Poetry Super Highway

Poetry Super Highway

Poetry Writing Prompts 2015

April 30, 2015: Brendan Constantine

“The strange thing about strangers is you can’t get away from them.” – blogger ‘Enocia’

What do you see when you think of a stranger? Even though we know a stranger can be anyone, chances are the word conjures some sort of image. Take a moment to visualize your

first impression of a stranger; is he/she tall or short? Slender or heavyset? What do strangers wear? Smell like?
Once you’ve conjured your stranger, complete this title: “___________With A Stranger”
You can choose just about anything to fill the blank: Dance With A Stranger, Paris With A Stranger, Eating Pomegranates With A Stranger
Now create a poem or story that proceeds from this idea.

Submitted by Brendan Constantine.

If you write a poem from this prompt, post it as a comment underneath the prompt in the Poetry Super Highway Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/poetrysuperhighway

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April 29, 2015: Mike Finley

Try to write a poem with using “poemese.” A poemese word uses words you would EXPECT to hortee in a poem, especially one written 100 or more years ago, and not much anywhere else:

grey
phantasm
heartbeat
destiny
eternal
celestial
spledor
ablution
steadfast
glistening
silence

“Poemese” is romantic, dreamy language. While pretty, it usually depicts idealistic, nor real situations. When you use regular language, like cheapskate and carbon paper, it is harder to delude yourself you are doing something wonderful.

Use ordinary language, and you sound more trustworthy.

Submitted by Mike Finley.

If you write a poem from this prompt, post it as a comment underneath the prompt in the Poetry Super Highway Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/poetrysuperhighway

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April 25, 2015: Elizabeth Iannaci

The Do it Now exercise
Think of a task you know how to do but don’t want to (and perhaps have been putting  off):  your taxes, ironing,  asking for a raise, breaking up with a lover
Now, write a “how to” in 8-10 easy steps using the instruction as a title – example:
How to Change the Cat Box
 
Try to use as few adjectives as possible – the more nouns the better.
End with an image.

Submitted by Elizabeth Iannaci.

If you write a poem from this prompt, post it as a comment underneath the prompt in the Poetry Super Highway Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/poetrysuperhighway

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April 23, 2015: Elizabeth Marchitti

“My sister doesn’t write poems . . .” The first line of Syzmborska’s poem: In Praise of My Sister

This poem was an inspiration to me; I wrote a poem: My Sister Doesn’t Write Poems. (It is amazing how very different sisters can be, and how many things they have in common, nevertheless.)

So–write a poem about your family, those who do not write poems–but may have other poetic talents.

Although some editors do not like poems about poetry, all poets are compelled to write them. Speaking to Carole Stone, professor Emeritus at Montclair State, on Saturday, she reminded me of this, as I read my poem inspired by Syzmborska. She told me she loved this Nobel prizewinner, also.

Submitted by Elizabeth Marchitti.

If you write a poem from this prompt, post it as a comment underneath the prompt in the Poetry Super Highway Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/poetrysuperhighway

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April 22, 2015: Laurel Ann Bogen

Take your initials (in my case L A B) and spend 5 minutes or so brainstorming about all the things those initials could stand for: such as Lonely Albino Basketball, Last Although Best, Lusty Angel Baby, Light Author Bumble…After about 5 minutes pick out the one that seems most interesting and use it as a jumping off spot for a poem.

Submitted by Laurel Ann Bogen.

If you write a poem from this prompt, post it as a comment underneath the prompt in the Poetry Super Highway Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/poetrysuperhighway

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April 21, 2015: Leah Schweitzer

Begin to think of all the names you have been known by [called] in your life. List them as they come to you, in no particular order. Find them by visualizing yourself at different stages in your life’s journey–they will come back to you–nick names, insulting names, names of affection, love names…whatever you recall. You are just making a list right now, not writing about them yet…each name should have a memory with it, a significance that may mean something only to you. Now scan the list [you can always add to it later] for the one name you were called that brings with it a potent emotional tug. Select the one that’s most tugging, most painful, most passionate or frightening.
Meditate on this name. Now get writing about what you remember about it, the person who called you by this name, whatever else that comes. You can title the poem the name you selected. This is a prompt you can always return to, by selecting another names from the list to write about. Enjoy!

