Panicked Poet: Needing Prompts

I learned a lot from reading biographies of several poets. Frost was a night-owl and tended to write into the night and this, of course, put him late on the day. It was not a great schedule for a poet who was, in the early years, also a farmer. But William Stafford, Ted Kooser, and Billy Collins all have said they get up early to write.

In that great work Early Morning by William Stafford's son, Kim Stafford has the great poet talking about how his kids would get up early and interrupt his morning writing, so he would get up an hour earlier, and then another hour earlier, until he found that sweet-spot where the house was quiet, the kids were asleep and he could write.

I took this practice on myself, getting up at 5, or 4 am to write. The problem, for me, is that I don't always know what to do at that hour. In fiction I just make it a practice to stop writing in the middle of a scene that I know where it is going. That way, when I go back to it, I know how to start. I just take up where I left off. But with poetry, sometimes, I need prompts.

Here are some prompts that I use, and you are welcome to use too, if you want to, or feel it might be helpful.

1) Start a notebook and fill it with prompt stuff: Stuff like a list of topics to write about:

• fear
• sleep
• death
• spring
• snow
• a spider
• paying bills, and on and on

2) Prime the pump: Either collect in your prompt notebook a list of phrases you come across as you read. When you need to prompt yourself, scan those phrases and pick one. Paraphrase the line in 5 or 6 different ways, and see if it leads you to a poem.

 

3) Take a color and color a poem: Jot down every memory you have that includes that color. See if it leads you to a poem.

 

4) Never, ever, no way: Start by making a list of stuff you could never, would never do. See if it leads to a poem.

 

5) Start by making a list of stuff you could never, would never do: List, explain, read, delete, add to, and see if this starts to lead you to a poem.

 

6) Don't start the morning with writing, start with walking, or standing, or sitting: Take the dog for a walk, or take yourself outside, and intentionally look, listen and feel. Then come back in and write down what you saw, heard, and felt. Do haikus or just very short poems that tell no story, or reveal some memory or opinion, they just capture the moment.

 

7) Write a rant: Take some issue that really chaps your hide and write a ranting tirade about it.

 

8) Write a funny rant: You can make this a separate activity, or you can let it spring from the serious rant poem. Take the ranting poem, make it rhyme, and make it so extreme it is silly.

 

9) Write an inventory poem: Inventory a drawer, or the contents of your pocket, or your purse, or three or four things you lost recently, or all the pieces of mail that arrived yesterday.. Maybe you could write some thoughts or memories about each of the items in your inventoried list.

 

10) Looking for your mind, a million miles away: I have often heard, and sometimes said, "My mind was a million miles away." It is a phrase used to explain why we didn't hear something or notice something that happened right in front of us. Well, go find that mind. Where is it. What is it thinking about? See if it leads to a poem.

Forty Poetry or Journaling Prompts

Forty Poetry Prompts

 

 

Here are 40 ideas for writing a poem, or as a prompt for a personal essay.  If you want to make it a funny poem, try using rhyme.  If you get stuck on a rhyming word use the following link as your on line rhyming dictionary:  http://www.rhymezone.com/

 

Write about...

 

1.     being underwater

2.     a person whose life you're curious about

3.     your mother's perfume

4.     trouble sleeping or waking up

5.     growing older

6.     the feeling of getting lost in a book

7.     telling someone, like a grandchild, how to know when you're in love

8.     a bad dream

9.     tell a ghost story or something about the occult. Even if you don’t believe                    in that stuff it can be fiction.

10. your mother’s whistling.

11. an important life choice you've made

12. spring, summer, fall, or winter

13. something most people see as ugly but which you see as beautiful

14. a n emotion that you have struggled with, such as jealousy, or worry

15. becoming a parent, or a grandparent, or a great grandparent

16. an event that changed you

17. a place you visited -- how you imagined it beforehand, and what it was actually like

18. the ocean, or huge storm from your childhood

19. forgetting [i.e. does it get scary when you first notice you are forgetting stuff a lot?]

20. the speed of light

21. someone with a skill: doll maker, weaver, painter, et cetera.

