Prompts + Poetry Event: A Celebration of 30 poems in 30 days

Tomorrow night at the Ugly Mug in Orange, HanaLena Fennel and I will be reading prompts and poets will be sharing their prompt-inspired poems to celebrate April’s 30/30 challenge! 

The reading starts 8:00 (or more like 8:15). Be sure to sign up for the open mic (3 poems/5 minutes, whichever comes first) and share your 30/30 poems or a new one or your favorite poem.

Don’t forget to bring $3 for the cover, or Phil will collect an organ of his choice!

Full disclosure: I only wrote 20 and did not write an ode to my socks, a sestina, nor even a limerick....

It’s a Mother of a Day—Prompt

Happy Mother’s Day to everyone who loves someone’s mother, whether it be your own, a friend’s, a kitten’s, or the mother earth. 

For the first prompt, think of someone who has been a mother figure to you—generous and strong and wise. Honor her/him/them with a praise poem. What bird should sing just for that person? What flower blooms under their gaze? Which small moon should orbit them for a year? And explain why through a scene.

If nothing gets moving with the first, try this next prompt. For this second prompt, mad lib the cliché “Necessity is the mother of invention.” A jutting table leg is the mother of the muttered “Motherf_cker” that begot the Dawn-brand-dish-soaped mouth that gave birth to a small resentment against that table that bloomed a bruise on a shin and an everlasting fear of bubbles. Go forth and multiply these mothers. 

If neither prompt works for you, read the following poems: Julia Kasdorf’s “What I Learned From My Mother,” Diane Wakoski’s “Thanking My Mother for Piano Lessons,” Jean Nordhaus’s “A Dandelion for My Mother,” and Ross Gay’s “Ending the Estrangement.” Which one calls to you and why? Write a response to that poem. Be sure to credit the poet for your inspiration.   

Form This!—A Prompt from Rachel McKibbens

Challenging forms are a challenge, and, my oh my, this one is a doozy. Good luck! I will need it too!

Here is a picture of Miss I, Incredible Inventor, from The Letter People to help you start creating those lines! 

Picture from https://www.retrojunk.com/article/show/1448/the-letter-people 

A Fleshbag of Feral Cats—Another Twitter Prompt

So this is a weird one, bless Chuck Wendig for all of his infinite wisdom:

For this poem, write as if you are this colony of feral cats going about your day. How do you make polite conversation at the checkout line? Do people look nervous at all that hissing and meowing? Do you get distracted in the sewing aisle with the thread and yarn?

What other errands can you accomplish? How difficult is it to renew your library card when half of your teeth selves are chewing on book corners, other claw selves have found the rubber band ball constructed by a bored librarian, one subset of feline selves is chasing your tail selves, and two are just flashing their butts to all the other patrons?  

Or perhaps you aren’t filled with feral cats, but instead with bean-filled stuffed animal cats. You are soft, cuddly, and rather matted and scruffy after being carried and dropped repeatedly by a small child with grubby hands. Several of your stuffed selves are lost, fallen under the bed, left in the backseat, sitting on a park bench. Someone is always looking for that missing self. Who finds that part of you and where? Who carries one of your selves everywhere? Why? What does that part of you offer?

Good luck! Please send me your draft from either prompt. I really want to read your poem!

More “Borrowing” from Twitter—Proper-noun-yourself-into-a-poem Prompt

Full disclosure: I love Shira Erlichman’s poems and cannot wait for her forthcoming Odes to Lithium. Using her concept she tweeted below, take a noun and open the poems about it as itself and as something you have made of yourself: “singer and song,” belief and believer, mourning and mourner, dance and dancer, knowledge and knowing (in a carnal sense or not), paint and painter, Twitter and tweet (ha). Stretch the language if necessary. What would “bitter” as a noun and “bitterer” as doer encompass? Play a little: whine and whiner, wine and drinker, bird and birder, jump and jumper, memory and eraser, gaslight and lighter. Journey from there. 

This tweet is a poem. So lovely.

