And now for the real test. Can you fit poetry writing into your busy Monday? Yes you can. But you must WRITE WORDS NOW! Here’s your daily (optional) poetry prompt:
Prose: Write a prose poem describing a ritual you have, something you do regularly, just for yourself. But don’t just describe it in general terms. Describe a specific time that you performed this ritual. Some examples of daily routines turned into beautiful prose poems are Amy Lowell’s poem “Bath,” and Ron Padgett’s “The Morning Coffee.”
And here’s a little bit of homework. Circle ten words from your prose poem, jot them down on slips of paper, and put them in a bowl or a hat. You will need them tomorrow.
This prompt may be perfect for you if you find that your first draft, or your second, or even your fifth, looks a whole lot more like prose than poetry. You may find yourself wondering, is this even poetry that I’m writing? Yes! The Academy of American Poets tells us that a prose poem is “[a] composition printed as prose that names itself poetry.” Basically, if you call it poetry, it is poetry. And if it is not broken into lines of verse, it is a prose poem. The Poetry Foundation reminds us that a prose poem will still “demonstrate[ ] other traits such as symbols, metaphors, and other figures of speech common to poetry.” So, your poem will look like an ordinary block of text but it will still sound magical and poetic because of your word choice, how those words sound, and everything that they evoke.
Here’s what I wrote:
Super Blue Blood Moon
I move through the dark house, its silence hinging into my ears, hours before others stir, flick the little soft light over the stovetop on and press the button for coffee. At the first hisses and spits, I slide my mat from the crevice in the built-in and unfurl it on the kitchen floor. My mat is twenty-two years old, bought before you could get double thickness extra-long ones printed with mandalas or creeping vines. I step into its blue rectangle, its body-sized ocean. The moon through the window is full. More than full. Rocked with a humming luminescence. Larger by degrees than should be possible. New moon? Harvest moon? I have no words for it. I say I will look it up later. Nameless moon of a Wednesday morning, blanketing me in the twining phosphorescent brine shrimp of its light, filtered by slow-moving snowflakes. The snowflakes are outsized too. This I know something about. I line up my body beneath me, join the palms of my hands, and close my eyes. I picture them falling: fernlike dendrites, columns, needles, diamond dust crystals, stellar plates, split plates and stars, bullet rosettes. They collide with drops of water, birth rimed crystals, collide again and are graupel—the furred tufts of soft snow hail.
I press the button on my headphones, the little saddle slung from ear to ear across the base of my skull. The magic of Bluetooth. Music fills me, does not escape me, as I move in the barely-lit silence. Fold, sink slowly, cobra, down dog, warrior 2. My phone plays songs for me. The Lumineers. Janis Joplin. I am surprised, though I know I shouldn’t be, at the ability of a computer algorithm to guess my pleasure, disappointed in my own predictability, the reducibility of my desires to lines of code. Zeros and ones. But as I move—lung, twist, side plank, sink slowly, cobra—I reconsider. Don’t we all want to be reduced to our essences, our decisive and definable selves? I like this. I don’t like that. How else do we know who we are? Zeros and ones. We all seek to be the one thing. One with my body, one with this mat, one with this soft-hailing moonlit morning. And then, as always happens—down dog, hop, halfway lift, mountain pose—even the oneness falls away; I am not the thing moving but the movements themselves. A nullity. A particle of light. Prayer pose, namaste.