22. reflections in a window

23. a newspaper headline recently or one important one from you past

24. holding your breath

25. a specific color

26. your greatest fear

27. time travel and how or why you would travel to a particular time and place

28. a particular toy you had as a child

29. being invisible, maybe it is just people not seeing you for some reason when you are clearly right there in front of them.

30. a time you felt homesick

31. telling someone about something that is hard to tell

32. about birthdays [i.e. birthday candles: how they matter to children who get few of them, and they don’t matter at all old people who get a whole bunch of them.

33. a favorite food and a specific memory of eating it

34. an imaginary city

35. losing your ability to sing, or giving up driving

36. imagine life in an aquarium

37. pick a Bible verse and tell how it give insight into something that happened to you.

38. write about falling two ways:  a physical fall, and something that was a downfall

39. what a computer might daydream about

40. your grandmother's hands

Poetry Prompt: Emotional and Feelings are Visitors.

I read a quote I wish I’d read in high school.  I don’t have the exact quote in front of me, but it went something like this:  Feelings are visitors, they come and they go.”  Write a poem about a frequent emotional visitor.  This could be a good visitor, a positive or pleasurable emotion that has left you, and you could talk about what made it leave.  It could be a negative emotion that keeps coming into your life.  How do you get that emotion to leave?  Why does it keep coming back?  What do you do if this uninvited guest just won’t leave you?

Form Suggestions:

Make this a FREE verse sonnet.

• Put 10 syllables in each line, but the beat of each line is free.  Make the rhythm of the line just sound good to you. 
• Write 14 of these 10 syllable lines.
• If you want to do what Shakespeare often did for his monologues on stage, end with a rhyming couplet as a way of signaling that the poem is done.

OR write it however you like:  free verse, traditional sonnet, a blank verse monologue, a dialogue between you and the emotion, short, long, whatever you feel inspired to try.

NOTE:  since there are a lot of visitors this could actually be used for lots of your emotions and then you would have a chapbook, or perhaps a full book of poetry.

Write a poem about your pillow.

Write a poem about your pillow.  It can be as serious or funny as you like.  If you pick funny see if you can write some rhyming cat in the hat like work.  But serious can be perhaps easier.  I heard on TV that your pillow can double in weight due to dut mite excrement.  As a kid I remember how I would get hot and throughout the night I was flipping my pillow to the cool side.   Think of all the dreams hatched on your pillow, or lovers who shared your pillow, or children who rested on your pillow, or times when your significant other hit you in the face.  Think of your pillow as a witness to some aspect of your life.  Perhaps you have cried on your pillow.  Maybe you like to read while propped up on your pillow. Maybe a pillow played some role in your sex life.  Count the pillows on your bed.  Count the pillows in your house.  Imagine a functional pillow debating a decorative pillow.  Has a pillow ever played an important role in your past?

Here is my pillow effort:

MY PILLOW  by tex norman

                As a child I had pillows

stuffed with feathers.

I was before foam-rubber was common.

I was during the time when feather’s were common

and pillows were filled with bird magic.

Sometimes, in the night, I would feel something sticking me.

I used my fingers like tweezers and pinched the point and

pulled.  Out came a feather. It was my explanation for

how my dreams traveled, not on wings, but on feathers.

My dreams drifted.  My dreams responded to the slightest

hint of a movement.  My head filled with the impossible

and it seem all so totally, absolutely possible.

Boomer Poetry Prompt: More Ranting Poetry

On June 25, 1857, French poet Charles Baudelaire published his book Les Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil).

This collection of poetry led to his conviction on charges of blasphemy and obscenity.

Here's a sample of Mr. Baudelaire’s nasty poetry:

"Huddled, teeming, like gut-worms by the million,

A clutch of Demons make whoopee in our brain

and, when we breath,

Death floods our lungs, an invisible torrent,

muffled in groans.

" Get good and dark:

You can find some translations on line if you are willing to read a bit from Flowers of Evil. 