The Black Hole Ate My Blog Post—A Delayed Prompt

So this is a prompt I’d intended to write last week after news of four bees drinking a woman’s tears and of the first image of a black hole. I even wrote a poem about the black hole only to have my phone die in the middle of reading it. The black screen seemed particularly apt. Since my brain seems to be full of dizzy bees and holes, I am going to rely on the Twitter poets to save me. 

 I hope that your poem does almost write itself. Some poems seem to burst out of me, but others...hmm. 

For your first prompt, write a poem about bees or any creature living off your sorrow. What do you want to tell this creature? Would you stop feeding it if you could? What do you want in return? For inspiration, read Justin Phillip Reed’s “About the Bees” (seems very apt) and—for a shorter read—Emily Dickinson’s “Fame is a bee.”

If you would like more information about the actual story, here is a link.  

Now for the second prompt, write a poem about black holes as metaphor, as as scientific phenomena, as MRA ego. What moment, what existence, what reality exists in the black hole? What feeds it? What in your own life pulls you across a room, draws you in until even your breath can barely escape?

Below is the image. Eye of Sauron is a fitting description, although the overall explanations and descriptions in Hannah Devlin’s article in the Guardian are brilliant.

For a third prompt, combine the two, the black hole and tear-sipping bees, in the same poem. Are you the light or the dark, the drinker or the nectar? Which is God? Do we enter heaven, or are we pulled into it? Do we drink the wine, or is it our immaterial selves, the flashing of neurons, that sustain the immortal? Can we choose? What is your choice?

Your Lighthouse, North Star, the Moon, Heart and Other Overdone Metaphors: It’s William Shatner to the Mic

Yes, we have all written them—sappy, overwrought, overdone metaphors in poems comparing a new love to a lighthouse or guiding star and then a followup poem to the moon lamenting the breakup and your shattered glass heart. So do it again. And do it big. Do it with lots of unnecessary pauses. No William Shakespeare now; embody William Shatner. Boldly go where everyone has gone before and by God like it. This is 30/30, and the 13th. You have earned a night of Boone’s Strawberry Hill and Cool Ranch Doritos. So pile on those gerunds and rhyme heart/part/start in the first stanza. You got this. 

Courtesy of Paramount Television in Fortune

Now that the pressure is off to write a poem for the challenge, get a little weird. Switch the heart with another organ, replace lighthouse with telephone pole, substitute moon with Uranus. Mix the metaphors, make verbs out of your nouns and see what happens. Maybe you will even get a second poem out of this. Hope to read this in the next issue of Poetry!

Bonus prompt: take the Star Trek episode pictured here (“The Trouble with Tribbles” ) and multiply some other creature or object. 

Good luck! 

Another Twitter Prompt—Orchards of Scissors, Silverware, Clocks, Socks, Widgets, Tofu, a Sister

More stealing from Twitter... Using Todd Dillard’s prompt, describe what would grow in your orchard. What would you plant, and what would spring up on its own? I once liked to pretend meat grew on trees. Now I am a vegetarian and avoid eating anything with a face. People can be buried in pods that will grow into trees. Rather than a cemetery, a forest grows. For my family whose name Pflaum is pronounced “plum,” most likely an orchard. Who comes for harvest? What is shared? What is eaten?

For this month, Todd Dillard is creating a thread of prompts. Follow him on Twitter for more. And I hope this prompt helps create a poem. Please share. I would love to read your poem!

Murders, Conspiracies, Wakes and Deceits—This List Poem is for the Birds

This prompt is inspired by a tweet from the amazing Frankie Choi. For your next poem for the 30/30 challenge, write a list poem of why you don’t trust birds—perhaps it is their beaks, the skill of crows in holding grudges and remembering faces, the tiny aggressiveness of hummingbirds, and the ability of most birds to fly above and defecate on the heads of their enemies (this would be why I envy them of course), their relation to dinosaurs, etc. After all, the collective nouns for many birds—a murder of crows, a conspiracy of ravens, a wake of vultures and a deceit of lapwings—do not exactly inspire confidence. Choose all birds or one particular species if one is particularly disturbing.

