Tag: poetry prompt

Posted on

NaPoWriMo Day 30: Final Words

All good things must come to an end. Thank you so much to those of you who participated in NaPoWriMo with me, for a single day or for all 30. I started this website as a way to hold myself accountable to my goal of writing every day. And it worked! Your final daily (optional) poetry prompt is all about endings.

Golden Shovel poem. Write a golden shovel poem. Find a short poem or take a line or two from a longer poem that you admire and place the words, in order, as the last words of each of the lines of your poem. Your poem can be an homage or go in a totally different direction, but you need to hit those familiar notes at the ends of your lines.

“The Golden Shovel” is the title of a poem by Terrance Hayes. The last words of the lines in Hayes’s poem are, in order, the words of the poem “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks. Many poets tried this exercise after Hayes and a new poetic form was born. Want to try it?

Here’s my Golden Shovel poem, playing on the words of “This Is Just to Say,” by William Carlos Williams.

The Icebox

Some memories I
do not tend to or have
forgotten quite intentionally. I’ve eaten
them, chewed them like the
frosted purple skins of just-picked plums.
Better that than add them to that
which I carry. Some things were
just not meant to ripen in
that way. Others lie stacked, foil-wrapped, in the
far corners of the icebox

and,

though I know that that which
does not kill you makes you
stronger, these things that were
not close to killing me, probably
not worth saving
myself from recalling, for
some reason surge up, as I sit with my breakfast.
And I must invent ways to forgive
such a young and authentic version of me.

Other memories, they
exist in perpetual re-write, were
once something so delicious
that they beg to be replayed, and so,
through overuse, the sweet
in them is worn thin and,
having hinged them in and out of the icebox so
often, they’ve grown rancid and cold.

Posted on

NaPoWriMo Day 29: Giving Thanks

The end is nigh, poets! As we close out this month of writing, I thought it would be nice to reflect on what it is that we get out of poetry and to give thanks for what inspires us. Here’s your daily (optional) poetry prompt.

Poem of gratitude . Think of a poem you love and write a poem in response to it that says “thank you.” See Dorothea Grossman’s poem “For Allen Ginsberg.” Speak directly (though perhaps not expressly) to the poet or to the poem itself. Explain what the words of the poem mean to you, how they make you feel, and why the poem is important—to you and to the world. You may want to peruse some of the poems in the Poetry Foundation’s collection of poems expressing gratitude.

[Please check back for my poem! I was up late last night finishing my entry to the NYC Midnight Screenwriting Challenge. Wow, you guys! It was fun to write something completely different, in a format I had to learn from scratch. I was assigned to write a 12-page screenplay in the suspense genre, about a government employee and something nocturnal. Now I definitely want to make writing screenplays a future monthly challenge!]

Posted on

NaPoWriMo Day 28: Cross Talk

We are at the home stretch poets! Let’s make these last three days count. Your daily (optional) poetry prompt invites you to bring two seemingly unrelated things together and let your description of each play off the other.

Juxtaposition. Choose two objects or activities that are, on their surfaces, very different, but which you suspect might have something in common. Write for 5-10 minutes about the first object or activity in an instructional way, naming the various parts, explaining how they are put together, how something is prepared, what the step-by-step process is for doing the activity. Then do the same thing for the other object or activity. At least one of the two things you choose should be something pretty ordinary. The other might be more abstract. Then work to intersperse the lines you’ve written on these two subjects into a single poem. Do the two things say something about each other? Is one a metaphor for the other? Or are their differences only highlighted by their proximity? See if there are any lines you can make a little ambiguous, so it is not completely clear which of the topics the line refers to.

I was inspired to write this prompt by Henry Reed’s poem “Naming of Parts,” which, as Robert Pinsky at Slate noted, “contrasts the language of rifle instruction with vegetation.” We feel like we are the army recruits, sitting in the garden listening to their commanding officer. The syntax of weapons and the syntax of nature overlap, invoking ideas beyond their literal meanings.

Here is my poem written from this prompt. Can you guess what it’s about?

It Helps if Your Blade Is Sharp

Have a little reverence, these are
among the oldest cultivated things.
Fable and parable, myth and legend.
Peculiar nourishment of humans;
the animal gut fails to comprehend.
Wild ones may still have their leaves,
flat reeds woven down into the bulb.
They make a natural handle to pull
the thing up from the dark ground.
But you must snap them
off and discard them.

Beginnings are simple.
The rustling outer skin peels back easily,
it is the living layers, dense, cellulose,
that cling to one another. They must be
breached, forced apart, partitioned
by a practiced hand.