You can purchase the book on line: 

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/081120006X?ie=UTF8&tag=httpwwwgoodco-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=081120006X&SubscriptionId=1MGPYB6YW3HWK55XCGG2

If you just want to vent, then write a short venting poem.  Unleash the gut-worms!  Remember the movie Network?  The protagonist was “mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more.”

Write a poetry rant.  You can read more of Flowers of Evil, or just sound off on what pisses you off.

Here is one of my rants.  I won first place for this work in a coffee house poetry slam.

Bra Ads  By tex norman

I stand before you

a man racked with guilt

and shame

that came

(or so I felt)

from my Calvinistic, blackbelt,

fundamentalist

father.  He wasn’t much fun,

but he certainly was mental.

He could make a hard-shell Baptist

look like a godless ACLU liberal.

No lie.

So all my life I

have felt like a hopeless

and helplessly unworthy one

living in the State of SIN,

the black sheep of my family.

Despite, however, the

the religious oppression of my family

we did have porn in

our house.  It was called

the Sears & Roebuck Catalogue,

containing seventeen provocative pages

of brassieres for all sizes and ages.

Back in 1950-twelve, I

perused those over (and under) developed bra models

modeling bra, after bra, after buh-buh-buh bra.

I could sit for hours imagining

their hoooo-haaahs.

Back then there was a poplar song

about an “itsy-bitz,

teeny-weenie-

yellow-polka-dot bikini”

that prompted Sears to add

three pages of two-piece

bra-topped swimming suits

added, I thought, just for me

adding to me variety.

Then, one day, all my fears

came true.

I got caught

while scrutinizing a brassiere

that hooked (oh, my god)

in the front.  You know,

between the left hoooo and the right haaah.

My father saw what I was seeing.

There must’ve been like 57 hooo-haaahs

on each page

and I was of an age

my daddy thought too

young to

be forming such mummeries

so daddy worked himself into a

brew-ha-ha

like rage reciting scripture

about how impure

my thoughts were.  He

threw scripture at me

like one of those onward Christian Soldiers

lobbing verse grenades.

“The Apostle Paul wrote

in his First Letter to the Corinthians

that, ‘it is good not to touch a woman.’”

When a guy says something like that

you can’t help but wonder,

“Had Paul ever tried it?”

Then my daddy quoted Jesus, who said,

“It is adultery to look at the bust

and to lust.”

Finally, my father bemoaned those cross your heart

Playtex living bra ads on TV.

But I have to say

it seemed to me

that those television bra ads were directed right at me.

Their very name was a Direct Address.

Listen carefully

I’m sure you’ll hear it:

“PLAYTEX”

                “Play tex”

                              Play                tex!”

Definition Poetry

This is a word count poem of 25 words.

The pattern is like this:  The poem is 9 lines lone and each line has a set number of words:

1. One Word--------The first word is the word you are going to define.
2. Two Words------Followed by the words defining line one.
3. Three Words
4. Four Words
5. Five Words
6. Four Words
7. Three Words
8. Two Words
9. One Word--------Then if possible use a synonym for line one 

                                      or some cleaver ending.

Example but when you are done you can eliminate the numbers:

1. DOUBT                                  --by tex norman
2. When you
3. ask a child
4. who ate the cookie
5. and the child says they
6. have no idea and
7. yet they are
8. chewing something
9. crunchy. 

Just try defining some short common words or unusual words in this manner.  It could be enough for a book all by itself.

Write a Sestina

This form of poetry, the Sestina, is  derived from the Italian sesto (sixth).

History.

The Sestina first showed up as a French form. The Sestina was one of several very complex forms that has regained some use among American poets. 

Form.

In a traditional Sestina:

The lines are grouped into six sestets [or 6 line stanzas] and a concluding tercet [a 3 line stanza]. Thus a Sestina has 39 lines.

Lines may be of any length but usually the length of the lines are consistent in length within a single poem.

The end of each of each line in that first stanza matters because the words are repeated in differing patterns through each stanza.  The six words that end each of the lines of the first stanza are repeated in a different order at the end of lines in each of the subsequent five stanzas.

