MONDAY PROMPT / December 6

Our cool and innovative friends over at Referential Magazine have given us permission to tromp through the poems they’ve published and use them as inspiration for new poems.

In order to write to the prompt this week, you’ll have to visit Referential Magazine to get a feel for how the zine works. It’s pretty intuitive and extremely fabulous! Poets and editors link up submissions to work already published on the site via shared phrases or images. Let’s join in the fun! For this week’s poem, let the work at Referential Magazine inspire you. Write a piece launched directly or indirectly from what you find.

And although this isn’t part of the prompt, while you’re there, why not consider submitting to the zine? Maybe you’ll end up editing and revising this week’s poem or maybe you already have poems you could send. Either way, attempting to get your work out in the wide world beyond the circus is powerful. Go for it. Go for it.

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: If you are new to our site, your comment(s) will be held for moderation for your first few posts. If you put more than one link in your comment, your comment(s) will be held for moderation. 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.

Tags: poetry, prompts