I’m no longer sharing regular prompts, so these are all ‘from the archive,’ but should still be useful. Enjoy! (and if you’re looking for more like this, check out my co-authored textbook, Advanced Poetry).

JANUARY 2021: INAUGURAL POEM PROMPT

This morning (1/20/2021, which, apropos of nothing, is the first double-palindrome inauguration day—i.e., also 1/20/21), my children and I watched and listened to Amanda Gorman give her inaugural poem (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZ055ilIiN4). The youngest inaugural poet in history, she adds to a list of firsts in American government right now.

We talked for a while about the poem’s effects (including her use of language play, sonic echoes as propelling narrative / syntactical choices, etc.) and impact (varied, by listener), and then I asked them: what would you write, if you were the inaugural poet? And how would you do it? It’s an unusual and specific task, really—despite the deep history of poets propelling and reflecting sociopolitical realms, often poets write for an audience that later finds them (us), rather than writing for a prescribed set of readers; in Gorman’s case, the rhetorical situation is laid clear before her: the audience is America, now, at this moment, and Amanda Gorman had to write and deliver a poem that was for this time and circumstance. What a task! (And go, Amanda Gorman!)

My children turned the question, of course, on me—they’re good little Socrates(es). So, I said I’d share what I’d do after they said what they’d do. (They’re working on it now; or will be, after they/we take our foster cat in for a vet checkup!)

Here is my prompt for you, which has two parts; you can choose to do one or both (or none, or mix and match!)~

1. What would you write if you were the inaugural poet? What topics & techniques would you use, for this audience? Write a poem as if you were in this position, and share with us, along with a paragraph about why you made the decisions you did. Amanda Gorman made many such decisions; feel free to talk about hers, too.
2. If I were the inaugural poet, I’d write a partial Cento. A cento, Latin for “patchwork” (learn more here: https://poets.org/glossary/cento ) is a (historically Italian) collage poem, which takes as its source material lines from others’ poems. “Cento” also means there are 100 lines (traditionally, though poets have done this in many ways!), and so for a “whole cento,” you might find 100 sources and piece them together for a “patchwork garment” of 100 moments of other famous writers’ words. More on this, and how to do it, here: https://www.masterclass.com/articles/how-to-write-patchwork-poems#how-to-write-a-cento-poem

Anyone who’s taken a quarter-long class with me has probably been asked at some point to write a cento, which I often use to begin a course, as I like how the form allows us to consider, pay homage to (or satirize if necessary), and also revise, received traditions—which is essentially what all great artists and writers do: we learn from those who precede us; we decide what our own canon is; we join it and therefore reshape it.

For my cento, I would use lines from all the former inaugural poets (e.g., Elizabeth Alexander, Richard Blanco, Robert Frost, Maya Angelou, etc—read them all here: https://lithub.com/read-every-presidential-inauguration-poem-ever-performed-there-are-fewer-than-you-think/ ), plus some poets laureate (Joy Harjo, Tracy K. Smith, Kay Ryan, etc.—see them all here: https://poets.org/united-states-poet-laureate ), probably folks like Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde, who I personally admire, and also, from poets and writers alive today whose voices are part of a chorus of art and justice that Amanda Gorman calls up. I think a cento can also be considered a docupoetic experience (docupoetics: https://kenyonreview.org/2008/03/documentary-poetry/ ); that is, as it is a patchwork, it gives us the chance to be inclusive of a variety of realities and identities, if excerpted carefully and with intention (this would, admittedly, be tricky, but that’s fun, too: curating our little living museums of words—which are always in flux). In my classes, we talk about respectful representation and the dangers of appropriation.

I’d also, if I were writing for all of America, consider lines from psalms, a range of prayers, excerpts from novels and stories and letters, words of activists and teachers and scientists and fisherpeople and folks who work at grocery stores and hospitals and in bars, and some who’ve been denied healthcare due to pre-existing conditions and some who’ve given birth at home and some who’ve come to America to survive and etc. (yes, this is not an exhaustive list–add yourself!). I’d try to find lines that “sing,” musically, imagistically, ideologically, and piece them together into a poem of 46 lines, in honor of the America we are still re-writing–because we must re-write it.