There is one possible exception.  Some writers will used homonyms to add verity in the poem. 

For example “write” could be used in one stanza and when the word comes around again it could be “right” and it could be “rite” another time.

This homonym aspect is not done by all or even most writers using this form, but it something you can consider doing if you want.  It is permitted by the form.

The particular pattern is given below. (This kind of recurrent pattern is "lexical repetition".)

While some writers have written rhymed sestinas, my suggestion is not to add a further complication to an already complicated form, unless that is just something that you enjoy.   In your first few efforts make your repeated words unrhymed.

The first line of each sestet after the first ends with the same word as the one that ended the last line of the sestet before it.

In the closing tercet, each of the six words are used, with one in the middle of each line and one at the end.

The pattern of word-repetition is as follows, where the words that end the lines of the first sestet are represented by the numbers "1 2 3 4 5 6":

1 2 3 4 5 6         - End words of lines in first sestet.   6 1 5 2 4 3         - End words of lines in second sestet.   3 6 4 1 2 5         - End words of lines in third sestet.   5 3 2 6 1 4         - End words of lines in fourth sestet.   4 5 1 3 6 2         - End words of lines in fifth sestet.   2 4 6 5 3 1         - End words of lines in sixth sestet.   (6 2) (1 4) (5 3)   - Middle and end words of lines in tercet.

Your Composition.

The repetition of words in a Sestina makes this form a good match for a story that uses common speech, for in conversation the repetition of key words is common. The Sestina is a more "natural" form than the 

Villanelle (which is comparatively artificial in repeating whole lines).

The writer of a Sestina (as with the Villanelle) can use the repetition to delve more deeply into the material. Each stanza can revisit that material and show more facets of what the poet feels.

As with other forms, try the traditional form first. Once you have mastered that, you are ready for your own variations.

Here are some steps to take in creating a Sestina:

1.      Decide upon six words that are your candidates for the words that will repeat. I recommend concrete nouns (e.g., wool, chimney, lozenge, floor) and active verbs (e.g., climbs, opens).

2.     Alternatively, begin by writing a 6-line poem that you want to expand into a Sestina. Reorganize that sestet if appropriate to get more interesting end-words.

3.     On a large blank sheet of paper (or, if you prefer, on a new computer text file) write the end words for the first stanza, leaving space to complete the line:

1                                                       2                                                       3                                                       4                                                       5                                                       6

Do the same for the second sestet and so on:

6                                                       1                                                       5                                                       2                                                       4                                                       3

Then for the tercet, write the appropriate two words per line, e.g.:

6                          2

Be sure to follow the above guidelines for form. You will then have written 1 or 2 words in each of the 39 lines of the whole poem!

4.  Now write the stanzas, using the stepping stones provided by the chosen words.

5.   Sometimes a writer finds that a later stanza is a much stronger one than her first one, and she wants to move that later stanza to the start of the poem. That's fine! Simply move as a block your strong stanza and all the sestets that follow it (down to and not including the tercet). Preserve their sequence, and put them at the start, before what was previously the first sestet.

Check the pattern of end-words. You should find that the Sestina's pattern is still in order (even though a different word is now word "1", etc.) for all the sestets. Then make appropriate adjustments to the placement of your 6 chosen words in the final tercet.

6.    As with all formal poems nowadays, it is vital that the form does not "drive" your poem. If the rhyme scheme and form begin to feel forced, then the poem's content must be asserted.

7.  Traditionally, one keeps the same line length, as that gives the rhythmic repetition that the ear associates with music. It also gives a pleasant appearance on the page. Sometimes a writer wants to vary the line length in order to challenge the listener's or reader's expectations: that is fine if you do it deliberately. Just don't be lazy and cut lines short or run them on because you can't be bothered to fix your poem's problems.

8.  Traditionally, one keeps the same end words. You can modify them, or replace them with off-rhymed words, etc. The less you follow the traditional form, the less you can claim to have written a Sestina. Again, only break the form's rules because you choose to, not because you lack the skills and devotion to make your poem work in the traditional form.

Example.

