MONDAY PROMPT / March 21

This week’s prompt

Poets need to mix things up a bit, don’t we? Sometimes we do this by simply writing an altogether new & fresh poem. (What a wonderful gift from the muse that is!) But sometimes we have to take matters in our own hands (as when that silly muse has missed a writing date), by finding (digging up, wrangling) bits of words someplace — in our journals or on the street — and bending them about to create new meaning.

This week we are going to try bending, maybe even breaking & re-stitching words together. And we’ll use Big Tent Poetry’s latest resource page: Poetry Toys!

Your prompt this week is to take a piece of your writing, or some other bit of written text, and try out one of the toys or tricks (on our new Poetry Toys page)  to generate (reformulate) new work. Some ideas:

• Translate a phrase or stanza back & forth in Babelfish — let the new words that show up change the emotion in your words & rewrite to match the new feel. Aha: a new poem!
• Use the cut-up feature at Language is a Virus. Leave what is generated as is, or add new words or lines as inspiration strikes. Aha: a new poem!
• Go to Erasures and try it. Or find a text (Project Gutenberg is a great source) and make your own. Aha: a new poem!
• Replace a bunch of old words with new ones you found at Visuwords or the dictionary. Again, expand the poem as you wish. Aha: a new poem!

Come back starting next Friday and, in addition to your links to brand new poems, let us know what you liked about the bending/breaking process, and what you thought of the work it produced!

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: deb scott, poetry, prompts