When I read my partial-cento of 46 lines (this is where I had to imagine, as I have no intent nor calling to be the inaugural poet!), I would explain (briefly!) the cento tradition, and how that tradition might mirror what we are doing as a nation–borrowing scraps and making something beautiful and inclusive– and I’d note, of course, the range of sources (for creative integrity but also to re-state the names and the traditions), and then when I finished, I’d ask America to write the rest (each of you, using the language of your own role models), the other 54 lines, a “Inaugural Poem Part II,” and share them with me, so we could make an online anthology of American verse.

So, write the other 54 lines—using sources—and share! Include a list of sources.

. . .

JANUARY 2020:

FALL 2019:

1. EVERYTHING IS THE INTERVIEW/ aka, BY MAKING FRANTIC SANDWICHES:

I just read Don Dellilo’s 1999 play, Valparaiso, in which a man (Michael) grapples with sudden fame after embarking on an accidental journey because of a flight itinerary mistake (I know: it sounds complicated, but the that’s the whole plot!). In the play, Michael’s everyday life is now on display, via a series of interviews about “the incident.” The scenes are comic and tragic simultaneously, and—like social media—put somewhat crafted and yet intimate moments into the public’s gaze, confusing the two impulses: craft and intimacy; this further exacerbates Michael’s unstable state following his journey, and it builds to a disturbing crescendo near the end (no other spoilers; sorry!). Though Valparaiso is already 20 years old (!), it nevertheless feels contemporary in its satire of what “publicity” does to our private selves (and it reminds me, if you’re into William Deresiewicz, of his essay, “The End of Solitude”). Anyway, here are some examples of the dialogue, which in general is full of musical repetition, is paced like prose poetry, and holds the gravitas of critical work:

…

-Interviewer with Michael’s wife, Livia:

Interviewer: What do you do when your husband’s gone?

Livia: I ride my bike. I do demon repetitions on my bike. I have a demonic side that only Michael knows.

Interviewer: How does the demonic side show itself?

Livia: By making frantic sandwiches. By hurling itself full-length into the world. I feel things. I become addicted to things. Life is habit-forming. I start things and can’t stop. I’m dangerous to myself. Michael is dangerous to others. (pp. 29-30)

…

–Delfina interviewing Michael (Michael turning the interview on the interviewer):

Michael: What do you do in your private moments?

Delfina: These are my private moments. This is the time I set aside in which to be myself. The studio audience restores my life force. The thing I’ve misplaced during the night. I feel private here. You have to understand. I live in a box in a state of endless replication. I speak to intimate millions. One of me for each of them. It’s the only way to have a private conversation. I’m like a primitive painted doll. (p. 94)

. . .

So here is my prompt. Think of a (recent?) event/incident in your life that shifted the way you saw things. Then, imagine that that event/incident became public, somehow, that it earned you accidental celebrity, and that you were being repeatedly interviewed about it, by different parties. Brainstorm a list of at least five such possible interview situations—say, one interview by Stephen Colbert, one by Rachel Zucker, one by whoever does your local radio, one by a random individual related to the incident, one by someone interviewing your romantic partner or friend, etc. Then, choose one or more of these and write the scene(s). They don’t have to make sense, but they should reveal strangely intimate details that relate to the incident without needing full context (which is what poems do!).

