Tag Archives: writing prompts

Day 30 Poetry Challenge

30 Saturday Apr 2016

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Holy cow–here we are. The last day of the April Poetry Month Challenge. If you have written a poem every day this month, congratulations! It is not an easy thing to do. Three times I fell behind on posting a prompt due to family and work.It has been restorative and an act of discipline to commit to the challenge. It is rewarding in many ways. Even if you didn’t write 30 poems, you have written something! And that is something to be jubilant about.

For your last prompt, write a poem that starts with an end and ends with a beginning. Think of images or subjects related to endings–the last page of a book, December 31st, graduation. And then something that we associate with beginnings: daffodils, the lights dimming in a theatre, an umpire yelling, “play ball!”

Thank you again for tuning into the Billow for this year’s prompts. If you’re on a roll, keep going! We’ll look forward to seeing your poems in our contests :)

Write on!

Michelle

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Day 29 Poetry Challenge

30 Saturday Apr 2016

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For your 29th prompt, write a poem about dreams. Do you have reoccurring dreams or nightmares? I have dreams in which I can breathe underwater and dreams in which a huge, 80 ft tidal wave plows toward the shore where I am standing on the second story of a glass building. She me your visions. Take the time to detail the images and sensations of them.

Day 28 Poetry Challenge

28 Thursday Apr 2016

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We are really closing in on the end of this April’s challenge. Three more poems!

Our 27th prompt asked us to write a love poem. Now, write a hate poem. Feel free to rant.

Maybe you’ve had it with a colleague, a boss, Donald Trump, the squirrel on the bird feeder (ding ding ding for me!). And you know what else I have had it up to here with? Have you noticed how long it takes for professional people to call you back or fulfill requests? I call a lawyer every week for a month–it takes a month for him to call and he doesn’t leave a message. I request a document from a doctor and she doesn’t send it until I call five times. I send an email and recieve no answers to my questions until I email again and call twice. Also, I move the feeder, change the location of the baffle, and the damn squirrel still ends up on the feeder spilling seeds all over the ground.

You get the idea.

Rant on!

Day 27 Poetry Challenge

28 Thursday Apr 2016

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Yesterday was mine and Rob’s anniversary. In the context of this, for your 27th poem, write  a love poem. Here is one by Marvin Bell I have always loved:

To Dorothy

You are not beautiful, exactly.
You are beautiful, inexactly.
You let a weed grow by the mulberry
and a mulberry grow by the house.
So close, in the personal quiet
of a windy night, it brushes the wall
and sweeps away the day till we sleep.

A child said it, and it seemed true:
“Things that are lost are all equal.”
But it isn’t true. If I lost you,
the air wouldn’t move, nor the tree grow.
Someone would pull the weed, my flower.
The quiet wouldn’t be yours. If I lost you,
I’d have to ask the grass to let me sleep.

Day 26 Poetry Challenge

26 Tuesday Apr 2016

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I love using the randomness of a dictionary to help me start writing and exercising my imagination. So today, a couple of options.

Option 1: Close you eyes, turn to a page in the dictionary and point. Write a poem about the origin of that thing. For instance: The Origin of Orion. The Origin of the Onion. The Origin of the Ski. In a way, you are writing the thing’s mythology.

Option 2: Flip through the dictionary twice and use the words to fill in the following title: Explaining ______to a ______. For example, Explaining Orion to an Onion. Explaining an Onion to a Ski. Try to explain the first word in terms of the second. How would a ski related to an onion? …maybe that layer between the first and second layer of an onion’s skin that’s slippery as a winter mountain for starters! Keep going!

Thanks to Rob Carney for the 2nd!

Write on!

Day 24 Poetry Challenge

25 Monday Apr 2016

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For today’s prompt, write a poem of apology. As in, I am so sorry for not posting a prompt yesterday! The end-of-semester work is piled up, the days are sunny and 71 degrees. And as we’ve covered before, it ain’t called a challenge for nothing ;)

Who in your life do you owe an apology to? Do you owe yourself an apology for something? An apology to your hand for not using an oven mitt? To your grandmother’s now-stained antique table after noy using a coaster?  To the child you will never have? Or, does someone owe an apology to you? Write in the persona of someone saying what it is you need to hear that never have.

Day 22 Poetry Challenge

22 Friday Apr 2016

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Happy Earth Day! In honor of the earth, today write a nature poem. Take some time to sit and watch the local birds or wildlife. Remember a time you were in the woods and felt refreshed. Describe your camping tradition, a trying hike.

Yesterday I saw a hawk snatch a robin from my front yard. Two crows flew from the trees like knights to chase the hawk out of their territory. Our grass was left with a scattering of soft, small feathers. The crows and robins must travel together–they do this–different kinds of birds form a flock they travel with, around here from feeder to feeder, like a family to which we all belong.

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 19 Poetry Challenge

19 Tuesday Apr 2016

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“‘It doesn’t happen all at once…You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
― Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit

I couldn’t help but share this excerpt that was shared with me today in my Yin Yoga class. For our class purposes, this was used as a meditation on acceptance. Here, on the Billow, for our purposes, I want to think about the Veleveteen Rabbit and his friend the horse who said this.

For today’s poem, write a dramatic monologue in the persona of an inanimate object. To stay true to the theme, give voice to one of your old stuffed animals, dolls, trucks–any toy that meant something to you when you were a child, or at some other point in your life. Perhaps the voice will speak about something it has witnessed. Perhaps, like the horse, it will share its wisdom or philosophy of life.

If you’d rather, give voice to something else that doesn’t have one.