Posts Tagged ‘writing prompt’

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Poetry Challenge 58

November 21, 2010

For the last week, we have been having a lovely snowfall–fine floury snow sifting down over everything, including half-built projects left from early fall.  Walking out to feed Mattie, I bumped my toe into something I couldn’t see under the snow and realized that it was a fence pole that I had thought was stacked safely to the side of the path.  I had changed the path in the snow, it turned out.  With new snowfall every night, the tracks I make the day before become blurred white.  With so much snow, the light reflects from everywhere at once, shifting my bearings and sense of perspective as I walk through it to give Mattie and Sam their hay.

So write about hidden things that emerge or about how what covers them over marks a shift of perspective.  Write about the true things–like a fence pole–that disturb the fluffy surface of everyday.

Post your poem as a comment and I’ll add it to this post!

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Poetry Challenge 57

October 26, 2010

Footprints

This morning,when I went to feed the horses, there was light dusting of snow on the corral–like a thin layer of powdered sugar, just enough that the sand underneath showed through in precise ovals where the horses stepped.   Their egg-shaped prints made dotted trails through the corral, sharp and well-formed.

Sunday, while I was doing some chores outside the house, I noticed vole tracks in some unmelted snow where the new compost pile sits.  The voles clearly couldn’t believe their good fortune and the small V-shaped tracks of their feet dragging across the surface of the first winter’s snow showed their enthusiasm for coffee grounds, cabbage leaves, onion skins.

Write something about tracks or traces you’ve found and how they reveal the small and large lives around us.

Post what you write to the comments and I’ll add it to this post.

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Poetry Challenge 56

October 13, 2010

We are in the first throes of winter here in the Interior: ice on the roads, snow and mist in the air in the early morning, still a hint of warmth–above freezing–in the afternoon.  We are shifting consciousness to the inner life of winter, readying ourselves to do what’s necessary to get through the season.  And there are moments of sudden beauty–not the gaudy greens and reds and golds of summer, but the subtle pastel of morning light on snow, of the sun slanting on hills, the breath of horses in the evening air.

So write about the small beauties of approaching winter, the ones you’ve forgotten about since April or May but that lead you to embrace the approaching season–inner and outer.

Post a poem in the comments and I’ll add it to this post.

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Poetry Challenge 53

August 17, 2010

Summer is winding down here, and the weather is changeable.  Saturday, we had a Chinook wind blow in; it was 75 degrees at 11pm on the last day of the Fair–a night that brings the first stars of the season and, sometimes, first frost.  Today, we loaded up the horses in sun, blue sky, and 80 degrees.  By the time we got to our lesson, we had driven under dark clouds and rode, shivering, in pouring rain.  The weather has us all off kilter.

Write about unexpected weather and someone or something reacting to it.  Be sure to use the sense of touch (as in warm sun/chilling rain) and some quality of motion.

Post the poem as a comment here and I will add it to this post.

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Poetry Challenge 52

July 30, 2010

Last night several local poets and I gave a panel for the Alaska Book Festival in which we each read poems of other Alaskan writers whose work we admired.  It was fun and daunting.  I had heard the poets I chose read their works many times–I know their voices, their cadences, the stories behind the poems, and the bits not spoken.  How to read them and do them justice without preempting the other poets’ voices?

Along those lines, find a line or a phrase or a word from a poem written by someone whose work you admire and build your own around it.  If it helps, break the phrase apart and use the words in a different sense than in the original.  Let the poem take on your voice, with echoes of the other poet’s voice.  If it helps, find an unsuspecting word like lupine or hail or sandhill crane or clutch cable  find its way into the poem.

Send it as a comment to this post and I’ll post it here.

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Poetry Challenge 51

July 9, 2010

This is the time of insects here in the Interior.   Here at Mattie’s Pillow, we hear the buzz of yellowjackets everywhere.  There’s a nest in the hay barn, one in the eaves above our grill (logical place, if you’re a yellowjacket), and one in the greenhouse.  They are in a perpetual state of agitation; any vibration or movement near the nest sets them off.

So, it’s time for a poem about an insect.  Have one crawl through the poem, or have it land on a line somewhere.  Be amazed at it, or be indifferent.  Let sound be part of the poem, the small peripheral sounds that you don’t notice at first, until they stop.

Here’s one.  Send me one of yours and I’ll post it here!

.

The Stink Bug on Joe’s Shirt

We talk in sun

then the sudden chill

of cumulus, stacked

high with moisture, then heat

at our backs, on our faces,

the scrubbed blue

sky.  You lean against

a lounge chair.  Your hair,

.

wild as the clouds,

curls with the charge

and buzz that fills

your blood.  We talk.

We watch your face.