2. LETTERS TO STRANGERS:

I’m planning a literature course for this fall, at CWU, called “Surrealism, Dreams, and the Duende.” One of the books on the course list is Remedios Varo’s Letters, Dreams, & Other Writings (trans. Margaret Carson), and it’s full of all manner of weird and playful unhinged-ness. Varo, a visual artist, had this whole secret world of notebooking. She wrote letters to strangers and asked them to attend parties, and she would conceive of the living room as a solar system and the objects of the home as orbiting some central object that she would designate as the sun. And of course she made that unicycle-spine-person out of bones (homo rodans), and she talks about that. Anyway, she was a total weirdo (and good friends with Leonora Carrington, so obviously totally my jam). If you’ve read Varo, you can probably pull anything from this book and use it as a prompt, but the one I want to focus on is the Letter to a Stranger idea. In Varo’s, she invites a stranger (which she finds via the phone book) to a New Year’s Eve party with her and her surrealist pals. In yours, choose a random person you don’t know (but can find out a little about, perhaps on social media?), and invite them to an upcoming event you plan to attend with friends. Here is the start of one of Varo’s letters, for inspiration:

Dear Stranger,

I haven’t a clue if you’re a single man or the head of a household, if you’re a shy introvert or a happy extrovert, but whatever the case, perhaps you’re bored and want to dive fearlessly into a group of strangers in hopes of hearing something that will interest or amuse you. . . . (p. 16)

SPRING 2019:

LULLABY: I am currently reading Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic, which is a book-length poem, a play in two acts, and also a poetry collection, which interrogates our (human) complicity in violence and war. I loved The New Yorker’s multimedia poetry feature on this project last month (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/02/18/deaf-republic ), and the book is equally intense. Among the many gorgeous moments are two poems, each titled “Lullaby,” one in each act:

Lullaby

Little daughter

rainwater

snow and branches protect you

whitewashed walls

and neighbors’ hands all

child of my Aprils

little earth of

six pounds

my white hair

keeps your sleep lit

. . .

&

Lullaby

I look at you, Anushka,

and say

to the late

caterpillars

goodmorning, Senators!

This is a battle

worthy

of our weapons!

. . .

I love how these poems provide us such a direct lyric address, so tender, layered with more than one intimacy—such as, in the second, speaker-to-listener, speaker-to-listener but sharing speaker’s address to caterpillars (!), which is a metaphor for address to “Senators” but really “soldiers” but really caterpillars!!!—and Sapphic in their imagination and urgency and candor. Says Ilya Kaminsky, : “I don’t write in a language in which I have ever heard lullabies as a child. My English is the world I make as I go. It is already a private language, an imaginary language. Already a wreckage. My job is to find, among those wreckages, what is beautiful, what might have lasting value (however mistaken I might be about that value) what is worth learning by heart, repeating, becoming a spell. That is the goal.” Good God, Ilya. So beautiful.

Okay, poets: write in a language in which you didn’t hear lullabies as a child. Write lullabies in your private, imaginary language, something worth repeating as a spell against whatever the larger terror was that lay just beyond your sleep. Write more than one—write at least two or three, imagining them as part of a larger project (maybe they are, like a manuscript-in-process). But don’t call them lullabies. Call them something you come up with yourself. It’s your language, after all.

W.S. MERWIN: We all know Merwin died on the same day that terrorists murdered 50 people praying in New Zealand mosques. Merwin was asleep when he died; I hope he didn’t know of the shootings. I don’t want to parallel the events but I can’t help it. When things happen at the same time, they are related (I still think of the death of Leonard Cohen as parallel to Trump’s election—again, I can’t help it—and also of a rhododendron, blooming the next day, in Port Townsend, WA. It was November, and the flower was violently out of season). Merwin wrote this strange relatedness in his poem “Separation,” a tercet:

Your absence has gone through me

Like thread through a needle.

Everything I do is stitched with its color.

I feel this poem on a blood level, how the absence of the “you” becomes the thread of the speaker, who becomes a needle. The “separation” is made manifest, more than metaphor, in the off-the-page actions of the speaker. “Everything I do,” the speaker says, “is stitched with its color.” The speaker is never the subject taking action in the poem; he/she/they remain passive—as the vehicle for absence, which is the subject of the first clause; as part of the noun clause “Everything I do” which then passively “is stitched.” This is how one carries on in grief: as an agent without agency. “Your absence” has a “color” we imagine—in my mind, it is red as blood, or wine, or the neon of a flame. That color that means gone.

