The Poetry Marathon

For this prompt you should listen to The Swallowtail Jig. You can watch the video or not. Personally I prefer to turn the light on my screen down all the way and just listen. But I want you to really focus on the music and do nothing else the first time through. Then you can either turn the music off or play it again. At that point you should start writing your poem.

Write a poem where color plays an important role. How you choose to interpret that role is up to you.

Write a poem about a spider. This poem should not rhyme.

The prompt for hour eight is to write a golden shovel. Not familiar with the form? That is not surprising, it was created in 2010 by the poet Terrance Hayes in his poem The Golden Shovel.

It is pretty simple though. First you take a line or lines from a poem you admire.

Use each word from the line(s) as the end word of each of the lines in your poem. So for example if you used a line with ten words, your poem should be ten lines long.

Keep those words in order.

Give credit to the original poet.

Below is an example. The original line inspiring it is “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone” by W.H. Auden

When you asked me yesterday to stop

at the top of the hill and look out at all

the cliffs that form the walls of the

valley, I shook my head and pointed at the clocks.

Now I want nothing more but to cut

work with you, to take every hour off

to be spent on the trail, in a hammock, in the

pool, anything. For the person to be you, on the other side of the ringing telephone.

“Write a poem from the inside out.”

This prompt was submitted by Jo Eckler and is as she phrased it “Purposefully vague”

Set a timer for one minute and write a stanza. Stop the timer. Clear your mind.

Set a timer for 90 seconds and write another stanza. Clear your mind.

Set a timer for 2 minutes and write another stanza.

Go back and edit all the stanzas.  You can add extra stanza breaks or add section breaks. After you finish editing you can choose to do another timer session or two, or not.

Write a poem about a specific location that meant a lot to you as a child or teenager that you have not returned to in many years. It could be a house, a park, a country, anywhere that had particular significance. The focus of the poem could be on the location itself, or it could be on something(s) that happened there, or someone you spent a lot of time with there.

The prompt for this hour is to write a four stanza poem. The stanzas can be as long or short as you want them to be. In each of the stanzas, you most repeat one of the lines in the first stanza. It can be the same line repeated in each stanza or a different line in each stanza.  This can have a dramatically different effect, depending on the length of the line and the length of the stanza.

Choose one of these images to write about. You don’t have to describe what is going on in the image (although you can if you want to). It is just the jumping off point.

How do we share yearnings when we cannot speak of them? For additional context and inspiration you can listen to Leonard Cohen’s song “Take this Longing”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqVvNpcX5HQ&feature=youtu.be

Prompt contributed by Ramona Elke