Day Ten (incomplete)

"Today’s prompt (optional, as always) is another one from the archives, first suggested to us by long-time Na/GloPoWriMo participant Vince Gotera. It’s the hay(na)ku). Created by the poet Eileen Tabios and named by Vince, the hay(na)ku is a variant on the haiku. A hay(na)ku consists of a three-line stanza, where the first line has one word, the second line has two words, and the third line has three words. You can write just one, or chain several together into a longer poem. For example, you could write a hay(na)ku sonnet, like the one that Vince himself wrote back during NaPoWriMo 2012!"

Day Nine (incomplete)

"Our prompt for the day (optional as always) is inspired by Kaschock’s use of space to organize her poems. Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a “concrete” poem – a poem in which the lines and words are organized to take a shape that reflects in some way the theme of the poem. This might seem like a very modernist idea, but poets have been writing concrete poems since the 1600s! Your poem can take a simple shape, like a box or ball, or maybe you’ll have fun trying something more elaborate, like this poem in the shape of a Christmas tree."

Day Eight (incomplete)

"Today’s poetry resource is a series of twitter accounts that tweet phrases from different poets’ work. The Sylvia Plath Bot, as you might expect, tweets snippets of Plath. @PercyBotShelley tweets Shelley, @ruefle_exe tweets bits of Mary Ruefle’s poems, and @carsonbot and @sikenpoems send into the world small fragments of the work of Anne Carson and Richard Siken.

And if you’re feeling puckish, perhaps you might enjoy (or enjoy the act of not-enjoying) the “poems” created by @VogonB. If you’ve ever read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you may remember the Vogons as the aggressive aliens who, in addition to destroying the Earth, have an unpleasant habit of reading their poetry – known as the third worst in the entire universe – to their victims.

Our prompt for the day (optional as always) asks you to peruse the work of one or more of these twitter bots, and use a line or two, or a phrase or even a word that stands out to you, as the seed for your own poem. Need an example? Well, there’s actually quite a respectable lineage of poems that start with a line by another poet, such as this poem by Robert Duncan, or this one by Lisa Robertson."

Day Seven (incomplete)

"And speaking of news, today our prompt (optional, of course) is another oldie-but-goodie: a poem based on a news article. Frankly, I understand why you might be avoiding the news lately, but this is a good opportunity to find some “weird” and poetical news stories for inspiration. A few potential candidates:

“Earth Has Acquired a Brand New Moon That’s About the Size of a Car,”

 “Ohio Man Seeks World Record with Beer-Only Lent Diet”

“Pablo Escobar’s ‘Cocaine Hippos’ May Be Restoring Colombia’s Ecosystem”

“Researchers Discover Faraway Planet Where the Rain is Made of Iron”

Day Six

"Today’s (optional) prompt is ekphrastic in nature – but rather particular! Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem from the point of view of one person/animal/thing from Hieronymous Bosch’s famous (and famously bizarre) triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. Whether you take the position of a twelve-legged clam, a narwhal with a cocktail olive speared on its horn, a man using an owl as a pool toy, or a backgammon board being carried through a crowd by a fish wearing a tambourine on its head, I hope that you find the experience deliriously amusing. And if the thought of speaking in the voice of a porcupine-as-painted-by-a-man-who-never-saw-one leaves you cold, perhaps you might write from the viewpoint of Bosch himself? Very little is known about him, so there’s plenty of room for invention, embroidery, and imagination."


Outliers

What the unicorns don't know
won't hurt them.
My fellows and I have bitten
the fruit that is flesh
because a man with abundant ideeën gave us
little but jaws and splendid claws.
Birds, don't look at us that way!
Even here, it is someone's job
to be shameful.

We take pride in our work.

Day Five

"Our (optional) prompt for today is one that we have used in past years, but which I love to come back to, because it so often takes me to new and unusual places, and results in fantastic poems. It’s called the “Twenty Little Poetry Projects,” and was originally developed by Jim Simmerman. The challenge is to use/do all of the following in the same poem. Of course,  if you can’t fit all twenty projects into your poem, or a few of them get your poem going, that is just fine too!

1. Begin the poem with a metaphor.
2. Say something specific but utterly preposterous.
3. Use at least one image for each of the five senses, either in succession or scattered randomly throughout the poem.
4. Use one example of synesthesia (mixing the senses).
5. Use the proper name of a person and the proper name of a place.
6. Contradict something you said earlier in the poem.
7. Change direction or digress from the last thing you said.
8. Use a word (slang?) you’ve never seen in a poem.
9. Use an example of false cause-effect logic.
10. Use a piece of talk you’ve actually heard (preferably in dialect and/or which you don’t understand).
11. Create a metaphor using the following construction: “The (adjective) (concrete noun) of (abstract noun) . . .”
12. Use an image in such a way as to reverse its usual associative qualities.
13. Make the persona or character in the poem do something he or she could not do in “real life.”
14. Refer to yourself by nickname and in the third person.
15. Write in the future tense, such that part of the poem seems to be a prediction.
16. Modify a noun with an unlikely adjective.
17. Make a declarative assertion that sounds convincing but that finally makes no sense.
18. Use a phrase from a language other than English.
19. Make a non-human object say or do something human (personification).
20. Close the poem with a vivid image that makes no statement, but that “echoes” an image from earlier in the poem."

