Write a poem about your inner spirit.  Maybe you will make it concise in three stanzas, featuring three separate images. Or choose a form that more readily suits your spirit.  Write for 10 minutes. Ready, set, go!
​

​For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet
Joy Harjo
 
Put down that bag of potato chips, that white bread, that
bottle of pop.
Turn off that cellphone, computer, and remote control.

Open the door, then close it behind you.

Take a breath offered by friendly winds. They travel the earth
gathering essences of plants to clean.

Give it back with gratitude.

If you sing it will give your spirit lift to fly to the stars’ ears and
back.

Acknowledge this earth who has cared for you since you were
a dream planting itself precisely within your parents’ desire.

Let your moccasin feet take you to the encampment of the
guardians who have known you before time, who will be
there after time. They sit before the fire that has been there
without time.

Let the earth stabilize your postcolonial insecure jitters.

Be respectful of the small insects, birds and animal people
who accompany you.
Ask their forgiveness for the harm we humans have brought
down upon them.

Don’t worry.
The heart knows the way though there may be high-rises,
interstates, checkpoints, armed soldiers, massacres, wars, and
those who will despise you because they despise themselves.

The journey might take you a few hours, a day, a year, a few
years, a hundred, a thousand or even more.

Watch your mind. Without training it might run away and
leave your heart for the immense human feast set by the
thieves of time.

Do not hold regrets.

When you find your way to the circle, to the fire kept burning
by the keepers of your soul, you will be welcomed.

You must clean yourself with cedar, sage, or other healing plant.

Cut the ties you have to failure and shame.

Let go the pain you are holding in your mind, your shoulders,
your heart, all the way to your feet. Let go the pain of your
ancestors to make way for those who are heading in our
direction.

Ask for forgiveness.

Call upon the help of those who love you. These helpers take
many forms: animal, element, bird, angel, saint, stone, or
ancestor.

Call your spirit back. It may be caught in corners and
creases of shame, judgment, and human abuse.

You must call in a way that your spirit will want to return.
Speak to it as you would to a beloved child.

Welcome your spirit back from its wandering. It may return
in pieces, in tatters. Gather them together. They will be
happy to be found after being lost for so long.

Your spirit will need to sleep awhile after it is bathed and
given clean clothes.

Now you can have a party. Invite everyone you know who
loves and supports you. Keep room for those who have no
place else to go.

Make a giveaway, and remember, keep the speeches short.

Then, you must do this: help the next person find their way
through the dark.
​
Source: https://poets.org/poem/calling-spirit-back-wandering-earth-its-human-feet

For Prompt #2, PoetryBones writers
​recalled spirit in these places:  ​

     This poetry writing challenge was authored by John Cotter for "What Sparks Poetry" a serialized feature at poetrydaily.com where poets explore experiences and ideas that spark new poems.
     PoetryBones members were asked to bring two poems to the session -- poems that they loved but that were also relatively new to them.  As Cotter suggested, they printed out the poems with triple spacing.  Here is how the prompts unfolded:

In the empty space between each line of the poem you brought to the session, write a response line of your own – a line that responds only to that one line of the poem.  Write like this for 10 minutes.

Once you have a response line for each line of your poem (let’s call it poem A), discard Poem A and build a new poem of your own (let’s call it Poem B),  made only from the response lines. Write like this for 10 minutes. Note: if you feel like your Poem B is evident, then repeat the challenge with your second poem. In this way, you will be writing two new Poem B’s.

The sample poems aren't direct products of the prompt. Instead they are poems that harken to another poet's style or rhythm or voice.  For example, for me, Danez Smith's poem "my president" echoes Walt Whitman's "I Hear America Singing" for its shoutouts to everyday American people in their states of work or honesty or valor.  It favors a few of Whitman's "Os" like O captain! My captain!   It even makes me think of Carl Sandberg's FROM THE PEOPLE, YES, but I can't think what, exactly.  Can you?  Let me know.

—Writing response lines was insight to the inner thoughts of the reader
—This exercise riggers inner thoughts and you are in the world of the poem more
— Imitation writing stretches my writing because it proposes words I wouldn’t have chosen
— I found myself responding to the lines but still staying in the storyline I was developing, meaning I was developing the "thread" of poem B while I was simultaneously influenced by the lines of poem A 
—Confused while I was writing.  Not being a poet or not ever imitating another poet, I wanted to know where the exercise was headed or why we were doing what we were doing
— Didn’t know if I was responding to the content or the emotion or what specifically in each line

Share your experiences in the comments section.

Tell me about a mistake.  Tell me about your favorite mistake.  Write for 10 minutes. Ready? Go.