The cloud passes, all

that roiling not yet

enough to loose sparks,

and the blue shadows,

your eyes.  A bug

.

iridescent,

a small bronze shield, totters

up your shirt, legs

like shaved whiskers,

bent to cling above

the “l” in “devil,”

climbing up the curled

tail toward your shoulder,

all it needs for a cliff.

.

Someone reaches

to flick it where it gleams.

Your prize:

the grown-back hair

the numbness gone

the sun in its place

and you striding

beneath it—one

bug suddenly flicked

away.  A stink.

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Poetry Challenge 50

June 22, 2010

In honor of the solstice and the delirious quantity of light we’re getting these days, write from a giddy place.  Think of a time or place or color of the clouds that made you feel silly and happy all at once.  For me, last night, it was a Midnight Sun Baseball Game that went 15 innings under the silvery light of Solstice night.  We sat in the stands and hollered and laughed as the sun slipped behind a row of hills, still sending a wash of yellow light into the arc of the sky.  Then as the last hit brought all the runners in, the light behind the hills brightened, the cirrus clouds turned fireweed pink and the sun slid back up again.  A perfect–if very long–solstice night.

Write about a moment of unexpected glee.  Use all five senses, of course.

Post it as a comment and I’ll post it here.

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Poetry Challenge 49

June 8, 2010

Today a distant friend e-mailed me that she was reading a poem, “Bird News,”  from my new book, Beneath a Portrait of a Horse, and that it had her tongue-tied.  It’s always amazing to discover that someone sees what you intended in a poem–or sees more than you ever thought was there.  This was a poem I started years ago, tinkered with, abandoned, tinkered again, and finally included in the book, hoping that in made sense in somethingof the way I had hoped it would when I wrote the first draft.  Putting a book together allowed me to see old poems in new ways.  Sometimes just placing one poem next to another brought out some association I hadn’t noticed in the older poem and made it seem fresh once again.

So, go back and find an old poem you’ve stashed away somewhere.  Read it as if you were a distant reader, as if you had no idea where the poem originated or where it’s going.  Let yourself be surprised by the phrases that actually do turn out well–and do some housekeeping on the ones that fall flat.   Pare away.  Strengthen nouns and verbs.   Make short lines long, long lines short.  Or discover that the poem is actually a complete whole  that arose from the deepest awake places in your unconscious.

Post it here in the comments section–your oldies and actually goodies.  When I have a few posted here, I’ll post the poem my friend was reading, too!

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Poetry Challenge 48

May 20, 2010

We’re into leaf-out here in the interior–the leaves, still small and yellow-green, shine as they flicker in the breeze.  The wind has been stronger than usual as the ever-increasing daylight creates unstable warm air masses that move across the flats or up the river system.  The other day, I came home to find Sam in the middle of the corral staring hard at the hill behind the house, where a large spruce had fallen–luckily, along the side of the hill and not onto the house or the corral.   Yesterday, he spooked at the hose being pulled along the side of the corral.  We’re all a bit jumpy.

So write about a phobia that turned out to be nothing to worry about–or a close call (like the tree).  Let the wind blow through the poem–or have a cat run through it.

Add it as a comment and I’ll post it here.

———————————————————————-

Here’s a poem from Tim Murphrey:

Bernoullian Extacy

Scraping the ice from the pane
solidifies to my vision
the relationship between two lovers:
Me
and the ground.
But the doubt in our courting lies
on me, an Earthbound yearning,
and I wonder if she wants
like I do, or worse.
Our union can only end in disaster.
A buzzing, as of switches being thrown,
that light, airy feeling
from my new mistress
helps to lull me into the big lie
that this may never end.
Fast, too fast! and I’m always watching,
straining to see the ground, now grown cold,
expression seldom changing,
quick, constant, moving glimpses of us sailing over,
swollen belly mocking; what was once the Earth’s
now belongs to the vespers.
She’ll have to tolerate our presence soon, as we give in
to the sinking feeling –
Our union can only end
in disaster.

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Poetry Challenge 47

May 7, 2010

Birdbrain Love

All this week, a pair of robins, who I’m calling Mr. and Mrs. Hitchcock, have been flying against the window of our computer room, over and over.  The male robin perches on the railing of the stair landing to our back door, eyes the window, then flutters up to a certain spot on the glass, thumps it, then flutters back to the railing.  From there, he eyes the glass again, as if certain he can figure this out and succeed at whatever birdbrained scheme he’s up to.  Then he does it again.  Mrs. Hitchcock watches from the willow nearby, patient with his foolishness.  We think this behavior may have something to do with the nest they’re building out of last year’s fireweed and hay up on the butt of a roof beam above the window; perhaps he’s defending the nest from his own reflection in the window as he flies up to the beam.  Or not.

But it’s spring–after many false starts.  The hills are greening up as the birch and willow buds open; there’s a mist of green moving across the tree tops.

So, write about the foolishness spring brings, or love, or birds.  Post it as a comment and I’ll add the poems to this post.

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