In the Podcast “Dover Beach… or Dover Bitch?” Tim and LeeAnna dug into the intertextual tug-of-war between Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach and Anthony Hecht’s Dover Bitch—a 100-year gap where Hecht takes a sharp, mocking jab at Arnold’s melancholy classic.
Tim has a challenge for you writers. The prompt is simple: Keep it under 600 words.
Let's start with Matthew Arnold and his love, his new wife, so they go to get some food and drink some ale, maybe at a local pub after their walk on the beach and they meet the narrator of the second poem, Anthony Hect. This is the first time she meets him. What do they say to each other?
Or, if you wanted to have a little more fun, imagine how she breaks it off with Matthew Arnold a couple of days after their walk on that beach. How would that conversation go?
Or perhaps she slaps the guy that called her a bitch. How about that?
Write whatever inspires you—just make sure it’s under 600 words. Pop it over to us through the submissions page. Who knows, maybe we'll even feature it on the podcast. Extra points if you can include anything about a man’s hairy whiskers!
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