Perhaps you don’t want to write about fears or trickery, but do like birds. Make a list poem of images with birds as Wallace Stevens does in his “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” And here is a response poem to that from the perspective of blackbirds (that I really like): “Thirteen Blackbirds Look at a Man” by R. S. Thomas. 

If birds are your beacons of happiness but you still want a list poem of a creature’s skullduggery, then choose another species. Perhaps you are suspicious of kittens—those plump bodies with their hidden pointy parts ever reading to attack toes, their excessive pride (and of cats) in their ass, their cruelty in playing with their food, etc. 

NaPoWriMo (APRIL 30/30) Begins!!!!

This is the first day of the 30 poems in 30 days challenge. Each day, try to write a poem. If you get behind (as I will), try to write nine in one day (also me). I will post prompts during this month and post links to other places posting prompts. Remember, this challenge is difficult, it’s goal is a good one: to get all of us writing! And don’t forget that these are drafts. April is the month of writing, and May of editing. Let’s celebrate poetry and write together. 

For the first prompt, check out the NaPoWriMo site that will post prompts every day and start with its first prompt. I will post links to other sites so that you have more choices. If nothing else, take a poem you previously wrote and make it into a form: a haiku, tanka, ode, etc. If the poem breaks the form, call it a modified _____. Or do an erasure of an old poem to get to one central idea/image/emotion. Best of luck!!! 

Please share what you have! I’d love to read your poems. 

W.S. Merwin—Poetry and Prompts

In honor of W.S. Merwin, I’d like to share a few of his poems and let his brilliance inspire more poetry. If any of these prompts do resonate with you, please acknowledge his influence by using “After W.S. Merwin” or a similar method.

For the first prompt, use the title “For the Anniversary of My Death” as a ghostline. Ask yourself what will remain after you go? How do you now pass that unnamed day? Where are you or what activity are you in the middle of when that faint breath of mortality sighs along the back of your neck? 

For the second prompt, let’s use Chen Chen’s favorite poem, and one that brings an ache to my throat. I am amazed at the power of these three lines. Your prompt is to describe the color of absence in three lines. Do not mention the word “absence” anywhere but in your title. 

For the third prompt, think what words “will be buried with us”? What words do you carry with you, hear in the dark well of your sleep, and wait to rise and bear witness in your heavy bones, trapped within your rib cage until all and everything are freed to the sky? 

I find this photo of him by Jill Greenberg particularly lovely.  

Photo: Jill Greenberg/Courtesy of Copper Canyon Press  (found in NPR’s article “Poet W.S. Merwin, Who Was Inspired by Conservation, Dies at 91”) 

Dressed to Kill or Fly or Both—Prompts for the Lovely and We All Are Lovely, Damn it

For the next prompts, I want to use Tresha Haefner’s fabulous poem  “Swan Wedding” published in Cultural Weekly (Click the link for Tresha’s other poem and for other wonderful poets). I loved this hearing this poem read at Tresha’s feature and reading it on the page. The imagery is incredible.

First prompt: how would you dress to kill, to die, to escape. What outfit that you’ve worn or dream of wearing is the one that you would be married, seduced, sirened, and buried in? Is it a three-piece suit,  a sequined prom dress, the little black dress, or white wedding gown. Or if it is flannel pajamas, a hoodie, jeans and a geeky t-shirt, that is cool too. Describe this outfit but make the fabric a bed of roses and bloodstained thorns, a silky blouse house fire of a low neckline, a caution sign jacket, a starry sky filled with the unreachable heavens of distant gods, a murder of crows miniskirt with fishnet stockings that hooked a thousand leaping salmon.

For a second prompt, make a poem using the following words found in “Swan Wedding”: “satin,” “glaze,” “obsidian,” “shimmer,” “scythes,” “vodka,” “clouds,” “silver,” and “smash.”

For a third prompt, read Stacy Gnall’s “Self-Portrait as Thousandfurs” and notice the similarities and differences. In what outfit do you make your escape. What sacrifice do wear against your skin? Or what animal, bird, or insect would you trade your own skin for? 