Try to write something Merwin-worthy, something stitched with the color of his absence, or maybe with the color of his presence. It parallels something. Include that something.

EKPHRASIS: This image, Yates Thompson 13 f.155v, 14th century:

SPRING 2018:

REVISION/NEW POEM CREATION EXERCISE: Take a pile of poems; go to the thirteenth line in the thirteenth poem. Take the last six words of that line, plus the first six nouns in the same poem, and use them in a new poem which also contains a type of tree, the name of your birth month, and a bird in an unlikely scenario. Put your poem in couplets.

“TIMSHEL”: In her poem “Timshel” (the last thing God says to Cain before the murder of Abel/ simple future tense of timshol: “you will rule”), Laura Fargas begins “You have certain rights. You may/ strum a zither. You may return to the key/ that plinks a little flat over and over,/ and call the piano turner back.” The poem continues in this pattern of parallelisms offering permissions, and I find these permissions delightful, even if foreboding in their promise of mortal power, especially given our current political moment. I’ve been thinking daily about what rights I have and don’t have, what permissions I have and don’t have, what power I might scrape together to find joy and wonder and to create joy and wonder for others. Write a poem full of permissions . . . for someone. Use parallelism. Use the second person. Don’t use the word Timshel; instead, find something Trump said to someone and make that the title. Write your poem in tercets, with lines of no more than eleven syllables.

“Ugly Poetry”: A friend of mine asked me to give a talk on ugly poetry for his class. I have had to struggle with a lot to figure out what I think this means). I’ve decided “ugly poetry” is written art that empathetically, or with nuance or negative capability, approaches the ugliest things we can think of –things like extinction, anxiety, sexual assault, shaming children for who they are, mud fields thick with beef cattle, terror attacks, videos of starving polar bears . . .etc. . .  and I have seen poets write about these things with humor and hope and also despair, but in such beautiful ways. For example, here is an erasure of the Art of the Deal, https://pankmagazine.com/piece/erasure-poem-created-from-donald-j-trumps-the-art-of-the-deal/, & here is Kathyrn Smith’s “Poem for Trending Tragedy:” https://www.cleavermagazine.com/poem-for-trending-tragedy-by-kathryn-smith/ . . . Write a poem that faces an ugly thing head on.

September 2017–a smattering of catch-up prompts for your fall writing:

1. R.I.P. John Ashbery:  Take a line from one of his poems and make it your title, or a line in your poem, and then write an elegy called “Elegy with a Line from Ashbery,” or something similar. Or, write something in the vein of Frank O’Hara’s “To John Ashbery:”

2. THE ECLIPSE. You know what to do. And make it in tercets, with nine beats per line. Include at least two eclipse images, another person’s name, your own name, a specific food, and a geographic feature.

3. Another Apology: I know I’ve given this prompt before—the apology poem—but my favorite poem in Kaveh Akbar’s collection Portrait of the Alcoholic is “An Apology,” which you can read on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/kavehakbar/status/776758473707118592. Write an apology to an authority figure, like a diety or a parent.

4. “reportage:” Last spring, my students read & discussed Quan Barry’s Water Puppets, and were quite taken with Barry’s use of journalistic impulses. In “reportage,” which you can read here: http://www.poemoftheweek.org/quan_barry_id568.html, Barry achieves a momentum & a hurried feeling without punctuation—the lines propel us forward through time like a fast film, and both fulfill and complicate “the journalist’s mission,” which, it seems, is impossible, just as the poet’s mission is impossible. Write a poem that seeks to “report” something impossible from far away—geographically, temporally, physically, emotionally, etc—through a similar sort of style, seeking to connect with its reader so it can transport us into the experience of witnessing.

