Prompt for Hour Eight

The dreaded form prompt! This year I scheduled it a lot earlier in the marathon. This year the prompt has to do with my favorite form, the pantoum.

The pantoum is a form of poetry similar to a villanelle in that there are repeating lines throughout the poem. It is composed of a series of quatrains; the second and fourth lines of each stanza are repeated as the first and third lines of the next.

Now in case that all was a little much for you, here is a link to a pantoum generator Jacob made: http://jacobjans.com/pantoum.html

The key to writing a pantoum is to write about something that either obsesses you, or something that automatically requires some sort of repetition (ie cooking).

If you want to the repeated lines can include some new words, but they should still be recognizable.

Here are two good example pantoums:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/56284

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/parents-pantoum

2 thoughts on “Prompt for Hour Eight

  1. Woooo! I’ve been hoping to write a pantoum, but lacked the discipline to do it without a prompt. I wrote one on prostitutes and wasps for my MFA program a few years ago, fell in love with the form, and never wrote another one. here’s my chance!

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