Mattie's Pillow

Starting with A

This morning I heard an interview on the radio with Robert Manson Myers, who just published a book of poems in which every word starts with the letter A. I loved listening to the interview. Meyers, in his 80s, has the tweedy, leather-elbow-patch voice of some of my old English professors long ago, a kind of wry Mr. Chips humor. The poems are a long-running entertainment he’s been writing for years and is now sharing with us.

So here’s the challenge—-pick a letter and write a poem that uses that letter. You don’t have to keep to Meyers’ strict rules and use every word, but set a pattern—-start every line or every other word with the letter. Be careful—-some letters are more useful than others, as every Scrabble player knows.

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Thanks, again, to Glow, our most intrepid challenge taker:

mosquitoes mob me
merciless, meandering,
mincing, miming meanness
my most mad moments
made merely moot
mindlessless morphed into meaningless

Tags: poetry, Robert Manson Myers, writing, writing prompt

This entry was posted on May 21, 2009 at 7:27 pm and is filed under Poetry Challenge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.