To be a poet you have to write poetry. Maybe you need a lot of other things, but you can have all the
other things (whatever they might be) and if you aren't writing poetry you
aren't a poet. You
may have the soul of a poet. You
might have poetic inclinations. You
may be a poetry lover, but unless you are writing poetry you can't be a poet,
not even a lousy one.
I propose that you consider
giving yourself a challenge, accepting the challenge, and completing the
challenge. Make a commitment, that beginning today, you are going to write at
least one poem, and that you will continue writing a poem a day, every day,
missing no days, for at least the next 30 days.
Don't say, "I'll start on the first day of the month and
write a poem a day for the rest of that month."
Why wait? What are you waiting
for? If it is March 15th, then write a poem a day until April 15th.
Then go drop your taxes in the mail and come back home and write your final
poem entitled: Ode to Money.
What if I miss a day?
Well, what if you do? So what. You set yourself a standard of
a poem a day for 30 days. If you miss a day it means you
didn't meet your standard.
Just to help, if you need the
prompts, here are 30 prompts to keep you writing for the next 30 days.
Write. Be a poet. Don't wait for inspiration to strike.
1) Pick something from
current events and write about it. You can write a poem. It can be a poem about a news
story, a political commentary, or maybe even some current topic like an Ode to
the Internet, or an Elegy for an Underwood typewriter.
2) Write a confrontation poem.
Think of a confrontation you had, or one related to you that was especially
memorable. Relate the confrontation in first, second, or third person. If it is remembered like,
"I should have said. . ." then now is your chance. Say what you should have said,
or what they should have said. You can provide a resolution,
or leave the ending open-ended.
3) Take the phrase: Save it for a rainy day. Save what? How would it be saved? What good would come from
having saved it, whatever it turns out to have been?
4) Try writing a season poem
[Winter, Spring, Summer, Autumn] Make the work evoke the selected season for
you. Or write one poem with 4 sections, each a different season.
5) Write a poem about a big change
in your routine. It happens to all of us. Changing jobs, going through a wedding prep, and event, surviving
a traumatic incident, all such things change one's life. What you usually do you can't
do.
6) Write about a series of big
changes in your life that have been kicked off by a small change.
7) Write a poem about something
that you think would make you happy. While living inFlorida a hurricane knocked out our electricity for over a week. Getting electricity at home
again was something I thought would make me happy. For someone else, that may be a
vacation trip to London, or a visit by a parent,
or an adult child, or some imaginary gadget like a time machine, or a car that
runs on grass clippings.
8) Write a poem that is, in some
way, about food. Make the egg a protagonist, or perhaps food only makes a cameo
appearance in a more humanly dominated work. You could even make food the bad guy, the antagonist.
9) Write a poem about finding
something. It could be something fraught with memory that had been waiting in a
drawer. It could be an old trophy in a closet, an old photograph in a box
in the attic, or perhaps something like a sense of compassion, or a sense of
humor. It can be funny, sad, mean, or
mad. What do our things tell us about ourselves?
10) Write a "rant" poem. Writers feel strongly about things, and not ranting is what takes
effort. In this poem, let your rant off the leash. Go off on politics, religion,
global events, weather patterns, and if you have some road rage, well, it is
just safer to let it go in incendiary verse.
11) Write a poem about marriage. It
can be about your marriage, but it could be about someone else's marriage, or
some imaginary couple's marriage, or the someday marriage of your newborn baby,
or simply about the institution of marriage.. It can be pro-marriage; it can be
anti-marriage; it can be pathetic whine on the topic of marriage.
12) For this week's poetry prompt,
I'm also going to discuss an interesting poetic form called the cento. A cento
is a poem composed of lines from other poets' poems. It's similar to the cut-up
technique made famous by William S. Burroughs and others. The main
difference is that a cento uses only lines from other poets, whereas the cut-up
technique uses lines from any and every where.
I want you to go through your
favorite poems and piece together your very own cento. The lines do not need to
be popular or well known--but you should know where and who you're drawing
from. The method that helped me was to find the lines and write them down first
before trying to make something out of them. Later on, you can try this exercise
on your own poems, especially ones where you might like a line or two but feel
disappointed in the whole (I know I've written many that fit this description).
13) Write a dream poem. Until I got
my C-PAP machine I hadn't had a dream in 30 years, now I have dreams, but only
remember bits and pieces of them. If you can't remember any recent dreams, then try making it about
a long ago remembered dream. In fact the old and unforgotten dream is probably best, because it
has not been forgotten for a reason.
14) Write a poem with the title of
"How to ____ (blank) ____ " where you use the
title as the springboard for your poem.