Submitted by Leah Schweitzer.

If you write a poem from this prompt, post it as a comment underneath the prompt in the Poetry Super Highway Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/poetrysuperhighway

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April 20, 2015: Kenneth Merchant

Sometimes poets get a gut feeling that their poem doesn’t seem right. Whether this has happened to yet or not doesn’t matter, but here is an exercise that could help get those creative juices flowing:

Write whatever stylized poem you would like. Next, take a couple words out of each line and replace them with new ones. These words must have completely different meanings (no synonyms).

For example:
“Blue bonnets bounce upon battered barnacles.”

Now take lets take out bonnets and battered, and replace them with clouds and melodious.

“Blue clouds bounce upon melodious barnacles.”

Soon you will be transforming your poem into something else extraordinary.

Submitted by Kenneth Merchant.

If you write a poem from this prompt, post it as a comment underneath the prompt in the Poetry Super Highway Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/poetrysuperhighway

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April 19, 2015: R. Bremner

I’m stealing a prompt that was used at poetsonline.org. It’s called “The Golden Shovel”. You take a line or lines from some well-known poem, the write a poem using each word of the prompt (consecutively) as the last word in each line of your poem. For example, if you choose Rabindranath Tagore’s “Love is an endless mystery, for there is nothing else to explain it” you might write

I question this thing called love,
what exactly it is.
It’s been sold as an an-
esthetic, a panacea to ease the endless
search and desire for mystery.
But what is love truly good for?
How can you quantify it?
No measurable value it has,
and nothing from nothing leaves nothing.
But perhaps I forget something else,
some mythical truth to hold on to,
facts that no one can explain
and therein lies the secret of it.

It’s actually a lot easier (and a lot more fun) then you might think!

Submitted by R. Bremner.

If you write a poem from this prompt, post it as a comment underneath the prompt in the Poetry Super Highway Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/poetrysuperhighway

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April 18, 2015: Bob Holman

Write a Rothko.
1. A Rothko (poem) can only be written while standing in front of a Rothko (painting).
2. A Rothko is three lines, three words per line.
3. Three of these nine words must be colors, and their position in the poem must be a tic-tac-toe.
4. Like all rules of poetry, break at your own risk.

Submitted by Bob Holman.

If you write a poem from this prompt, post it as a comment underneath the prompt in the Poetry Super Highway Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/poetrysuperhighway

#napowrimo

April 17, 2015: Michael Virga

Always heard that haiku is 3 lines in a syllabic distribution of 5/7/5?
A sampling of contemporary haiku reveals a freer range, including one and two liners
rendering a simple surface with a mighty imagistic implication in under 17 syllables.
After reading an array of these one-breath wonders, model your own after one that gives you that Aha! haiku moment –
a resonance that is suddenly familiar
a location no longer strange to you
a space no longer empty – fulfilled
found but was never really lost
like déjà vu
that haiku was the vessel of discovery

Submitted by Michael Virga.

If you write a poem from this prompt, post it as a comment underneath the prompt in the Poetry Super Highway Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/poetrysuperhighway

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April 16, 2015: LB Sedlacek

Create a poem in 20 minutes:

1) get out your smart phone, timer, stopwatch, whatever you use for keeping time

2) get out your notepad and pen or computer or whatever you use for writing

2) set the timer and just start writing a poem, no editing, no looking up words, no looking up anything about your creation on the internet, no worries about form or subject, line breaks, etc. — simply write for exactly 20 minutes

The poem can be of any length. Once your 20 minutes are up – that’s when you can edit, polish, put it into a form if you want to.

Submitted by LB Sedlacek.

If you write a poem from this prompt, post it as a comment underneath the prompt in the Poetry Super Highway Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/poetrysuperhighway

#napowrimo

April 14: Trish Hopkinson

Find a poem you love by a poet that is a different gender than the gender from which you identify. Then write your own version of the poem from your perspective. Here’s an example of my poem in response to Pablo Neruda’s “Walking Around”:

Waiting Around
after Walking Around by Pablo Neruda

It so happens, I am tired of being a woman.
And it happens while I wait for my children to grow
into the burning licks of adulthood. The streaks
of summer sun have gone,

drained between gaps into gutters,
and the ink-smell of report cards and recipe boxes
cringes me into corners. Still I would be satisfied
if I could draw from language
the banquet of poets.