Photo by Noel Nichols on Unsplash website.  

Forest Door—Ekphrastic prompt

Here is another ekphrastic prompt: use the photo to create a poem. Remember to not simply describe the photograph though. Ask yourself who or what built the doorway and for whom. And why? Is the doorway an entrance to the forest or an entrance for the forest?

A doorway made of twigs, some floating, seems a structure designed by birds. Can a doorway be a nest, or vice versa? What does it mean to leave home and what is home? 

Doors provide an opening through a wall or other boundary. What are the unseen walls here? A doorway should have a door that closes and perhaps even locks. What does a doorway without the door mean? What is its purpose?  

Here are two poems that might provide inspiration: “Bon Courage” by Amy Guerstler, “Prospective Immigrants Please Note” by Adrienne Rich, and “Doorway” by Jack Myers. 

Good luck writing!

Post-Valentine’s Day—The Prompt That Won’t Get Carded

Margaret Atwood’s “Variation on the Word Sleep” is a poem that still brings an ache to my throat, especially when I remember the seemingly hopeless yearning I felt for my (now) husband. I think of it  when I lie next to him at night and listen to his rhythmic breathing, letting the sound of his presence rock me to too-often elusive sleep. I imagine that at my passing my soul alighting upon his outstretched finger and resting for one moment in his cupped hand before fluttering off to my preferred oblivion, and I wish for one moment to see the world made orderly by his rational eyes. My skies, the only place I am gifted with wings, are the blue that watch me.

Wll, that has probably embarrassed him enough for now...on to the prompts!

Prompt 1: Describe another activity that you want to watch a potential lover perform? Would you like to watch a lover drink the first cup in the morning? To be the aroma inhaled, the relief in the first swallow, the trail of warmth sliding along tongue and down the throat to the center of abdomen, to be carried there in a cold morning, the frenetic firing of neurons wiping away sleep’s film, to embody the addiction and daily comfort and habit, to be reached for and cupped every blessed morning, even the darkest ones. If you do use this prompt, particularly if you use similar wording to the original or use a variation on the title (pun intended), don’t forget to credit Atwood. 

Prompt 2: What items would you give a lover to protect them (or he/her) in a dream? An invisibility cloak to hide them from the monsters, an eagle’s wings to fly high above pain, a key to unlock the guilt-manacles chaffing their wrists? 

Prompt 3: Where does your lover’s dream-self travel? Where is their “worst fear”? Describe the land/environment. How will you help them return to the waking? Will you offer gate or boat or bridge or door or galloping horse or tunnel or elevator? And how will you follow them there? If it helps, you can use the line “towards your worst fear” as ghost line. The rest of the poem can your desired lover’s journey or your own. Again be sure to give credit.

Dana Point, CA

Ekphrastic, Pic from the Button Factor—Three Prompts

The past two weeks have not been productive ones. I neglected to post even a Valentine’s prompt. This coming week will, I hope, be better. 

For the prompt, use the following picture from an abandoned button factory. What can make you of the image of the buttons spilling in a downward spiral? Where are the threads to anchor the buttons, the needles? Where have all the hands that created the buttons gone? What shirts are now undone, unable to close and shield the body from view? What is spilling open now? What effect does time have on even what binds things together? Why is someone standing at the top ledge of a staircase lined with a thousand ways to slip? When do you do the same? Sometimes it feels as if I am about to slip whenever I open my mouth. 

If you are having difficulty getting started, read “ San Sepolcro” by Jorie Graham, ”Shirt” by Robert Pinsky, “White Buttons” by Mary Ruefle and “Night Falls Like a Button” by Chen Chen. Notice how wide ranging the themes and styles are. 

(btw, I could not find the origin of the picture to give credit). 