5. collections/persona: consider a collection of something—birds, unloved animals, superheroes, tea cups, insects, etc.—and write in and around this subject, using persona, avoiding your own life as much as possible.

March 2017

“I WOKE UP AND IT WAS POLITICAL”. . . everything is political; for many people, what was formerly minutiae is now emergency. I’ve been digging on this poem by Jameson Fitzpatrick, in this regard: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/detail/91685

Write another poem about what it means to “be political,” to “be woke,” to be whatever you are.

February 2017

“MOTHER POEMS”: Jane Wong’s PhD dissertation website, “The Poetics of Haunting,” offers a glimpse into her poetic lineage: http://poeticsofhaunting.com/

In a reading & talk she gave recently in Spokane, Jane interspersed personal history with her critical work. Among other interesting tidbits, Jane confessed to ongoing reverence for her mother. In her collection, Overpour, Jane takes on the voice of her mother, Jin Ai, in a series of persona poems strung through the manuscript—each has a title that indicates the mother’s age at the time the poem takes place: “Twenty-four,” “Thirty,” “Twenty-nine,” “Forty-three,” “Twenty-five.” You can read Jane Wong talking about the process of Twenty-four,” about demystifying the maternal figure, etc.: http://www.poetrysociety.org/psa/poetry/crossroads/own_words/Jane_Wong/

Try writing one or more poems in the voice of your mother, tapping into her personal narrative and image bank to do so. You might even take some time to interview her and weave in actual lines from her speech.

January 2017

“My Private Property”: “It is sad, is it not, that no one today displays any interest in the art of shrunken heads,” begins Mary Ruefle’s “My Private Property.” The essay, part ethnography, part personal memoir, part psychological/ contemporary social commentary, winds into the history of the art of head-shrinking, punctuated with statements such as “To be eaten by worms is charmless and inevitable. But for your head to be nibbled at by a mouse, for your head to become a bit of moldy cheese on a plate–that was something that spoke volumes about reversals of power, about foolishness and vanity” and  questions such as “Am I vain to think of my head as a book? Am I not transcribing the book of my head as I write?” The narrator admits that she would like to have, as her own “private property,” a dozen human heads, belonging to people she has loved. Ruefle claims to have seen her first shrunken head in a museum, when she was sixteen–and so the interest begins in formative personal experience, which I think allows for the emotional leaps, as well as the final lines. The essay concludes by direct address to these heads: “Oh my pantheon of shrunken heads, struck like new-laid eggs in a carton, comfort me when my rivers are high, comfort me when my waters are gone, for I can almost hear you breathing.” I find this essay delightfully disturbing. Begin an essay like this–by lamenting the loss of an ancient practice, perhaps one with which you hold a personal connection.

November 2016

“Border Triptych”: The Latinx poet Eduardo Corral has a beautiful 3-sonnet sequence called “Border Triptych:” http://www.webdelsol.com/LITARTS/CORRAL/corralpoem2.htm. In it, each sonnet takes on the voice of a different persona, but all three poems interrogate border lives and politics. Write a poem that addresses a complicated, nuanced social issue, for which multiple perspectives would need to address an issue in order for us to begin to understand it at all. Include three sections, each from a different persona. Bonus points if you can make three sonnets happen.

Sept/Oct 2016

“There Are Birds Here”/poem of your city:  In Best American Poetry 2015, Jamaal May discusses the process of his poem, claiming to be “artfully present[ing] [his] interior.” He says the poem was a response to critics latching on to the metal in his first book, HUM, about Detroit (and many more things–he says “hey, there are birds, too”). Write a poem about your city, in which you characterize and defend it via something that’s present (i.e. birds, statues, rivers, etc.). In so doing, you’ll be writing a poem of landscape/place, which is a form of political artfulness/ docupoetics.

