Tag Archives: writer

Day 20 Poetry Challenge

20 Wednesday Apr 2016

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It’s 4/20. And if pot was legal nationwide, this prompt would be very different…

Today, write an abecederian poem. It’s when the first letter of each line follows the order of the alphabet. So, the first line starts with A, the second with B, the third with C, etc. In the end you should have a 26-line poem.

Here’s one by Michelle Bonczek Evory (yours truly):

Lake Affected

April 11th and through my Michigan window: no surprise, really:

Blizzard. The small sidewalk trees sag under fluff and sky.

Cindy says she can’t take it, this weather. She misses

Dallas, the blue bells, has had enough of the lake’s snow globe

Extending its stay beyond this season’s home opener, yellow

Flowers and late night light for late nights

Grilling. Her hand opens back toward Texas like a beauty queen’s,

Her eyes bat their long lashes: Take me back old friend, holy hell,

I am sorry. But everyone has different needs

Jig-sawing their bellies. Pieces of life floating down like, well, you

know. Kevin, I’m leaving messages like lightning on your machine.

Lying in bed this morning I couldn’t sleep. Snow

Makes electric champagne of my nerves, pops me open, twists me until sweet

Nostalgia curls me up with a book, squeezes poetry from my skull, seduces me to

Ogle over young faces in old pictures, realphabetize my library, boil

Potatoes until my kitchen windows steam. I burned yesterday’s leftover

Quart of coffee reheating on the stove. But I didn’t care, all

Restless as I was and hungry for everything no longer

Snuggling in my shoes or my bed, which is to say, bodies from the past.

Time, oh time and time again time

Undoes more than the elastic seams on lingerie, but like that—

Very much like that, the things that make us sexy

Wear away. And when it snows like this I want to melt until

X-rays show me one white dot, unique, branching out, stuck,

Yearning for others like me that will have a ball with me making something

Zesty as an orange, ready to be thrown at the world.

 

 

 

Day 18 Poetry Challenge

18 Monday Apr 2016

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“Monday, monday,” sang the Mamas and the Papas, “Can’t trust that day.” “Wish it were Sunday, my I-don’t-have-to-run day,” sang the Bangles. And we all know how easy it is to get those Monday blues. Why are we running? Is the answer seriously just that four-letter “w” word, WORK? Jobs and school that demand we be awake against our body’s will? Staring into a blind sun, coffee dribbling down our chins as we sit in traffic? Lists of things we need “to do.”

For today’s prompt, write a work poem. What’s your typical Monday look like at the office? What’s your dream job? Maybe write a list poem about the contents of your briefcase or toolbox. Are you a stay-at-home parent? What’s that look and smell like? Use the senses and specific diction to bring your job and work to life.

One of my fave poems about work? I give you Dorianne Laux’s “The Shipfitter’s Wife”:

The Shipfitter’s Wife

I loved him most
when he came home from work,
his fingers still curled from fitting pipe,
his denim shirt ringed with sweat
and smelling of salt, the drying weeds
of the ocean. I’d go to where he sat
on the edge of the bed, his forehead
anointed with grease, his cracked hands
jammed between his thighs, and unlace
the steel-toed boots, stroke his ankles
and calves, the pads and bones of his feet.
Then I’d open his clothes and take
the whole day inside me — the ship’s
gray sides, the miles of copper pipe,
the voice of the foreman clanging
off the hull’s silver ribs. Spark of lead
kissing metal. The clamp, the winch,
the white fire of the torch, the whistle,
and the long drive home.

 

 

 

Day 17 Poetry Challenge

17 Sunday Apr 2016

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After two days of yard and garden work, I am ready to sit…and write a poem. For today’s poem, we will write an epistolary poem, or a letter poem. An epistolary poem can come in any form and be about any matter. I am pulled to write a letter to a younger version of myself, but perhaps you will be moved to write one to a future version of yourself. What would you say to yor 12-year-old self? Your 21-year-old self? Your 45-year old self? You 101-year-old self? What would the you today, right here &now, say to yourself on the day you graduated from college? Married? Decided not to have children? Anchor the you that you address in an event or an age in general.

Let the writing begin!

Day 16 Poetry Challenge

17 Sunday Apr 2016

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It’s not called a chalenge for nothing. Yesterday’s beautiful spring weather captured me and I spent the entire day outside in the yard and garden. As a result, our sixteenth prompt slipped down on my priority list which included cutting back an enormous holly bush on our property, clearing leaves from the base of plants, and weeding. Now that these chores are done, let’s write!

For some reason, maybe the spring weather and all the imaginings of what the new garden will look like, I’ve been wanting to invent a new poetry form. So, let’s do it. For this prompt, create a new poetry form. You can focus on rhyme as does the sonnet, repetition of words or lines as do the pantoum and sestina, or subject matter as does the elegy.

Invent the form and then write the poem.

Day 15 Poetry Challenge

15 Friday Apr 2016

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We have arrived at the halfway point!

Today, let’s make a list of as many cliches as you can think of and at their halfway point, mix and match them.For example:

A penny for your thoughts.

Good day to be alive.

Hip to the scene.

Grass is always greener on the other side.

 

A penny to be alive.

Hip to the other side.

The grass is always greener for your thoughts.

Good day to the scene.

 

Once you have a new list, revise them into a poem paying attention to either sound or image, or both.

 

Write on!

Day 14 Poetry Challenge

14 Thursday Apr 2016

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This is one of our favorite prompts and one Rob and I utilize often. Choose 4-5 books about varying things–a collection or two of poetry, an autobiography, a book about stones, a novel. Pick up a book, randomnly open to a page, glacne down. The phrase your eyes catch: write it down. Pick up another book and repeat the process 10 times. Then, see what you have and revise it into a poem. You will be amazed at the way the universe’s synchronicity manifests itself in such an approach.

Interview With Poet Brittany Cagle

15 Friday Jan 2016

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We are really excited to bring you an interview with Brittany Cagle, the winner of the 2014 Pangaea Prize with a series of poems titled My Family Sleeps in New Beds.  This interview  addresses how to navigate personal tragedy within the tragedies of others and how to translate the experience of people close to you while not exploiting them. We also discuss some formal elements of Cagle’s poetry and her amazing art.

“In the case of [writing on] tragedy, we completely expose the people we know and often have to negotiate between our desire to be truthful and our fears of exploiting someone. We have the ability—even more so as writers—to hurt each other in perseverant and permanent ways, especially once our words are printed and public…. But often I think— don’t I somewhat own the things that happened to me in my own life? Aren’t these, too, stories for me to tell?  This is where lines can become blurred and downright confusing. This became a source of personal frustration—how I could approach writing on others.” Read the entire interview here.