The edible round center
comes in three varieties:
the novel, lengthy prose, with a
narrative arc, is yellow and full-flavored,
will caramelize wonderfully
if exposed to slow heat;
short stories or flashes,
devoured in a single sitting,
have a livening bite, purple
or red, they are excellent raw;
and the little pearly white memoirs,
true stories dredged from murky soil,
can be bitter or quite sweet.

An old defense mechanism will be triggered:
the release of a volatile gas.
your eyes will water, making it difficult to continue.
The more often one chops, the less
one experiences this irritation.

You should have some techniques
at your disposal: slice lengthwise,
chapters and paragraphs,
in rounds or half circles;
chop roughly, point of view;
small dice, dialogue
(for precision, brunoise);
or mince—the one telling detail.

However you go about it,
it helps if your blade is sharp.

Posted on

NaPoWriMo Day 27: Pinning Down Butterflies

Happy Friday poets! We humans are visual creatures, there’s no doubt about that. But describing what something looks like can only take us so far. We have four other senses that must not be neglected. Today we’ll employ some of our neglected senses to make the abstract concrete. Here’s your daily (optional) poetry prompt.

Making abstractions concrete. Abstract ideas often find their way into poetry. Emotions like love, anger, and fear. Concepts like memory, the passing of time, regret, elation, doubt. But if we speak of these things in only a general way, we invite platitudes, clichés, and banalities into our poetry. Abstractions are like butterflies; they flit about and are difficult to grasp. But we are the lepidopterists of our minds! If those concepts fly into the world of our poems, we must net them and pin them to boards. The tools at our disposal are our five senses. Today I want to challenge you to describe an abstract concept using at least three of your senses. What does anger taste like? What does ambition smell like? What color is fear? Pin those butterflies down, poets! Be absolutely ruthless.

Here is my take on the color, sound, and smell of loneliness.

They Say Loneliness is Blue

They say loneliness is blue
but they are wrong.
It is eu de nil, pale green of
lychen, clinging to rocks,
far above the tree line.

It is the stack music of
superheated steam
bursting from the engine
as the train pulls into
the very last stop.

It is the smell of relics
drawn down from the attic,
slow-blooming molder
of treated wood, scent
revenant of long-dead mice.

Posted on

NaPoWriMo Day 25: Worth a Thousand Words

If a picture is worth a thousand words, why start by staring at a blank piece of paper? Let’s find a good photo and WRITE WORDS NOW.

Writing from an image. We live in an age of digital cameras in our pockets, Pinterest, and Instagram. There is an extraordinary wealth of high-quality photographic images available to spark our imagination. Just take a look at what pops up when you search the Internet for “black and white photos,” “National Geographic photos,” or “historic photos.” Find an image that grabs you and write about it. Or use an old family photograph. Sit with the photo for a minute and just list a bunch of words and phrases that come to mind. Do this with a few photos before deciding which one you will use for your poem. The most evocative one may not have been your first choice. Describe the photo, tell us what is going on in it, or use it as a jumping off point for something completely different. Maybe your poem is about everything that is not in the picture. You decide.

Here’s my photo-inspired poem:

We Cater to White Trade Only

Someone
commissioned the sign,
placed it in the window
of the smart little
ground-floor office,
just beyond the stripes
of Venetian blinds
so that, at closing time,
lights out, blinds closed
with a twist, door locked
with the tinkle
of a tiny bell, there
would be no
misunderstanding.

Someone
placed the order,
considered “Whites Only,”
decided to spring
for the extra letters.
Someone handled
the samples,
chose the one
with the graceful bracket,
disappointed perhaps,
that a sign like this
was needed,
but determined
that if it was,
it would be
dispatched with style.

Someone
claimed the sign,
when notified
that it was ready,
unwrapped it
from the stiff
brown paper.
Someone assented,
produced bills,
gave thanks.
Someone tucked the sign
under one arm
and walked, dignified,
down Main Street,
past the courthouse,
the green grocer,
the hardware,
the florist.

Someone
opened the little
tinkling door,
twisted up the blinds.
Someone placed
the sign in the window,
smiled at passersby,
stood back to check
that it was straight.
Someone nodded once,
with approval,
pursed her lips,
brushed dust
from the palms
of her hands.

Someone
sat down at her
cold metal desk,
in a squeaking swivel chair,
and began the work
of the law,
of insuring risk,
of assessing values,
of placing orders,
of making deliveries,
of writing copy,
of catering to trade.

Someone thought,
well then, that’s done.

Posted on

NaPoWriMo Day 24: The Bard’s Birthday (Belated)

As close as anyone can tell poets, yesterday was William Shakespeare’s birthday. Shakespeare was of course a master playwright. But he was also a poet, writing several long narrative poems and a series of 154 famously cryptic sonnets. Want to read some? You can find them at Shakespeare-online.com. Or you can listen to readers of all ages and abilities read the sonnets as part of an annual celebration called Sonnet Slam. I’m sure you’ve guessed already what your daily (optional) poetry prompt is.