“Alternate Names for ____”/ list poem: Danez Smith, in writing “Alternate Names for Black Boys,” creates a catalog or litany of metaphors, images, names that allow us to consider the ways black boys in America find themselves in fear, the ways their mothers live daily in the “clutched breath.” Clearly political, this poem gives us another way to approach the poem of witness: through listing. Think of a group to which you belong, some group for which you identify and therefore feel comfortable speaking on behalf of. Write a poem called “Alternate Names for [group name].”

“What You Have Heard is True”/imitation poem: Using Carolyn Forche’s  “The Colonel” as inspiration, write a prose poem (a prose poem is a poem in prose style, without lineation) that begins “What you have heard is true.” Continue to imitate syntax (in other words, the sentences should follow the same grammatical structure, but use different words). So, the next sentence of Forche’s poem is “I was in his house,” and yours might be “I was on the lake.” Hers goes on “His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went  out for the night,” and yours might go “The waves ferried a boat of leaves and eyes. The mountains bent their necks, the clouds came in for the day.” You get the point. Write an imitation. You’ll probably surprise yourself with what you come up with, and best of all, you don’t need to think about rhetorical situation–it takes care of itself, to some extent. When you finish the poem, think about how it enters the social conversation–as a private poem? a poem of witness? something else? etc.

as-children-together-forche“As Children Together”/epistolary: An epistolary is a poem in the form of a letter, as Forche’s “As Children Together” is. In “As Children Together,” a speaker addresses a childhood friend. Do this in your poem–address a childhood friend with whom you are no longer in touch. At the end of the poem, as Forche’s speaker does, implore the friend to write back to you. You don’t need to imitate the syntax, just get an idea from the style.

For the week of August 1

Natalie Diaz’s poem “No More Cake Here,” like many of her poems, adds dream magic to an autobiographical situation to create perfect poem narrative hyperbole, a way for her to deal with the tragedy of her brother’s drug addiction. Most of us have our obsessions, our hauntings. Write about yours in a way that gets weird and irreverent and confessional and lovely the way Diaz does in “No More Cake Here.”

For the week of June 12

“catalog of unabashed gratitude”
We live in a world fraught with violence and horror. Yet, in his collection titled Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, poet Ross Gay manages to give a nod to the terrible tragedies of our contemporary world  in a way that still allows for celebration, or he’ll turn away from a terrible situation to express an “unabashed gratitude.” Is it even possible? Here are some examples: “Ode to Sleeping in My Clothes,” “Ode to the Flute”.   If Ross Gay can do it, then so can we. Write an ode.

For the week of April 23

“I Apologize.”: (I love to give this exercise to my students, as it often produces really vivid work that accesses the shadow they usually don’t show us.) Write an apology poem to someone for something you did. Using parallelism works really well here, as in Martin Espada’s “I Apologize For Giving You Poison Ivy By Smacking You In The Eye With The Crayfish At The End Of My Fishing Line,” in which he repeats “I apologize” at the beginning of each sentence (you could also say “I’m sorry for,” or access any other number of ways to repent). But the non-apology (sorry/not sorry) of W.C. Williams’ “This is Just to Say” also works, and it doesn’t use parallelism. Obviously, you can adapt this into an essay or story.

For the week of April 10

“Centos means patchwork”: When I was a teenager, we didn’t have cell phones, the internet was brand new, and we didn’t spend much time on computers. We used to make collages out of magazines from the free bin at the library. There’s a poetic form that’s kind of like this–a collage form, called a “cento.” You can read about this form, and an example, at Poets.org, the Academy of American Poets. The book Wolf Centos is a collection of such poems. This week, go through your favorite texts–in any genre–and make a collage of lines that create a new text.

For the week of March 20

“Scientific American”: I love this magazine/ website so much–it’s always full of interesting, sciencey reads. This week, take cue from one of them–either do an erasure of one of these for a poem, or choose ten specific phrases or words from an article and work it into a poem, story, or essay. Or, just take a title, and, without reading the accompanying article, write a literary work. Some titles on the front page today: “The Sunny Side of Smut,” “Lions are Making a Surprising Comeback–but Only When They Are Kept Behind Fences” (you might need just the first part for this one), “Negative Emotions are Key to Well-being.”

