Prompt #152 – Over the Moon

Writing poems about the moon is probably as old as written language and might seem a bit “done.” However, inspired by Midsummer Night on the 21^st, immediately followed by a “supermoon,” I thought it might be interesting to have a go at “lunar” poems this week—not the typical or expected fare but, rather, moon poems that speak to the ways in which we can take a familiar theme and make it “new.”

The goal this week is to approach the moon from a fresh perspective, with memorable ideas and images that startle (and, hopefully, delight) your readers. Be aware that your poem should address the actual subject and should contain a deeper meaning as well. Remember that really good poems often contain the shock of discovery—something life-illuminating that happens when you write and when your poem is read.

Some Ideas to Consider:

1. A honeymoon (a get-away taken by a man and a woman immediately after their marriage).

2. Moonshine whiskey (illegal liquor, made by a “moonshiner” in a secret still).

3. An eclipse of the moon (when the moon appears darkened as it passes through the earth’s shadow).

4. Being moonstruck (so in love that one cannot think clearly or behave normally).

5. A mooncalf  (a pejorative used to suggest that someone is stupid, a blockhead, a fool, or otherwise not very intelligent).

6. Being “over the moon” (extremely delighted about something).

7. “Shooting for the moon” (being highly ambitious).

8. “Mooning about” (as in hopelessly in love).

9. “Once in a blue moon” (something that happens very rarely).

10. “Casting beyond the moon” (making wild speculations).

11. “Moonlighting” (in the US, having a night job in addition to day-time employment—in Australia, riding after cattle at night—in the UK, illegal work—and in Ireland, once used to describe violence carried out at night).

12. The famous line from the old Honeymooners show in which Ralph Cramden (Jackie Gleason) says to his wife, “To the moon, Alice!”

13. The man, or the rabbit, in the moon.

14. The old silliness about the moon being made of green cheese.

15.  The old fad for “mooning” (referring to a bare, moon-like posterior displayed to passersby).

Examples:

Click on the Titles to Read the Example Poems

At a Lunar Eclipse by Thomas Hardy Tender Buttons [A Light in the Moon] by Gertrude Stein Two ramages for old masters [Silent in the moonlight] by Robert Bly December Moon by Brenda Hillman Honeymoon by Louis Simpson Horses at Midnight Without a Moon by Jack Gilbert I'm Over the Moon by Brenda Shaughnessy Many-Roofed Building in Moonlight by Jane Hirshfield Moon Gathering by Eleanor Wilner Moonlight by Sara Teasdale Moonlight Monologue for the New Kitten by Péter Kántor Moonrise by H. D. Moreover, the Moon --- by Mina Loy The Creation of the Moon by Anonymous The Distant Moon by Rafael Campo The Harvest Moon by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow The Moon in Time Lapse by David Rivard The Moon in Your Breath by Amy King The Wind and the Moon by George Macdonald The Wind and the Other Moon by Robert Gregory Under the Harvest Moon by Carl Sandburg Untitled [There, by the crescent moon, the shark] by Shido The moon is distant from the sea (387) by Emily Dickinson

Additional Examples May Be Found Here: http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/thematic_poems/moon_poems.html

Prompt #151 – Personal Ad Poem

In journalism, the personals section is comprised of brief, private notices in newspapers or magazines. Typically printed in a special part of the classified advertising section, “personals” are sometimes addressed to a particular person and are sometimes “coded” to provide confidentiality. In most media, the personals section is a place for people to connect. People  list their positive attributes, best qualities, and/or interests, along with contact information in the hope of meeting a significant other or just making friends with a similar-minded someone. Online dating sites have eclipsed the old personal columns to some extent, but they’re still found in many newspapers. For this prompt, write a poem for the personals sections of a newspaper. Have fun with this! 

Tips:

Begin with a persona (either your actual persona or a fictional one).

Try beginning with the word “You” in the title (headline) to engage the reader. 

Include something like this: Unknown poet seeks appreciative and nonjudgmental reader who can read between the lines.

Ask a question, again engaging the reader.

Note your gender and age. Tell what's important to you.

