It started with a guinea pig at age eight, and ever since, Christine Klippenstein has been finding her muse in the strangest of places. By 13 she was winning prizes for her prose and poetry, and recently was awarded Bywords top spot for high-school poets with A Cup of Tea. As always, her muse – Stephanie Bolster’s Two Bowls of Milk – is discovery, this time Bolster’s technique of negation. Now 18, Klippenstein has decided to study French literature at McGill University later this year, and will write about how she arrived at this decision in June’s UnFolding.

“I wrote this poem shortly after reading Two Bowls of Milk. The last lines of my tea poem came to me first, and my creative process subsequently involved finding the words to lead my piece to its final stanza. I love the linguistic minimalism of this piece — together, the words ‘tea’, ‘is’, ‘the’, ‘a’, and ‘no/not’ comprise about 30% of the words used. I challenged myself to write a piece in a very simple style, hoping to use that simplicity to benefit the poem.”

Christine Klippenstein

Photo by Rechitansorin

A Cup of Tea

is a cup of tea. It is not a cup

of coffee, or of cocoa, or of milk.

It is not an implication of China,

or of yoga, or of class. A cup of tea

is a cup of tea. The cup is not special.

The tea is not special either. There is no sugar

in the tea. No milk. Nothing

but tea. No-one

has drunk the tea. The tea

was once hot. Now

it is cold. It is cold

because it was left there.

The hands that held this tea

were also cold.

Cold because they, too,

had been left.