For the week of February 14

“Choreograph a Literary Work:” Tod Marshall (new WA State Poet Laureate) recently shared a link to this video of a dance routine choreographed to (and accompanied by) Gertrude Stein’s “If I Told Him:”

Take a different avant-garde, modernist, or otherwise strange and famous poem and write its accompanying choreography (maybe approach this as how it would be choreographed, or imagine that language is choreography, or or or). Or, watch some cool choreography and then write the accompanying poem, story, or essay.

For the week of February 7

For the week of January 31

“Punctuation Imitation”: Artist Nicholas Rougeux has recently taken the punctuation of classic novels and made spiral text projects of these symbols (they remind me of hypnotist’s pendulums–check them out!). Do something like this with one of your favorite pieces of writing: take only the punctuation (erasing all the words). Now, fill in new words of your own, but keep the original punctuation. Think of the punctuation as a sort of blueprint for what you’re writing, as a new way of imitating.

For the week of January 24

“Cut it Up”: Take an essay, story, or poem that you’ve struggled with lately and put hard returns between stanzas or paragraphs (or verse stanzas). Now, print it out and cut it up, paragraph by paragraph or stanza by stanza. Now, put all these chunks in a pile, and then draw them one by one to make a new (random) order. Try reorganizing them this way in a digital file, making new transitions, cutting words, and making the new piece work. Rearrange again as necessary as you re-work the piece.

For the week of January 10

“Experiential” writing: My friend, the writer Julie Trimingham, recently published an essay called “A Bee I Do Become.” Her style here, which is part lyric, part narrative, experiential collage–works well for a person exploring something she’s tried, is trying. . . Write an experiential essay, poem, or story, based on an adventure you’ve had. Try to incorporate and give credence to a range of source-types, as Julie does. (Isn’t her essay fantastic?) Bonus points if the thing you do involves injury or potential injury.

For the week of Dec. 6

“Line Thief”: I’ve been doing this lately. Steal a line you love from a story, essay, or poem, and use that line as your title. Famous examples of this are Billy Collins’ poetry collection, Picnic, Lightning, which takes its name from Nobokov’s Lolita (this is how Humbert Humbert’s mother died); and Ray Bradbury’s story collection I Sing the Body Electric, taken from Walt Whitman. Yours can be a shorter work, though–doesn’t have to be a whole book.

For the week of Nov. 29 (yes, I missed a couple weeks–sorry!)

“Libraries & Childhood:” Spokane author Erin Pringle asks a few writers each summer to write a guest blog for her Summer Library Series, brief posts about people’s childhood relationships with libraries. In July 2015, she shared my experience. I had a great time reading everyone else’s, too (and so can you–follow the links to Erin’s blog). This week, write about your childhood experiences–or adult experiences–with libraries.

For the week of Nov. 8

“Wikipedia Erasure”: An erasure is a poem that takes an existing text & then erases words; the words that are left make a poem. Wave Books has an online tool where you can do this. Either use the Wave tool, or go this route: Poet & pie-maker Kate Lebo has some poems on Ink Node she calls Excerpts of From a Tree, a collection of erasures that use Wikipedia entries to make a lyric grocery of seasonal produce. Read a few of her poems & then choose an entry (or set of entries) on Wikipedia and write an erasure, or a series of erasures that work together.

For the week of November 1:

“Prompts and Instructions”: Write a piece that is a how-to, a list of prompts, or set of instructions. (Spokane’s new Poet Laureate, Laura Read, does this beautifully here.) Bonus points if you can figure out a way to mention the name(s) of your listener(s).

