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

After graduation from my MFA program and back when I used a Mac Classic — sigh — I would send emails via AOL to buddies from my writing program. One in particular found me and wanted to stay in touch. I found that a bit odd only because my two years in Florida seemed like some other life. I did not expect to stay in touch with as many of the people as I did.

Since I’ve had good friends for 20-plus years, the friends who were only a year or so old seemed too new to keep. Dumb of me? Yes.

I kept my friends. I kept in touch even when I was ashamed at how little I was writing. They did not say anything. They did not need to say anything since I excelled in being disappointed with myself for my lack of writing.

I thought — how cute! — that I was too busy. I worked. Now I can only wonder (and perhaps dream) what else did I do with all of that time?

Now that I’m a mama (a hip one, I hope), I am really busy. In theory, I have no free time. Yet how do I accomplish so much? It’s one of those things I don’t want to question too much. The smoke and mirrors may remove themselves. I only want to accept that I am doing a lot and somehow continuing.

This month, I’m writing one poem per day. If I miss a day, I’m not being too hard on myself. I’m writing one poem per day despite my new two-hour commute to a client site. I’m writing despite owning a business. I’m writing despite running a magazine, having a family and having a number of people in my life fighting some scary-as-heck sicknesses.

So, there you go. If I can do it, you sure as heck can.

PROMPT: An oldie but a goodie. I first learned from this prompt from Dana Roeser. Just recently, Aimee Nez brought it back to mind. Write a poem using an object for inspiration. Help us see this object in a new or unusual way.

Okay, on to the prompt.

Write a poem using all (or at least a lot) of declarative sentences. An example is this Frank Stanford poem.

I wondered if a poem made of declarative sentences could work. I wrote one recently and think it does. The method of writing is about 100% different from what I normally do, so it was a stretch. The diction was simple. I’ve admired how Louise Gluck packs a punch even when she’s using simple diction. I learned a lot from her work in that regard.

When I asked this question on the blog before — if a poem composed of declarative sentences could work — someone commented that a declarative style would appeal to the hurried reader. We do hear in the media — not to mention from friends and family — how busy all of us are all the time. I’m not sure I agree 100% that we should write this way for those with a hurried lifestyle. I like to take time to read a poem. I don’t want to rush. A little declaration here and a little declaration there won’t hurt anyone though.

You can still read the comments on the post where I asked about this before.

Create a poem in the form of some kind of official document.

Need examples? Here you go:

• A love poem in the form of a traffic ticket
• A poem in the style of a will
• A poem in the form of a junk mail letter

Please post your efforts in the comments section. We’d love to see them!