“Put this in my toaster”—the Domestic Bliss Prompt

Yes, Valentine’s Day is coming up, and, yes, it is a holiday that is dreaded, mocked, celebrated and ignored sometimes all by the same person at different stages in life. Nonetheless, let’s add some romance to the February rain (and, sorry, everyone else, snow). Let’s skip the first message/text and the first date and just leap in to a marriage in all of its domestic erotica.

 For the first prompt, take the first line from Luisa Muradyan’s “Marriage” as a fill-in-the-blank exercise and choose another verb to complete the infinitive phrase: “Marriage is a lifelong commitment to” ________. From that line, extend the metaphor throughout the poem as Muradyan did. 

Btw, Ilya Kaminsky is a great poet to follow on Twitter for posted poems and interesting discussions, and I absolutely love this poem.  The full poem is below:

For the second prompt, use the line “There is honesty/in the oatmeal but not the Greek yogurt” as a ghostline just because that line made me laugh. Here is where overblown claims (innuendo intended) about pomegranates, cranberries, acai, etc. can come in handy.   

For a third prompt, create a list poem listing all the places where love poems are. The title could even be or some variation of the line “There are love poems everywhere.” Again, give credit to Muradyan for the inspiration.

For a fourth prompt, write a poem using the following words: “ritual,” “forbidden,” “ashamed,” “calling,” “wash,” “honesty,” “ancient,” and “aisle” but again change the religious context. What other subject matter could these apply to.  

For a fifth prompt, use a quote and apply it within the poem. I love how Muradyan follows the quote with what each partner does repeatedly (and therefore are).  Perhaps write a poem using the quote “Life must be understood backward. But it must be lived forward” by Søren Kierkegaard and write a narrative poem in flashback. 

For a final prompt, turn a routine domestic task—such as grocery shopping as Muradyan did—into foreplay and afterglow. Put all the dirt into cleaning house, make a striptease of laundry, turn your oven on for baking.  

Failed Ekphrastic Poem—Prompts to Try, Break, and Rebuild

Failure happens. I tried to respond to an ekphrastic prompt for a contest and repeatedly looked at the drawing, but nothing came. I finally did write something (two days before the deadline) but didn’t like it. Even failed attempts teach though, and after a friend helped me, I ended up with a better poem and ideas for how to edit it further.

Here is the drawing ”The Davenport” by poet and writer Steve Davenport: 

And here is the editor’s hint:  

For your first prompt, use the drawing and the editor’s hint to create a poem. Please share! I would love to read your resulting poem! 

Here was my original poem, which I find choppy and unconnected and contradictory to the interweaving inherent in the subject matter: 

Here is the suggested revisions from the generous Adrian Ernesto Cepeda: 

For a second prompt, take one of your existing poems (or perhaps the poem you inspired by the DavenTree) and break up the lines to avoid end stopping, or perhaps cut them at the punctuation. Play around. Start with your very last line and see what happens. I have a poem that a friend recommended that I try that exact exercise with. (Full disclosure: still on my to-do list, although I started it). 

While I like the poem much better (THANK YOU, ADRIAN!!!), I think the subject matter may be better suited to a form—particularly the pantoum. I want the weaving and repetition of the poem’s lines to replicate DNA’s function in life. 

For a third possible prompt, take an existing poem and pilfer its lines/phrases/images/words for pantoum. Here is the pantoum form in case you need a reminder and a link to a helpful site if you wish more information on this form or others: 

Good luck! Good writing...and breaking and editing! 

Self-Reflection and Self-Replicating Prompts

How do you visualize your “self”—is it a body part, an onscreen character you watch during a every uncomfortable scene in a rom com, a color, the smell of a rusty swing set and cut grass, the TV screen your eyes make of the world and framed by your hair? Perhaps the latter is only my projection of self lost in the world around me. Is your self the one you recognize in photographs, in the mirror, in the weight of your body as you wake in the morning?

Create a metaphor of your self and follow it as it moves about the world. Do you empathize with your self—perhaps want to pick it up and cuddle it like a stray kitten? Or are you embarrassed by it? Is your self the pair of underwear you only wear when all others are in the laundry hamper? Or do you glorify in your self? Is it a jewel sparkling beneath your skin, a peacock giving a hundred side glances to all newcomers to the scene, a stallion outracing all your competitors whether they know they should be running or not? 

