MONDAY PROMPT/ August 30
This week’s prompt
Poems hang out where life is. – Susan Wooldridge
So you’ve spent most of the summer at the pool (or the lake or the beach) and you’ve hardly written any poems. (Or maybe that’s just me). Maybe you’ve been working too hard at your day job and you’re just not feeling the poetry. Whatever the cause, if you are feeling your well is dry (or even if you’re not), it’s high time to make a word pool!
For this week’s prompt you’re going to need a little notebook, something you can carry with you in your pocket. And you’re going to need to, as I say to my young art students, open your artist eyes and ears. Because before you write your poem this week, you’re going to look and listen and gather all the words and phrases your world has to offer.
“Pick me, pick me!” you hear the neighbor kid shouting. Write it down. “… no reading required,” you spy on your child’s Memory game. Write it down. Step outside your door and write down the first five things you see: cracked stair, beach towel, empty bird bath, overgrown garden, green plastic watering can. Go back inside and raid the pantry: cumin, ground pepper, canned spinach, lazy susan.
The idea of a word pool is one I originally learned from Susan Wooldridge in her wonderful book, Poemcrazy: Freeing Your Life with Words. As she describes the process in her second book, Foolsgold,“Gather words at random, sloppily, aslant, in circles, even upside down on a page.” Once I started really opening my eyes and being in tune to all the amazing words and phrases just waiting to be used in a poem, I couldn’t stop writing them down.
This week, give yourself permission to eavesdrop and steal. Take words in the name of poetry and call them yours. Then weave your favorite words into a poem. It’s like a Wordle, but more personal!
Then come back, starting Friday, and share* your poem!
*When posting, it might be nice to tell everyone a little bit about where and how you collected your words!
How prompts work under the Big Tent
We post prompts on Mondays, and you have all week to write your poems, based on our fabulous prompt or any other inspiration. Come back on Friday when you will find a “Come One, Come All” post where you can use the comments section to 1) leave a link to your poem or 2) leave the poem in its entirety.
You’ll have all day Friday (and all weekend!) to post your work and read each others’ work. Take your time. Enjoy all the poems that are new to the world.
Some hints
Hint: We’ve set Big Tent Poetry to Central Time.
Hint: An easy way to check on new post comments is with RSS reader, if you use one. Here’s the address: http://bigtentpoetry.org/comments/feed.
Hint: Since we’re a new site, and you’re new to it, your comment(s) will be held for moderation for your first few posts. We’re checking the filters often, so don’t despair! That said, if it takes more than a half a day to see it come live on the site, do email us at info (at) bigtentpoetry.org. (But be patient, okay?)
Circus etiquette
We figure you know how to play in the poetry community, but here are the basics:
Be nice. Have fun. Remember we aren’t a critique forum. We want to support each other as we bring more poetry into our lives. Only provide critique if someone specifically asks for it.
Although we love seeing our badge in the sidebar of your blog, we would appreciate it if you would also link back to the site in each of your poem posts. Linking within your post helps people travel back and forth from your site to the Big Tent Poetry site, and it helps perpetuate Big Tent Poetry “findability” in Google searches — and that helps us all.
http://rinklyrimes.blogspot.com/2010/08/circus-of-life.html
Intent on stealth, I’ve bitten the hand that feeds me!
hi, rinkly rimes!
be sure to come back on friday and post your link to the post called “come one, come all / september 3.” we all post on the same day so that we can have a large gathering of poets & readers. our visitors don’t look here for poem links.
thanks! so glad you’re writing with us!
[...] know. Technically, then, I overheard that conversation, which brings me to this week’s Big Tent prompt: eavesdrop on conversations and use the words in your poem. As all I have done this week is [...]
[...] notes: Pick words from everyday, from everywhere. I did. See prompt over at Big Tent Poetry.The words gathered in a basket are: blubber, speculum, potpourri, park bench, cricket…oops I [...]
[...] I chuted through the passage of timeuncreased the wrinkles and looked into the aqua pool of her skin.The rogue gene swam up through the lucent underwater billowing, looping squiggles of murk,to leave blemishes on her soul.I held her hand, walked her to the dying Buddhawhose face had immense silence on it:words die when they find no speaker.Camel coloured void swept us as his breath like vapor escaped, smile still on the face, eyes fixed on us.Vicinity dropped in the desert of grief,dunes of worry lines swallowed our path.I held her hand and we walked days, days, days.A childlike curiosity lighted her sand encrusted eyesas she examined the veins on the pebbleswe picked from a gravel river bed where water dried years ago.The furrowed strand fought against the loam the wind carried,it wound into the sky. We stepped into this ribbon of memory and walked there, carrying pebbles to gather weight and leave our footprints. ( Process notes: I am reading Colin Thubron’s wonderful book ‘Shadow of the Silk Road’. Through the week I collected words from this book. They are - rogue gene, looping, murk, gulped, billowing, aqua, dying Buddha, lucent, hood, crumple, umblemished, cameI coloured void. I stayed with these words for a day and cleared time to write, hoping that nothing that was happening in my life at this point of time (my old parents-in-law who stay with me have been very sick and I have been spending considerable amount of time the last few months taking care of them) would influence what path these words take. I started to write and realised when I was done that words picked at random for their beauty and exclusivity stay very close to what is happening in me. Also, I think I have repeatedly used the image of the desret because Colin evocatively describes the Gobi desert on his journey through the Silk Route.)Big Tent Poetry [...]