Drifting

Our house is a ship sailing upside down. We can taste sunlight through yards of green sky. The woman on TV we heard, in bumfuzzled British: "But people must get in the water!" Our home is a ship run aground. If we stay in, the groceries will all disappear. The paper sails of panic are risen. Blocks of wind sit unmoved; I try to carry them away. My car is good for little else, and will become a pilgrimage for someday's tourists. It will be remembered as a lifeboat that drops people into the sea by mistake. L'acqua sta salendo. At least the green is beautiful, like cut emeralds or polished leaves.

Day Four

"Our prompt for the day (optional as always) takes its cue from our gently odd resources, and asks you to write a poem based on an image from a dream. We don’t always remember our dreams, but images or ideas from them often stick with us for a very long time. I definitely have some nightmares I haven’t been able to forget, but I’ve also witnessed very lovely things in dreams (like snow falling on a flood-lit field bordered by fir trees, as seen through a plate glass window in a very warm and inviting kitchen). Need an example of a poem rooted in dream-based imagery? Try this one by Michael Collier."


Planting Tigers

Seed of ivory claw
Plant in jagged row
Clay soil, clot orange
Iron spade and hoe.
Bury deep as lie
Word to spread plague
Plant field of tigers:
Cultivate rage.

Day Three

"Today’s prompt (optional, as always) asks you to make use of our resource for the day. First, make a list of ten words. You can generate this list however you’d like – pull a book  off the shelf and find ten words you like, name ten things you can see from where you’re sitting, etc. Now, for each word, use Rhymezone to identify two to four similar-sounding or rhyming words. For example, if my word is “salt,” my similar words might be “belt,” “silt,” “sailed,” and “sell-out.”

Once you’ve assembled your complete list, work on writing a poem using your new “word bank.” You don’t have to use every word, of course, but try to play as much with sound as possible, repeating  sounds and echoing back to others using your rhyming and similar words."

Bake

Yesterday the yeast fed
Lively it rose last night
Dough-flow to new height
Today tasked to make a feast
of lumpen bread.

Hands labor hours over
Sour hunks of gluten flour
Drunken supple knots
Stroked into elastic shape.

Egg with water offers shine;
Singular cuts breathe steam.
Loaves emerge glowing golden
From the oven's heated realm.

Crunchsome and crisp
Pale crumb within carved crust
Ancient stay of hearth to table
Still deep with heat, we eat
Proferring praise.

Day Two

"Our (optional) prompt for the day takes a leaf from Schuyler’s book, as it were, and asks you to write a poem about a specific place —  a particular house or store or school or office. Try to incorporate concrete details, like street names, distances (“three and a half blocks from the post office”), the types of trees or flowers, the color of the shirts on the people you remember there. Little details like this can really help the reader imagine not only the place, but its mood – and can take your poem to weird and wild places."


South 34

From three floors up, the entire campus is visible.
A sea of magnolias and a stripe of brick,
to divide the Green into dog yoga and Spikeball.
Three tall windows let the light stream in,
or the 6 AM howls of jocks on the hoof. 

The floor slopes to meet the radiator
which awoogas at winter's drafts. Stink bugs enter
through gaps between screen and warp. 
Painted-shut hopper windows shout "institution";
Our hallways are never dark. 

After a break this long,
our showers run rust-red. 100 years
will make its mark on a building.
It would take 54 minutes to drive there
(if I were allowed to drive there). 

Day One

"Today, however, I’d like to challenge you to write a self-portrait poem in which you make a specific action a metaphor for your life – one that typically isn’t done all that often, or only in specific circumstances. For example, bowling, or shopping for socks, or shoveling snow, or teaching a child to tie its shoes."


Curate

To curate a museum
asks much of the curator.
She values the smallest things,
for every detail is most important among details.
Steadiness is a must
to write with an accurate hand,
or tend eggs with the stuffed robin's exact care.
The storage room, a hub of reliable order
(apiarist's suit, pinned A. mellifera, beeswax candle)
and bewitching chaos
(birdless foot, arsenic dust, moldering paper)
suspended in "creative process."
History is her business;
she looks ahead
only with purpose.