Shakespearean sonnet. So what exactly is a Shakespearean sonnet? Well, there are some rules:

  • 14 lines (if broken into stanzas, 3 quatrains of 4 lines each, followed by a 2-line couplet)
  • The lines should be in iambic pentameter. This is a fancy term for ten syllables with alternating stresses (sounding like da-DUM / da-DUM / da-DUM / da-DUM / da-DUM). An example from Sonnet 12: When I / do COUNT / the CLOCK / that TELLS / the TIME.
  • Line-ending words should rhyme, in the following pattern: ABAB CDCD EFEF GG

You might want to try free writing for 10 minutes and then go fishing in your word soup for the elements you need to get you started. Circle rhyming words and words or phrases that have the right number of syllables and stresses.

And check out Rhyme Zone, a fantastic online rhyming dictionary and thesaurus that will give you a ton of rhyming and almost-rhyming words and phrases, grouped by syllable length. Or, if you know what you want to say but the words don’t rhyme, look up synonyms. You can restrict the results to iambic metrical feet by selecting the [ x / ] button.

I know. It’s kind of daunting. But let’s give it a go. Let’s write some crappy sonnets. This is like making our writer brains do Spenga! [If your sonnet is not crappy, please accept my sincere apology. And congratulations on your lovely sonnet.]

Here’s my sonnet:

Sunday Paper Sonnet

Steam, puff, and drip of coffee in the pot.
Fat bulk unfurled from its blue plastic glove.
Familiar parts arrayed without a thought.
First, Sunday Styles, a tale of modern love.
Then sweet surprise of fiction on its own,
Now taste the front-page stories and page through
Op-eds, spot on or—often—overblown.
Dowd, Bruni, Douthat, Kristoff—their world view.
A poem, a recipe for savory tart,
Medieval Tuscan town I stayed one night.
A washed-up actor, his hopeful new start.
An article that says, “Now go and write!”
I fold in halves and quarters each broad page,
And feel that, in this hour, I’ve lived an age.

Posted on

NaPoWriMo Day 23: One Week Only

Just over one week left of NaPoWriMo! Don’t stop now guys. Your daily (optional) poetry prompt is a fun one.

Personification. Write a poem in which each day of the week is a person. This is an in-class exercise I recently did in a poetry class taught by the talented and wonderful Beatriz Gartler (check out some new poems on her website, she’s doing NaPoWriMo too). The point of the exercise is to get you to experiment with personification, which the dictionary defines as “the attribution of a personal nature or human characteristics to something nonhuman, or the representation of an abstract quality in human form.”

Here’s how mine turned out:

Familiar Friends

Monday: self-assured, wearing
tall boots with clacking heels,
holds the door open for no one.

Tuesday: puddle-hopping
misses the first train,
but catches the next.

Wednesday: pulls on her sweater
with the extra-long arms,
folds herself into the last seat,
in the back of the room.

Thursday: falls down, searches
drawers for a bandage, blows
on the cool sting of disinfectant.

Friday: sweeps everything
from the table, places
a cold glass of water in the center
with a single ice cube.

Saturday: replaces the water
with wine, drinks it down, refills it.

Sunday: makes a list.

Posted on

NaPoWriMo Day 22: The Long and the Short of It

Hi poets! We’re going to keep this one short and sweet. I have a doozie for you tomorrow. Here’s your daily (optional) poetry prompt.

Brevity. Write a very short poem and give it a very long title. That’s it!

Here’s mine:

Cradle Song (or, The Moment in Which My Daughter Learns That
Sweet Things Can Have Dark Sides and Likes Them the Better for It)

Rock a bye baby, after a bath.
Pruned fingers.
Damp curls.
Muffled drain sounds.
Gurgle.
Splash.

Sing rock a baby, Momma,
Whispers my girl.
Sung once, sung twice,
A thousand times.

But her eyes widen as
Our lips mouth the rhymes.
She knows now,
What it means to fall.
She knows now,
It’s not a nice song.
Not at all.

Posted on

NaPoWriMo Day 21: Saying Goodbye

Today, we time travel. We can do that, we’re poets. Let’s set the dial forward just a bit and think about what it will mean to have lost something that is now just barely hanging on. How will we feel? What will we remember? What will we have learned?

Elegy. Write an elegy for some aspect of the natural world or human culture that is disappearing. An elegy is an ancient Greek poetic form traditionally written to commemorate someone who has died. It is typically comprised of three components: (1) a lament, expressing grief and loss, (2) praise for the lost person or thing, and (3) some final thought of consolation.