You can insert whatever you
wish into that blank and then go in any direction with the actual poem. My
mother use to make a pie that I still remember fondly. But my poem "How to
make mama's Mock Apple Pie"- doesn't have to be a recipe poem,
although that might be fine, it could instead be about mama, or pie, or mocking
things, or something completely different. As with all the Wednesday
prompts, feel free to have fun with it and get creative.
15) Write a poem about the number
of years you have lived [ 58, or 36] or about birthdays.
16) Pick an target audience and
write a poem that aims at that target. Put the name of your audience in the title of your poem. Your
audience can be dead or alive, real or imagined, general or specific.
17) Write a poem that involves a
large crowd. A mass of stadium sports fans,
or rock concert goers, or after a funeral church crowd. Be lost in the crowd, be the
keynote speaker, be the leader of a mob, or be afraid of it. Write about a historical crowd and imagine what one or all those
people were thinking.
18) Write a Vacation Poem. I don't vacation much. Remember, a poem can, and perhaps, often it should, be fiction. Write the poem as if you're going on vacation; or someone else is going on vacation; or
maybe you live in a tourist town that is currently swamped with college
spring-breakers.
19) Write an "invasion"
poem. An army invading a Middle Eastern town, or a person breaches the
walls of your heart, or your life, or some event that invades your brain, and
changes your mind, a mind you felt was unchangeable on that subject. It could be roaches in your
house, rats in your walls, or weeds in your flower bed. It could even be housing
editions, or Starbucks, or street gangs.
20) Write a poem with the
following title: The Reason I ____ (blank) ____. Try something you do that you have no clue as to why. Explore the possible reasons,
and see where it leads you.
21) Write a letter poem. It can be a letter to a
company, or someone from your past who is actually lost to you now, a letter to
a historic figure, or a letter to your future self.
22) Think back to those Spoon River Anthology poems where people in graves rise up and give us a brief insight
into their life, or how they died. Now do that for yourself. Write a poem about your own death. Or you could just imagine what
dying might be like, or make some comment on after life, or lack thereof. The main thing I want, though,
is that you focus on your own death--not someone else's.
23) Not only will you die, but
everyone you love is also going to die. I will die and everyone I care about is going to die. Write a poem about the death of
someone you loved who is now gone.
24) Not only will you die, but
everyone you love is also going to die. I will die and everyone I care about is going to die. Write a poem about the death of
someone you care about as if they were already dead. Don't show it to them, or at
least disguise their identity.
25) Write a poem about getting
older. You don't have to wait to be old to do this. If you weren't just born, you
have been getting older. A 12 year old is no longer 10. A 30 year old person was once
18. It doesn't matter how old you are you are getting older, every
single solitary second, with every beat of your heart. Have you ever heard an 8 year
old talk about when they were younger? All of us can look back. And looking back can make us look forward, and hopefully to look
at our NOW.
26) Write a list poem in which you
list all the things that matter most to you. Remember that Broadway musical standard, These are a few of my favorite
things? This can be serious, or funny, rhymes or perhaps you have the time
and inclination to try a villanelle, a pantoum.
27) Write a poem about the weather. It doesn't have to be storms,
but, of course it could be. Perhaps a particular sort of weather brings y or incorporates the
weather into the poem. Whether you make it about a crazy storm or a cloudless
summer day, you gotta give the weather report.
28) Write an occupational poem today. Write about a job. It could You be your own occupation or one you admire, or a job
you can't figure out why anyone would do. It could be about the best job you ever had in your past. It could be the worst job you
ever had. It doesn't have to be a story poem, it could be just what it felt
like to do the work without commentary, or some sequence of events. .Or it could actually be a
story poem, a funny story that is associated with a job? Babysitter, paper carrier, mucking out stalls, mowing yards anything
can become inspiration or grist for a poem.
29) Write a one side of a phone
call type poem. This is a poem where one person talks to another, but you only get
the first person's words. You don't hear replies or questions. Albert Camus wrote an entire novel, The Fall, in this way. If you have trouble with this try writing a dialogue and then cut
out one of the speakers, then play around and see what hints and implications
can be made by allowing your reader to hear only one side.
"Sometimes
it is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man who tells the
truth. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood on the contrary, is a beautiful
twilight that enhances every object" ~ Lies by Roger Fides
30) Write a NO APOLOGY poem. Anyone can beat themselves up
with guilt and regret. Take something that you did
that is perceived to be wrong, and defend yourself. Defend your actions. Take crap off of no one. Flatly refuse to take the
blame. Shift the blame, or explain it away, or deny you had any part of
it.
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