If I could salvage the space in time
for thought and collect it
like a souvenir. I can no longer
be timid and quiet, breathless

and withdrawn.
I can’t salve the silence.
I can’t be this vineyard
to be bottled, corked,
cellared, and shelved.

That’s why the year-end gapes with pointed teeth,
growls at my crow’s feet, and gravels into my throat.
It claws its way through the edges of an age
I never planned to reach

and diffuses my life into dullness–
workout rooms and nail salons,
bleach-white sheets on clotheslines,
and treacherous photographs of younger me
at barbecues and birthday parties.

I wait. I hold still in my form-fitting camouflage.
I put on my strong suit and war paint lipstick
and I gamble on what’s expected.
And what to become. And how
to behave: mother, wife, brave.

–originally published by Wicked Banshee Press. Issue #2 Fall 2014.

Submitted by Trish Hopkinson.

If you write a poem from this prompt, post it as a comment underneath the prompt in the Poetry Super Highway Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/poetrysuperhighway

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April 13, 2015: Suzanne Lummis

Part 1: Write a creative, imaginative curse — not against a person but an undesirable abstraction, such as Failure, Humiliation, or Bad Hair Days.
Part 2: Compose a spell to banish it.
Part 3: Bless something.


Submitted by Suzanne Lummis.

If you write a poem from this prompt, post it as a comment underneath the prompt in the Poetry Super Highway Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/poetrysuperhighway

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April 10, 2015: Linda Leedy Schneider

Through My Window

Write an “out or through my window” piece. Describe what is really there or imagine another window, like a school bus, your bedroom window as a child, or a window view on a trip.  Expect to come to transitions in your writing. Follow the energy and see where it takes you and your writing. Cycles was written in just this way:

Cycles
Out my window, near
the wrinkled adobe wall,
bougainvillea bows
to the sun.
Fuchsia leaves
masquerade as flowers.
Call the bees.
Ask for sex,
which is a flower’s
only destiny.
We think the beauty
is for us, a symbol
of something,
but it’s really
all stamens, pistils,
and ovaries,
like a slim-hipped
girl brushing
her beauty.

by Linda Leedy Schneider First published in Some Days: Poetry of a Psychotherapist, Plain View Press


Submitted by Linda Leedy Schneider.

If you write a poem from this prompt, post it as a comment underneath the prompt in the Poetry Super Highway Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/poetrysuperhighway

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April 9, 2015: Hal Sirowitz

On the last page of The New Yorker magazine is the weekly poetry caption contest. It requires a minimalist line or two. Roger Ebert, the former movie critic, entered it over a thousand times and never won. I start my writing by doing the contest. I’ve entered it over fifty times, and have never won either. It’s like a lotto. It becomes easier to do. You start using your instincts. The hard part is coming up with two quotes, and having to decide which one to enter. 
There’s a form you have to fill in once. Then you just have to come up with quotes. It helps having a cartoon you can bounce off of. It takes you outside of yourself.


Submitted by Hal Sirowitz.

If you write a poem from this prompt, post it as a comment underneath the prompt in the Poetry Super Highway Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/poetrysuperhighway

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April 8, 2015: Richard Lynch

Set your alarm on your cell phone to 2.37pm. when it goes off, take a snapshot mentally and perhaps with the phone of the situation, whatever it is. 4 hours and 23 minutes later (ok, at a convenient time to write, and not immediately, but in the same day), reflect on that moment.


Submitted by Richard Lynch.

If you write a poem from this prompt, post it as a comment underneath the prompt in the Poetry Super Highway Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/poetrysuperhighway

#napowrimo

April 6, 2015: A Poetry Writing Prompt from Lowell Jaeger

Prompt: “Things My Children Will Never Know” — Compose a catalog of things you experienced in your childhood which have already vanished. Write them down so that your children will have a chance to know them through you. (Hint: Sometimes you can add to this list a private confession or two — things your children would never have known about you had you not confessed to them in this poem.) Example below.