Do a bit of research first. What unique qualities does your subject have that will be lost? What will that mean for the rest of the world? For you?  Write about an endangered species, an island or city threatened by rising sea levels, a Unesco World Heritage Site on the verge of disappearing. Explore photos and videos of your subject. Listen to recordings of a language on the verge of extinction.

Here’s what I wrote today about the Great Barrier Reef.

Ruination

Coral Sea fringe, you were mighty! Visible from space.
Cyclone-ravaged, choked by the far-flung dust of desert sandstorms,
beset by sucking starfish. You endured.

But then one stark white coral.
Albino mushroom pedestal,
stack of bone china plates. And another.
Soon vast tracts blanched in the heated waves.
What vampire, what sucking leach, what white witch of Narnia
made the overnight chalk gardens?
Tangled heaps of deer antlers, branching bones,
rimed hoarfrost landscape, flash-frozen and still.

For a while you lived on, stolid and glowing
white as fiber optic cables. Fish came and,
not stopping, glided on to the open sea.
But, your algae expelled, you were starving,
rooted in the sterile waters of the tropics,
your brittle skeleton buffeted by currents.
Regions crumbled, limbs snapped,
and with a sudden soundless shudder, it was done.

Gone the whiskered angelfish, orange clownfish,
cobalt blue damselfish, and frowning gold cubies.
Gone the fluttering fields of pink and blue anemones.
Gone the turquoise parrotfish with their tiny nibbling beaks.
Gone the glowing yellow-spiked surgeonfish,
pouting striped triggerfish, and scuttling crabs.
Gone the needle-clustered sea urchins.
Gone the hinge-jawed trout, pink like watermelon flesh,
with their ice-blue freckles. Gone the bobbing sea horses.
Gone the roving shadows of speckled grouper
and barbell-eyed hammer heads.
Gone the sage turtles with their scarred faces.
Gone the blossom-pink fingered polyps,
glowing lavender footstools, sulfurous sheafs of ochre fans.
Gone the cerebral tangerine folds, mint green
branching structures, rubbery soft pink hearts.
Gone the great clustered pipe organs.
Gone one quarter of the earth’s sea creatures.

Bones furred with algal turf. A murky
seaweed forest marks your grave.

We know, now, that there are patches
of heat-resistant coral off the coast of Kimberly.
In 8,000 years a new reef will teem with life
because Nature always finds a way.
Trust we must in that. We won’t be here to see it.

Posted on

NaPoWriMo Day 20: Now I Know My ABCs

Hi poets! Today we are going to find ourselves an arbitrary organizational structure to climb inside of with our poems. As we learned back on Day 3, constraints are our friends. This is why writing challenges work, why writing prompts “prompt” us. We give our worker bee brain a little problem to solve (or a big one) and she gets right on it. She gets right out of the way, with all of her doubts and hesitations, fretting and obsessing. And then our writer brain steps forward, the one with all the ideas, the one who rarely gets a word in edgewise, who makes unusual choices, who knows beautiful words, who will quietly remind us of something we knew once, and had almost forgotten, but which really should be written down.

Abecedarian. The idea behind an abecedarian poem is pretty simple. There are 26 lines and each one starts with a different letter of the alphabet, in order, from A to Z. For an added challenge, you can ask someone else to select the words for you. I once tried this with words my 5-year-old selected. Or you could make yourself a little list of four or five words of varying length for each letter and keep it by you while you write, seeing if you can make any of the words work as you go along.

I wanted to see what sort of words I would get if I typed each letter into everyone’s favorite search engine and looked through the little list of suggested searches that popped up. I realized those suggestions were real questions that people around the world had asked. Questions the magical algorithms thought I might be wondering too. I got totally sidetracked and enchanted by this idea of a poem capturing all of those random voices and their pleas for information. So, I did a variation of an abecedarian made up of Google suggested searches. It’s fun on its own and a few of the lines would make good titles for future poems. Here’s the result.

Queries of the Twentieth of April, 2018

Why are the flags at half mast?
Why bother?
Why can’t I sleep?
Why do cells divide?
Why is evolution true?
Why is Friar Laurence to blame?
Why go to law school?
Why have you forsaken me?
Why is it a sin to kill a mockingbird?
Why did Jesus have to die?
Why Kill Carl?
Why is liberalism failing?
Why me Lord?
Why not?
Why oh why?
Why do planes crash?
Why quit smoking?
Why read Shakespeare?
Why should we hire you?
Why are there no snakes in Ireland?
Why u always lying?
Why was virtual reality invented?
Why does water look blue?
Why is the X unknown?
Why do you want this job?
Why did Zeus give the box to Pandora?