) when a text combusts on contact with truth.

tonguehack (v.) to jailbreak a language from its grammar.

subtextualize (v.) to smuggle meaning past authority.

#Neologism #GlossaryAsResistance

8️⃣ Map of Absences

1. Draw two spaces on a page: one labeled Assigned (what you were taught), the other Discovered (what you learned by yourself). Leave a blank space between them.

2. Fill them in.

   • In Assigned: list books, authors or art handed to you by schools, institutions or canons.

   • In Discovered: list the voices you found elsewhere — through family, friends, community, streets, playlists.

3. Now write on the border.
   Compose a short poem (8–12 lines) that lives between those two zones. Each line should touch both sides — one reference from Assigned, one from Discovered.

Optional sparks:

• Switch languages mid-line; don’t translate.

• Begin each line with a map word (meridian, crossing, fault, harbor).

• Every third line names something missing (No lullabies. No graffiti hymns.)

Starters:

Meridian: Shakespeare’s sonnet — my aunt’s proverb in her mother’s tongue.

Crossing: the textbook elegy — the drumbeat behind the protest chant.

Fault line: the anthology — the story scrawled on the back of a taxi seat.

#VisualPoetry #CartographyOfReading

9️⃣ Footnote Revolt - Digital Edition

Premise: the page is bait; the poem lives in the margins.

1. Open a blank Google Doc. Type one oversized line, e.g. THIS IS THE CANON.

2. Click the mode menu → Suggesting. Write only in comments. Each comment is a line, image, or rebuttal.

3. Tag voices (@Archive, @Mother, @Translator). Alternate languages if you want.

4. Screenshot the page with its comments visible. The image is your poem.

#DigitalPoetics #AnnotationAsForm

🔟 Controlled Burn (Closing Manifesto)

Prompt:
Finish the conversation:

The canon said _____.
I replied _____.
And from that burn, _____ grew.

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📚 Suggested Companion Reading

• Caroline Bergvall, from Drift

• Dionne Brand, Ossuaries / The Blue Clerk

• Jericho Brown, The Tradition

• Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictée

• Safia Elhillo, The January Children

• Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation

• Tyehimba Jess, Olio

• John Keene, Annotations

• Layli Long Soldier, Whereas

• Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark

• M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong!

• Danez Smith, Homie

• Derek Walcott, Omeros

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🌱 An Act of Regeneration

Fire, here, is a tool. Not a bonfire — a controlled burn. Clear what no longer feeds you; keep what does. Out of the char come the lullaby, the back-alley idiom, the hybrid register that won’t behave. This month, write the refusal you can live with. Just enough heat to make room.

The canon may have built the archive,
but you, my friend,
carry the match.

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The work of unlearning doesn’t end here. I’m building a gathering place for the unruly—a space where poets, translators, and storytellers share methods of defiance and repair. A living library for counter-languages, annotated ghosts, and unwritten canons.

I can’t wait to share it with you!

With love and intention,

Cara

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