Inner Child  by Paula Swanson

In the unrestrained laughter of children,

is the exalted, purity of joy.

Just seeing that first Crocus of the Spring

or kittens, their antics, exuberant.

You can't help but smile, in wonderment,

at the abundance of simple pleasures.

To watch vibrant sunsets, brings great pleasure.

As does a phone call, from both my children.

I'll recall their eyes, filled with wonderment,

and their squeals, as fresh snow fall, brought pure joy.

Their young minds, bounding with exuberance,

playing outside, in the warm days of Spring.

I love new baby animals at spring.

Their mothers, showing them off, with pleasure.

Playing, jumping, with such exuberance.

I am happy to have all the children,

with which to share these adventures and joy.

To see their eyes, grow big in wonderment.

I remember my own childhood wonders.

Seeing big rainbows in the skies of Spring.

Hearing birds, in the morning, sing with joy.

Watching mom, tend her roses, with pleasure.

My Grandmother, would send out us children,

to go play and use up our exuberance.

Now it's Grandchildren, with exuberance,

that find, in their lives, so much to wonder.

See the world through the eyes of a child,

the seasons; Winter, Fall, Summer and Spring.

I can't think of anything more pleasant,

than to watch them, their lives, filled with such joy.

Life in the desert, has brought me much joy.

Thunderstorms, beat my heart, exuberant.

My heart and soul, revived, with the pleasures.

Rugged beauty, fills my mind with wonder.

As life giving rains, that herald the Spring,

welcomes all of natures newborn children.

I find joy and exuberance abound,

in the pleasures and wonders within life.

That spring forth, from the child, within me.

Here is an example for my own work.  It comes from a verse novel I wrote and there is a scene where there is a funeral for a family killed in a murder suicide. 

---

From Zounds [a verse novel] by tex norman

An hour later it was time to start.

A hundred people came, a lot of them

were friends of Mattie and Miranda,

kids from school, but not too many friends

of Bobby showed. They were too young

to be exposed to these rituals of death.

All the kids from Madrigals were there.

For kids that talk almost all the time

at school, this scene was odd ‘cause no one

seemed to have a thing to say. Everyone

was secretly relieved when the preacher

stood and cleared his throat.

The Funeral  (a sustina)

“Blessed be our God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

And blessed be His Kingdom, now and forever.

My name is Pastor Joseph Fite. and I am here

to lead us in celebration of the life

of Megan Weeks, a woman filled with love,

and for four children, three of which are dead.

“We thank our God that Tiffany is not dead,

Such a loss as this can wound the spirit.

We’re in shock and questioning God’s love.

Yes, five are dead, but they’re not dead forever.

No, I believe there is an after-life.

Young people listen! I need you to hear

“but what’s even more important, you need to hear

that those we honor here today are not dead.

This may be the first time in your life

that someone you know has given up their Spirit,

and most of us are taught death lasts forever.

How could a God of love

“allow this to happen? Where is God’s love?

We’re hurting, Lord! There’s too much suffering here!

It’s more than we can take! They’re dead. Forever.

Aren’t we taught this fact about the dead?

That’s wrong! Wrong, because we don’t have a Spirit.

You think, “Hey, preacher, what about eternal life?’

“Yes, young people, I believe in life

eternal. I believe our God’s a God of love.

But we don’t have a spirit. We are Spirit.

We are Spirits that have bodies while we’re here.

Our soul wears our body. But once we’re dead

the soul discards the body, living on forever.

“God made us Spirits, so we could live forever.

That’s how He gave us our eternal life.

Yes, we miss our loved ones when they’re dead.

It hurts, of course, being separated from their love.

Our Spirits dress in flesh while we are here,

but we are not our flesh. We’re Spirit,

“and our Spirit lives forever.

We wear our bodies like space suits, our life

support is God’s love. We do not die.”

A Last Word.

Just because you start with the intention of writing a Sestina, you do not have to keep your poem in that form if it does not work for you. Your attempt to write a formal poem may help you find words that you would not have found otherwise. And you may decide that you choose to end up with a poem in a different form, perhaps even a prose poem.