DIY Write #1

This week we "crowd sourced" the possible prompts for each poem.  This exercise allowed for surprise and spontaneity.  After reading each poem, participants posted a word, phrase, image, or first thought that came to the mind.  Writers then DIY'ed their own writing prompts!  Choose something that immediately speaks to you, too.

First Mentor Poem

A Sense of Place
BILLY COLLINS

Source: Poetry Foundation

Poem Prompts #1

Write a poem about: 

a sense of place
storms
if things had been different
rootedness
this is my landscape
fantasyland
​river in the ceiling

​upholstered chair
what do you see from your seat?
a place that could have claimed you
high clouds
 little couriers
 back to it all
Ready. Set. Write a poem for 10 minutes!

Second Mentor Poem

Dictionary of Owl
BY MARY MERIAM
 
Who cares about the redbud tree, its flowers
half-black, half-pink, from winter’s April freeze;
who cares who lives halfway or dies too soon,
the blue jay’s baby squirming on bare ground,
the agonies of blood, the frigid breeze
shaking the fragile sense of April showers;
who cares who craves the heated pools of June,
the lake of boaters buzzing by or drowned.
Two vultures meet me at my open door,
scanning for carrion, the stink of spasms,
the sky-gods pecking rotting flesh for food;
who cares if this strange order ends in good,
or if the chickadee lands in the chasms
of endless carelessness forevermore.

​​Source: Poetry Foundation

Poem Prompts #2

In a poem, tell me about:

who cares?
scavenger
what do you care about?
fragile sense
desperation
a dictionary of _____
the vultures
endless carelessness

definition of sounds
death and life
open seas
two vultures
carrion
birds, just birds

Ready. Set. Write a poem for 10 minutes!

For Discussion

Snake
KATIE PETERSON
​
The thunderstorm came like a pot boiling over and the color
of water was made by that, all of a sudden, a pigment
more tropical than dense with the reflection of light.
Everywhere the scent of at least five different kinds of plants
lifted up. The desert can’t talk back but I believe
it breathes instead, breathes vivid when the water
wants it the water can’t wait and it breathes back.
I turned and went into the house.
Under the dining room table, a snake.
Green with a yellow stripe bisecting its back.
Motion ate each centimeter of floor
and air, scared, it makes sense to say, though there
exists or existed no safer time ever in which that shape
wouldn’t want to move, dead August being the exception
to this when heat makes molasses of all of us.
Why did I want to chase it out? I did, I got a rake and kept
making it make that beautiful scared
shape upon the floor, so clean.
Like two ice cubes rubbing each other
and too cold to melt. Nothing organized that fear.
Seeing the edges it found its way out.

Hear "Snake" read at Poetry Foundation's "Poem of the Day" audio recordings