If you're writing about yourself, be honest, but step out of your box a little.

List your attributes (be sure to exaggerate). Show the personality in the ad, don't tell about it.

Address the reader with a challenge to think about something that requires use of his or her imagination. i.e., Imagine ______________. 

Describe the person you'd like to meet.

Example:

"Personals" by C. D. Wright

Prompt #150 – A Line or Phrase

Is there a line (or phrase) from a book, play, poem, movie, or song  that you’ve never forgotten,  a few words from a remembered source that has a special meaning for you?

• Maybe the first line in a novel has stayed with you (for example, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” from Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities).

• Or perhaps a line from a song (for example, “All lies and jest, still, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest” from  Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Boxer”).

• Or a famous line from a poem, such as Tennyson’s “Tis better to have loved and lost/Than never to have loved at all;”  Eliot’s “Not with a bang but a whimper;” or Frost’s “and miles to go before I sleep.” 

I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this.

1. Think about a line from a book, play, poem, movie, or song that means something special to you (that you carry with you) and write a poem based on that line.

2. Often book titles draw inspiration from poems such as Slouching Toward Bethlehem by Joan Didion (based on a line from Yeats’s “The Second Coming”); Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (from a line in Robert Burns’s “To A Mouse”); and Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle from Dante’s The Divine Comedy. Along this line (pun intended), you may want to use a line from a poem (or part of it) as the title for your poem and work from that.

I couldn’t find any great example poems for this week’s prompt, so I hope some of you will post your poems or let me know if you come across any that fit the prompt! 

Prompt #149 – Questions

Right now, at this point in your life, what questions do you ask yourself? Is there one particular question that haunts you? What I’m getting at is what question or questions do you have about yourself, your life, your place in the world? What questions lead you to the deepest self-discovery, help others discover you, and bring you to a place of definition and clarity? This prompt calls for a fair amount of reflection and introspection, but its direction is simple. Write a poem about a question you ask yourself. Remember that this is a question about you, not about others or about anything else in the world. (You may choose to begin with a list of questions and narrow the choices to one or a few.)

Things to Think About Before Writing:

• Are there things you question about yourself (feelings, motivations, relationships, faith, responses to situations, ways of dealing with stresses).
• Are there things you feel others don’t understand about you?
• What’s the single biggest question you have?
• What question(s) do you think your spouse, partner, children, or closet friend might ask you?

Tips:

1. Because the poem is personal, there should be a sense of intimacy, but don’t let this become a confessional poem.
2. Alternate questions with declarative sentences.
3. Don’t over-tell.
4. Avoid sentimentality.
5. Use sound—“the music in it”— to enhance meaning (alliteration, assonance, internal rhyme, off or near rhyme, onomatopoeia, dissonance, repetition).
6. Remember that understatement and nuance can be more powerful than telling too much.

Examples:

"Questions" by Stephen Dunn

"Questions In The Mind Of A Poet While She Washes Her Floors" by Elena Georgiou

"The Book of Questions, III" by Pablo Neruda

"Twenty Questions" by Jim Moore

"Question" by May Swenson

"Some Last Questions" by W. S. Merwin

Prompt #148 – A Favorite Book from Childhood

For some of us, a love of the written word began in childhood, possibly with the popular Golden Books and series like the Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys mysteries. There were also Trixie Belden books (among my favorites) and classics of children’s literature such as Treasure Island, Peter Pan, Winnie the Pooh, Tom Sawyer, Robin Hood, and Alice in Wonderland, along with more recent “classics,” including Charlotte’s Web, the Harry Potter books, and poems by Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein.

Back in the days of my own childhood, my one of my favorite books was a collection of poems by Eugene Field. (Anyone remember his "Wynken, Bylnken, and Nod"?) This was the book with which my mother taught me how to read when I was four years old, during the summer I was in bed with what the doctors diagnosed as “polio fever.” From that summer on, I loved books and became a devoted reader. When I was in third grade, I found a book in our classroom library titled Ellen Tebbits (a 1951 children’s novel by Beverly Cleary). The story tells about the adventures of a little girl named Ellen Tebbits and her friend Austine. The book has been called “pure nostalgic Americana” by children’s lit expert Anita Silvey and, although I doubt if it’s read very much anymore, I must have read it at least five or six times.

