Author Archive

This week’s prompt

Remember last week when we said we had an idea/scheme for poems you may have written recently? Here it is:

Look over your recently written poem pile with the idea that giving is both noble & fruitful. Find a line or two from a poem and hand them over to the Big Tent community. Give us your favorites. Give us the wonderful lines that just didn’t fit your poem. Give us lines that seemed to come from some strange planet and plopped in your backyard.

Yes. Copy and paste a line or two and leave them in the comments (of this post). Don’t dilly-dally. Get them planted in the comments so folks have lines to pull from!

Then pick a line or two for yourself (from this lovely fecund pile) and write yourself a poem using this/these line(s) as your springboard. (Do give credit to your benefactor in your poem post.)

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: https://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.

This week’s prompt

Phew! It’s we can get back to our regularly scheduled program.

Let’s try a revision this week, shall we? Some of you have lots and lots of fresh material. Yay! Poems to re-read and revise!

But here’s this week’s twist. Put those new poems aside. Often we need to let our work sit for a while, and many poetry teachers recommend it as a fruitful strategy.

For this week’s writing, set your creative clocks back to a year ago (or so) and look through a handful of the poems you wrote way back then. Do they feel familiar or strange to you? Are they recognizable or do they seem as though someone else wrote them? (There is no right answer. And if you are a new poet, go back as far as you can.)

Find one poem you’d like to take further. Avail yourself of the fresh look distance can offer. Write the poem out by hand. Read it aloud to yourself. Record it on your phone or computer and listen to it. What is the heart of the poem? What images stand out to you? What language do you like?

Now poke at the seams for any weaknesses. Try removing the first few lines or even the entire first stanza. Try rearranging the poem from back to front. Now what strikes your interest? Change your point of view in the poem. Replace words you aren’t in love with. (Think of this as dressing up for your significant other as a way to put a little spark in the relationship.)

Need other ideas? Look to a May revision prompt from Read Write Poem a couple of years ago. There you will find a few other ideas and resources to help nudge your revision hand.

Come back starting next Friday and leave us a link to your brand-spanking-newly-revised poem! (And don’t think we don’t have ideas for your recent poems, too. We have schemes hatching!)

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: https://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.

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: https://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.