Write a “mistake”  or “mistaken” poem.  Strive to create a flow and some urgency with the prose poem format, or create paced and measured movement with stanza breaks and repetition.
​

Prose poetry has a foot in two genres as described by the Academy of American Poets: While it lacks the line breaks associated with poetry, the prose poem maintains a poetic quality, often utilizing techniques common to poetry, such as fragmentation, compression, repetition, and rhyme. The prose poem can range in length from a few lines to several pages long, and it may explore a limitless array of styles and subjects.   (Source: https://poets.org/glossary/prose-poem)

"Graduation" by Edgar Kunz inspires the first poem prompt and "Dutch Elm Disease" by Valencia Robin, the second poem prompt.  Notice the differentiated challenge in each prompt.

Write a prose poem about a person in a very specific moment. Include sensory details and focus on poetic language versus prose language (which includes more articles and transitional phrases). Go for the jugular to concisely capture a specific scene, a specific source of tension.

Write a prose poem about someone’s adverse reaction to surprising news – whether its humorous, tragic, or paralyzing.  How can you also use the setting to comment on the scene?

PoetryBones writers note their experience with the challenge:

• Though I was given more freedom because of the prose form, I actually wrote more concisely.  
• My poem storyline built momentum toward a significant point instead of meandering in the way that prose storytelling can.  The poem got to the point more directly. Didn't expect that.
• I used more specific word choice to create immediacy and intensity, like a poem does -- even though I was working with longer lines. 
• In an effort to be less 'prose like' I cut articles and transition phrases, and I thought it would seem artificial.  Instead the poem was more concise without being artificial. 
• This experiment helped me recognize my own rhythm.  I was choosing words to purposely fit a rhythm that was developing, which seemed to innately be my own voice and rhythmic style.
• Is there something about this form that leads us to intense stories, or was it the example poems that did it, that set our minds in that direction?  The poems I heard in the breakout room were intense and direct.

​

Bird
by Niki Herd

​Yesterday, at Shepherd and Gray, the parking lot was
filled with birds, black birds, actually grackles. It was a grackle
lot; instead of a bumper on a car, there were ten grackles, instead
of a sunroof, fifty grackles sat high, their bodies shimmers
under cheap strip mall lights as shoppers delayed their spending
to pull out phones and take shots, such spectators we were,
like that summer in July, when I was left again
to wonder who was the child and who the adult,
that Sunday evening that hung in the air like bug spray
when my father, the one who fed me and gave me his last name,
stood two stories on our family porch, every neighbor,
in all manner of dress, drawn from their homes, in the street
      watching.
Let me tell you how he spread his arms wide, like the man
he was before Vietnam, or before the schizophrenia.
Let me tell you how a child learns the alphabet by counting,
how she learns only 2 letters separate the words hero and heroin,
how he stood high on the ledge of a porch the child never much
liked because there was a crack in its wooden center as if the
      world
was waiting to open its jaws to swallow her body whole.
Let me tell you how that July evening didn’t hold death,
but instead was the preface to death. The point being he jumped.
Some will say there are worse songs to sing, others might believe
      it
a tragedy, but who are we to question the Gods when a man
unconcerned with the inconvenience of his presence shows up
in a parking lot winged as an army of himself? Eventually, lights
went dark in the shops and each watcher retraced their steps back
      home
to find their families, to rejoice over food, to laugh and settle the
​      night;
and the birds, steadfast they stood, not quite ready for flight--

PoetryBones has studied other notable prose poems
but toward different writing goals.  See:

• C.K. Williams' Blades in the "Hazy Memory" prompt
• Arielle Greenberg's The Expert in the "What Work Is" prompt

Other great prose poem resources:

Confusing words or simply wondering about the similarity in sound but the polar differences in meaning is where the tension for your poem might be found.  The confusion around pairs of words might be attributed to their being homonyms or homophones, because there are multiple meanings to the word or even additional connotations. Sometimes the confusion can occur in the speaking of the word, depending on which syllable is stressed, the meter of a sentence, learning words in another language, and even the tone when the word is spoken.   This confusion is the impetus for today's poetry writing challenge.

 "Oblation" by Tanya Grae introduces the free write prompt, and "Persimmons" by Li-Young Lee precedes the poem prompt.  

​Write about words you confuse or have confused in the past.  Write about the juxtaposition of these "sound alike" words.   Include their meanings, or use one of the words in the poem and imply the other, as Grae does in the poem "Oblation" wherein an "ablation" process is being described.  Write about the situations where the words come up; describe parallel things that are happening in relation to these situations.  If you need commonly "confused" words, here are some suggestions.  (Write for 10 minutes.)

 Write your “confused words” poem.  What do these confusions mean? Feel free to explore the parallel stories, the tangents that go with the words, as Lee does in "Persimmons."

 This last poem plays on the various meanings of the word "lie." 

Comedians and "confused words"  Norm Crosby's classic act includes malapropisms and Ismo, Finnish comedian, capitalizes on language differences.