The importance of literacy and books in children’s development is clear but, sadly, children in many parts of the world grow up without books. For most of us, it’s hard to imagine our own childhoods without the literature that ignited our imaginations, taught us about people and life in other countries, excited and delighted us, supported good habits and values, and introduced us to poetry. Today’s e-book technologies (the Internet, Kindles, and Nooks) bring fast and easy electronic access to books, but there are no real page turns, no dog-earred corners, no scent or feel of paper, and reading electronically can be a bit like buying pre-made coffee or wine in cardboard boxes. Don’t get me wrong: the technologies have many plusses, but still I like to think that actual books will always have a place in young readers’ lives. For me, there’s nothing quite as special as the look and feel of a book in my hands, and I still treasure the books I read as a child, many of which hold pride of place on shelves in my home.

This week’s prompt asks you to think about books you enjoyed as a child and to write a poem about one of those books (a chapter book, a picture book, or a collection of children’s verse).

Things to Think About:

1. What were some of the books you loved as a child? (Make a list.)
2. What was your favorite childhood book? How many times did you read it?
3. Why did you love about that book?
4. Who was the main character?
5. What did the main character teach you?
6. What feelings did the book and the main character inspire in you?
7. Is the book still popular today? Why or why not?
8. What memories of your childhood does your favorite book call to mind?
9. When you think of your favorite childhood book, what people do you remember? (What are the connections?)
10. In what way or ways is your favorite childhood book a metaphor for your youth?

Tip:

Every poem needs a strong emotional center that doesn’t smother meaning with sentiment—subtlety (and that doesn’t mean obscurity) is necessary for a poem to succeed. Be wary of overstatement. Don’t tell too much—leave room for your readers to fill in some gaps. Sometimes what you don’t write is as important as what you commit to words.

After Writing, Things to Consider:

1. Does your first line (or first thought) invite the reader into your poem?           
2. Have you used sounds effectively?
3. Are there unnecessary words that you might delete such as superfluous adjectives? 
4. Do you bring the poem to closure with a confident “punch?”
5. Might you have concluded the poem sooner than you did? (Remember that a poem usually suffers when you “tie it up in a neat package” at the end.) 

Examples:

"Books" by Gerald Stern

"Picture Books in Winter" by Robert Louis Stevenson

"There Is No Frigate Like A Book" by Emily Dickinson

"Notes on the Art of Poetry" by Dylan Thomas

"And Yet the Books" by Czeslaw Milosz

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A Note to Readers

While a lot of poetry activity stops during the summer and a number of journals are closed to submissions, there are many print journals that do read during June, July, and August. If you’re looking for places to send your poems this summer, be sure to visit poet Diane Lockward’s blog (Blogalicious) for a comprehensive list, complete with links.  Thanks, Diane, for this great resource! 

Summer Journals A-F

Summer Journals G-P

Summer Journals Q-Z

Click title to order Diane's most recent poetry collection, Temptation by Water.

Prompt #147 – Transformations

It’s funny how ideas for prompts and poems happen ...

Here in my part of New Jersey, the 17-year cicadas have begun to emerge and seem to be everywhere. There are literally thousands of them in my neighborhood alone, in various stages of changing from hard-shelled nymphs to winged adults. Once out of the earth, they climb to a rough surface where they struggle out of their shells (a process called molting). White at first, they darken within an hour. The adults move to trees and shrubs where they mate and lay eggs, completing a very short life cycle of just a few weeks. Admittedly, they’re not the most attractive insects but they are completely harmless, and their emergence every seventeen years is really amazing. Watching and photographing the transformations going on all around me led me to think about the process of transformation and how a transformation can be a revelation. 

So … this week, let’s try writing transformation poems, that is, poems in which something becomes something else. One example might be the moment that something or someone you thought was unattractive or plain was suddenly beautiful—a kind of “ugly duckling to swan” idea. Or, a time when something you thought was awful turned out to be great. You might even explore the “poem possibilities” of someone whose personality underwent a transformation.