For the week of October 25

“A Poet Came to Town:” Diane Suess has a poem called “A Poet Came to Town” in which (yes, Richard Hugo, the speaker shows someone around her town, but also) the visiting poet–-real in the poem, not imagined-–greatly upends the speaker’s expectations. The poem concludes with a Raymond Carver quote. Do this: write a poem about meeting someone, include a reversal, and end the poem with a quote from a story or movie that person would like.

For the week of October 18:

“Mirror Neurons”: In his recent Writer’s Chronicle essay, “The Limits of Indeterminacy: A Defense of Less Difficult Poems,” Charles Harper Webb goes on a bit of a rampage against what he calls “Difficult Poems,” and, as promised, comes to the defense of verses that are more accessible, saying he reads “to gain vicarious experiences . . . to discover verbal riches. . . to be excited, delighted, moved.” While I would say difficult poems can also have these effects, and I’m not going to completely join his cult, I found one passage particularly resonant: “Back in the 1980s, scientists discovered neurons in the human brain that, when we witness something, fire as if the thing witnessed is happening to us. These “mirror neurons” may explain our powers of empathy, the appeal of narrative, the strength of verbal imagery, the vividness of dreams.” Go through things you’ve read until you find the most “difficult” piece. Then, re-write this piece using a different approach, as your own mirror neuron text, one that, as CHW would say, “feel[s] vivid as life.” Be sure to attribute your ideas to the original author, in an epigraph or some other way that suggests the conversation you’ve created. [Another way to do this, of course, is to re-write your own piece, thereby skipping the attribution part.]

For the week of October 11:

“Let Me Count the Waves:” Many contemporary writers find interesting territory by working in form. One example is Sandra Beasley, who even blogs about sestinas on her site, Chicks Dig Poetry. Check out one of Beasley’s sestinas, “Let Me Count the Waves,” as well as this interview with Beasley at Incredible Sestinas. Here’s another by Beasley: “Sestina Inviting My Sister to Become a Pirate.”

This week, try writing a sestina. If you’re working in prose, use the repetition of words in a different way: write a short piece comprised of seven paragraphs, repeating your six words at the ends of sentences instead of lines (or, figure out another way to repeat the words). You’d end up with six sentences in each of your first six paragraphs, then three in your last paragraph.  You might want to mention the sestina form in your title. Or you might not.

If you want a set of words chosen for you, send me an email at mayajewellzeller [at] gmail [dot] com, with “Sestina Prompt from your website” as the subject, and I’ll email you a personal set of six words.

For the week of October 4:

“Not My Best Side:” Write an ekphrastic, a poem or piece of prose that takes a work of art as its subject. The art can be a sculpture, song, photograph, or painting (this last is the most common). My personal favorite ekphrastic poem is “Not My Best Side” by U.A. Fanthorpe. This piece takes the three “characters” in Uccello’s “Saint George and the Dragon” and uses them as three distinct speakers, one for each section of the poem. Other pieces I like are ” “Girl at Sewing Machine,” by Mary Leader (after the painting by Edward Hopper) and W. H. Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts.”

For the week of September 27:

“Someone else’s story (Grendel or To Kill a Mockingbird)”: Choose a fictional story you love, or one which should never be serialized, and write the sequel/ extend the story (in poem or story form). You can do this either by retelling the same plot through a different character’s perspective or by continuing the story line as it would move forward chronologically.

For the week of September 20:

“A game of fours”: Write a poem that contains four stanzas, each of which have four lines with four words in each line. Make it a direct address to someone or something. [If you’re working in prose forms, write a flash piece that has four paragraphs, each of which have four sentences. Each paragraph should also feature a different sense, so the whole piece references images in four total senses–so, one paragraph might have sight, another sound, another smell, etc.]

For the week of September 13:

“An exaltation of larks”: Go to the site Animals and English and browse around (take a look at the lists of animal group names, for example, such as “an aerie of eagles”–oh boy do I love these). As things delight you, take notes. Then try to use some of these details in a poem or prose piece. [For further reading, check out one of my favorite animal poems, “The Bear” , by the late Galway Kinnell.]