Dear Poetry Prompt,
Oh, how you helped me right after I received my MFA. I was adrift without a workshop, adrift without poets nearby, and in dire need of writing.
Enter you…you showed up in The Practice of Poetry. You arrived in emails from a friend on a distant coast. You arrived from my own pen and from certain esteemed poets leading Jenny Moore workshops at GWU.
How you helped me continue to write despite starting a job, despite a long commute and terrible traffic, despite no one really caring if I ever wrote another poem (except me, of course).
I feel bad for you, dear prompt, since you get made fun of in public. Few poets want to admit to using you. They toss you aside and take all the credit.
It’s not cool to mention your name, so I’m taking chances when I post this letter to you on my blog.
Thank you, Mary Biddinger, for the idea.
And, now, a prompt for dear readers.
1. Use a color as your title.
2. Write against what people associate with that color. If your color is yellow, write a sad poem. If your color is blue, write a cheery poem.
3. Invoke the name of a poet they way you’d invoke your own name in a ghazal.
4. Take our your Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and choose a form. Write the poem in that form.
5. Use a form of water in your poem– ice, drop, drip, drizzle, mist, etc.
Yours,
Deborah
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Hi Deborah,
Just happened upon your site from 32 Poems. Good post — and brave. *grin* Hey, I don’t know if she still is, but a short while ago Amy King was looking for exercises to use in a class she teaches. This might be a good one.
Bravo on 32 Poems.
Sara
I guess I will admit this in public: I love the book Practice of Poetry.
P.S. Parts of this post sounds like you should write a poem titled “Ode to the Poetry Prompt”
Sara — Thank you for stopping by. Nice to see you here.
Karen — Hey, I love the book, too. I think it’s a blast.
as an MFA grad who has lost most of her writing community and is feeling totally adrift, unmotivated, and almost totally alone, i’m excited about exploring and making use of this blog and its prompts.
thanks for this blog, and i’ll be checking out “Practice of Poetry”
I hope you find the prompts useful.