Things To Think About:

Have you ever seen a transformation of something in nature (caterpillar to butterfly, hatchling to fully feathered bird)? How would you describe it?

How have you been transformed (by an experience, a belief, another person)? What are the particulars of that transformation?

Have you ever experienced an emotional transformation (sorrow to joy, distrust to trust, alienation to belonging)?

Have you ever seen something physically changed (trees cut down to make a log cabin)?

Have you experienced a transformation in a relationship (discord to happiness, marriage to divorce)?

Has there been a time when your anger or resentment was transformed? How and why? 

What have you learned from a particular transformation?

What does the word metamorphosis mean to you? How about trying a poem based on Ovid's Metamorphoses?

How about writing a poem from the point of view of something in the process of transformation (tadpole to frog, nymph to dragonfly, embryo to baby)?

Tips:

Just as transformations can be startling, so should your poems. A poem should astonish its readers, either with an amazing story, with a unique view of something, or with insights that challenge (or change) the reader’s thinking.

Your poem should contain at least one image or idea that takes the reader’s breath away.

  

Work on a sense of immediacy (even when you write in the past tense).

Stay away from the passive voice, and be wary of words that end in “ing.”

Be specific—avoid abstractions and generalizations. Imagery is key. Write about things, not ideas. William Carlos Williams wrote: “No ideas but in things.” Tell it “like it is” in specifics, not through philosophical musings on the “meaning of it all.

Work on a dismount that elicits a “wow.”

Example:

What Floats is Called a Swan 

            By Renée Ashley

Amidst what's left where the shadows catch

At what feels like the shadow end of a life,

At what seems rubble and wreckage, what

Looks to be a dashing hopelessness raising

Its inelegant head, think this: What rises can be

Saved, what is saved just might turn beautiful.

Reprinted by permission of the author. From Basic Heart (Texas Review Press, 2009). Copyright © 2009 by Renée Ashley. 

To Order Basic Heart, Click Here

Other Examples: 

"Letter to Denise" by Hayden Carruth

"Transformations" by Thomas Hardy

"Transformation and Escape" by Gregory Corso

"The Layers" by Stanley Kunitz

And ... if you're interested in learning a little more about cicadas ... enjoy!

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Prompt #146 – Portrait Poem

I paint myself because I am often alone and I am the subject I know best.

– Frida Kahlo

When I first saw DaVinci’s Mona Lisa in the Louvre many years ago, I understood why it’s probably the most famous portrait in the world. Another famous portrait with which many are familiar is Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, which inspired the 2003 film of the same title. There are, of course, countless portraits in museums and galleries—faces that look back at us and make us wonder about their painted subjects. This week, the goal is to write a poem in which you create a “word portrait” of yourself (the person you know best, as Frida Kahlo notes in the quote above). Importantly, you will need to be descriptive, but the extra challenge is to be judicious in your use of adjectives and details.

1. One way to begin is to generate a list of words that describe or tell something about you. In generating this list, think about your personality, interests, relationships, memories, loves, dislikes, and desires.

2. Now, imagine looking into a mirror that reveals more than your physical image. What do you see? Add what you see to your list.

3. Next, choose three items from your list and begin writing about them. You’ll need to find connectors and complements for these items, and you’ll need to think hard about yourself in terms of how the items from your list impact or reflect you as a whole.

4. Begin writing (a free write first may be helpful). Review what you’ve written and work the best of it into your poem.

5. Think in terms of metaphors. What extended metaphor might you use to “word paint” your portrait?

6. Alternatively, create a word portrait of someone you know. Follow the same general process, and be sure you select someone you know well. A third possibility (if the first two don’t work for you) would be to write a poem about a famous portrait (in writing a poem based on a painting, you’ll be doing an ekphrastic poem—see prompt #79, September 19, 2011).

Examples:

"Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror" by JohnAshbery

"Self-Portrait" by Adam Zagajewski

"The Portrait" by Stanley Kunitz

"The Portrait" by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

"Portrait" by Louise Gluck

"Self-Portrait" by Linda Pastan