This prompt was inspired by a poem shared on Twitter by the amazing poet Emilia Phillips (author of Landscape of Sex and Violence). I wanted to give credit to Emilia Phillips for sharing the poem especially since I found her notations interesting.

And here is the entire poem. 

For a second prompt, use the line but fill in the ending: “i thought that i was a ____” to begin the poem and to end it. Think of the two lines as mirroring each other. What do they reflect? Be sure to credit Justin Phillip Reed (“After Justin Phillip Reed” after your poem’s title”).

Another possible prompt is simply to use that same line “i thought that i was a long hand” as a ghostline. Play with the idea of self as ghost (or how about the concept of ghost line itself?) What moves through your self, what does your self pass through in turn? If your self is a line, what does it intersect with, what is it parallel to? Where is it heading? Regardless of how you play with these concepts, still give credit to the poet though.

For a fourth prompt, use the following words in a poem: “angling,” “rigid,” “war-sharp,” “slashing,” “gauze,” “smudged,” “histories,” “contours,” “plexiglas,” and “wring.”

As always, please share any poems written from the prompt (however tenuously). I would love to read your poems! And once published, please send a link so that I can promote your work!

Two Beautiful Poems Make Seven Prompts and a Scene

Today, let’s look at two poems: the first, “Re: Happiness, In Pursuit Thereof” by C.D. Wright, and the second, “Transformation” by Adam Zagajewski and translated by Clare Cavanagh. Notice the similarities of the endings (credit to Bethany Hindmarsh @bthmrsh on Twitter for observing the relationship between the endings and posting “Transformation”).  

For the first prompt, use “Re: Happiness, In Pursuit Therefore” as an inspiration for your own answer to the question of where you will be found. Where is that place? The intersection of regret and ten minutes after closing? A small oasis between last Tuesday and a deadline on Friday? A copse with a small ice-clogged stream?

For this next prompt, begin by answering the one thing you crave, although you can choose to break the rule as “Transformation” does and list three. A possible alternative is to describe what you crave it but never name it. 

For the third prompt, take the first line from either poem to use as a ghost line. Remember to erase the line. If you do use the first line, perhaps as an epigraph, be sure to give credit to the poet. Even if you do erase the line, you can always use the “After [poet’s name]” below your title. 

For a fourth prompt, try to use as many of the following words in your own poem: landfall, labyrinth, mercurochrome, chamomile, glass, ivory-billed, elapsed, riddle, crimson, muteness, careless, bends, walks, walls, lightning.

For a fifth, ponder what it means to be “ivory-billed” and “Invisible/except to the most prepared observer” if debate over the ivory-billed woodpecker’s presumed extinction lives on? Then answer why the “birds grow quiet”; what snuffed their voices? Or, if you prefer, describe any negative phenomenon as in “heard the birds grow quiet”: felt numbness spread, saw vision fade, tasted hunger, etc. 

For the sixth prompt, notice all the indicators of time in the two poems: the year “2005,” “before landfall,” “at night,” “Aztec time,” “fifth and final cycle,” “digital,” “early,” “Elapsed breath,” “months,” “sunsets,” again night, “dusk” and “September.” Juxtapose these indicators. What did/will time make us? When do we begin again if we never stop ending?

For the final prompt, compare “stardust/Ancient tailings of nothing” to “September’s sweet dust gathered.” When do we become lightning? What next?

And here is a photo I took using the Paper Camera app.

More Gifts—Prompt Inspired by Rachel McKibbens

Rather than a gift of darkness, describe joyful, life-affirming gifts, the gentle ones Rachel McKibbens recommends. For sample poets or poems just for pleaseure, read “The Gift” by Li-Young Lee and read the poems “Minneapolipstick” and an “Untitled” by the inspiring Rachel McKibbens.

I can no longer remember at which beach I took this picture, but I remember the happiness of the moment.  It lingers, a warmth in my palm.