Things My Children Will Never Know

Me before I shaved.
Five cent root beer
in glass bottles that sweat
in July while I still traveled barefoot
before sidewalks.
Bottlecap collections.
The gray-haired immigrant grocer,
how he taught us to count change
—tirty-one, tirty-two, tirty-tree—
how he kept watch as we deliberated
over which flavor jaw breaker
and how much licorice, red or black.
Each of us bickering to divide the licorice,
a root beer dripping in our palms,
all for six nickels, three pennies
—Tirty-tree. Dat’s perfect. Tanks.—
His potatoes in wooden bins.
Black bananas. Onion sprouts.
Cereals and laundry soaps stacked.
The whole store no bigger
than a single-car garage.

Single car garages
with no windows, no lights, dirt floors.
Cigar boxes of rusty nails.
Cars big as whales.
Split windshields, rain visors.
Hood ornaments. Horns
that could blast me from my bicycle seat
as I pedaled the highway through town.

The highway through town
and the railroad that crossed it.
Wooden wig-wags striped black and white.
Lines of patient cars.
Bells that called us down from trees
to wave at dreaming faces
strung along the windows of passenger coaches.

The conductor in his cap,
brakeman swinging a blue lantern,
caboose with men in coveralls, mustaches, smiles.
How they rocked beyond us
day by every day we reached out to them,
while mothers twisted their aprons,
worried from inside screened porches,
scolding us for standing too near.

The milk boxes on those porches.
Fresh bottles of milk. Cream-top.
Milkmen in white paper hats.
Their miniature vans.

Birds everywhere
eating beetles that killed the elms.
The elms that once lined the streets green
and shaded in summer. Yellow leaves
knee deep one last fall before
the city crews stripped the branches,
fed them to a chipper and hauled them away.

The forests of logs the trains carried off.
The acres of corn and beans subdivided
to build new homes. The shopping mall
that edged out the homes. The freeway
that bulldozed the mall.


Submitted by Lowell Jaeger

If you write a poem from this prompt, post it as a comment underneath the prompt in the Poetry Super Highway Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/poetrysuperhighway

April 5, 2015: A poetry writing prompt from Raundi Moore-Kondo

Lions and Spiders and Fears! Oh My!

1. Make a list of your childhood fears.  If you are feeling really brave, try to come up with one fear for every year of life until you turned age 18. If you can’t recall what you were afraid of when you were very young, try to imagine what might have frightened a typical infant, toddler, or young child in your family back when you were a kid.  What images plagued your nightmares, and what scary thoughts ran rampant through your mind on sleepless nights?

2. Turn this list into an image driven dream where you come face-to-face with each of these frightening images. Describe them with as much poetic detail as you can. They may each be only a brief presence in the dream returned to try to scare you again, or perhaps they will try to explain to you why you shouldn’t have ever feared them. Perhaps these “fears” were each trying to  teach you something. One fear may take over the whole dream and become an extended metaphor or spokesperson for the rest of the fears. Follow the poem wherever it takes you. Even if it’s down a dark tunnel filled with lions and spiders. Have fun with it!
3. Try to end your piece with the most comforting image you can imagine. Perhaps something that comforts you now.

4. For even more frightening fun and perhaps a deeper analysis of your work and your psyche: circle words and images that stand out to you as powerful or meaningful (10 to 15 is plenty, but feel free to look up as many as you like. If you write a lot of poetry, some of these images may already be familiar themes in your work)
5. Look each of these images up on a dream interpretation/analysis website and write a second poem which “psychoanalyzes”  the writer based on the images in the dream.
Good news is that you likely aren’t crazy, you are probably just a poet.


Submitted by Raundi Moore-Kondo

If you write a poem from this prompt, post it as a comment underneath the prompt in the Poetry Super Highway Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/poetrysuperhighway

April 1, 2015: A Poetry Writing Prompt from Robert Wynne

Unlike most inanimate objects, water is nearly always in motion.  And we are each comprised of so much water, we are more inextricably connected to it than nearly any other substance.  Write a poem in the voice of water.  Could be ocean water, river water, rain, water in the body, water in a glass.  How does it feel?  What are its hopes, its fears and desires?  What does it want to say?


Submitted by Robert Wynne

If you write a poem from this prompt, post it as a comment underneath the prompt in the Poetry Super Highway Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/poetrysuperhighway

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