Author Archive

This week’s prompt

This week we’re going to try to mix up our writing life and we’ll start the process with a little poetic introspection.

Take a look at your last dozen or so poems and study them to find any common elements. Sure, you might have been working to different prompts, but do your recent poems share any structural components?

Are they narrative poems or do you tend to write to the surreal?
Do have they have short or long line lengths?
Do you write in stanzas or not?
Are they first or third person? Or otherwise?
Do you tend to be direct or indirect?
Is there a predominant theme in your work?
Do you play with spaces or punctuation or write in sentences?
What kind of word choices do you make? Concrete, romantic, whimsical?

Take some time, maybe a day or two, and think about these (or similar) questions and your poetry.

Now take your poem’s most consistent characteristic and this week try to write from its “opposite.”

Do you mostly write in third person? Try first person. (Try a persona in first person if it’s too uncomfortable to write so “personally.”)
Do you write in metaphor? Yay you! But this week try writing a piece that uses a little less metaphor, or perhaps a subtle metaphor.
Change up line length – and change the pacing of the poem by paying attention to sound and meter, even if you are not working to a formal form! This alone can shake things up  in significant ways.
Do you always write free verse with lines? Try a prose poem instead.
Do you write about relationships? Write an ode to an inanimate object.

The idea is to try something different from your usual style. Something that feels a little awkward, kind of like writing with your “other” hand. See if stretching different poetic muscles doesn’t release new creative juice.

If you feel like you need a prompt-prompt to get started, as in a topic or subject matter, try to rewrite a poem that you aren’t very happy with, but that you sense has some good stuff inside it using one (or more) of these switch-ups.

And then, of course, come back starting Friday and let us know your results (and how the experience worked for you).

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: 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.

This week’s prompt

Way back in April I received a lovely poem in my inbox. It was “The Love-Hat Relationship” by Aaron Belz, sent by those wonderful folks at Poets.org for National Poetry Month as a part of their Poem-A-Day.
I have been thinking about the love-hat relationship.
It is the relationship based on love of one another’s hats.
The problem with the love-hat relationship is that it is superficial.

Go read the poem here, on the Poets.org website.

For this week’s prompt why not try a similar idea? Think of a few well-known word couples and let (or compel) one of them go a little sideways. Then set your mind free and write a poem. It might be realistic, it might be surrealistic; it might be funny or serious. But whatever it is, you will never see that word couple in the same way again. Nor will your readers. And that is a fine thing for poetry to do!

Come back on Friday (and through the weekend) and let others read what mischief your words got into.

(Want to know about Belz and his poetry? Go to his website, which includes lots of links to places you can poke around, including reviews of his latest book, Lovely, Raspberry.)

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: 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

This week’s prompt

Emotion is in our poetry – on some level, be it evocative or exploratory, empathetic or explosive.

This week’s prompt is about anger. Maybe something or someone has pissed you off recently – someone you know or someone you don’t. Maybe it’s personal; maybe it’s philosophical. Maybe something in the Gulf of Mexico has you seething and frustrated. Maybe there are old hurts that still sting.

We want to explore that anger this week, but we want to do it in a controlled way. We want to focus our anger. While using emotion in our work can be fantastic, sometimes our poems can become overwrought unless we handle heat deftly. Sometimes the poem is more rant than revelation, or a lecture instead of a lesson or metaphor. Although that may be satisfying on a cathartic level, we might not get as much out of our poem as we could have had we focused that emotion and used it like a tool.

I read Bill Moyer’s Fooling with Words recently. His interview with Shirley Geok-Lin Lim was striking. Lim said she used the strictest form structure she could think of to “control her anger,” in this case anger directed at the Chinese one-child policy that resulted in female infanticide. Out of her focused anger she wrote “Pantoun for Chinese Women.”

This week why don’t you try doing what Lim did? Use repetition, in the form of a pantoum, to focus your anger in the unique voice of poetry.

Pantoums aren’t as scary as one might think. You don’t have to rhyme or use meter (although poets did when the form was first created). The modern pantoum is a poem of any length, composed of four-line stanzas in which the second and fourth lines of each stanza serve as the first and third lines of the next stanza. The last line of a pantoum is often the same as the first.

Read Lim’s poem as an example, or look through the many samples linked at About.com. The Poetry Foundation has a couple of pantoums as does Read Write Poem. Spend a little time thinking about the form – and your anger – and see where it takes you.

The resultant poem does not be polished. Think of it as an exercise, a draft, an experiment in anger management that might create something powerful. Come back Friday and let us know how it went. (And if this exercise doesn’t grab you — try some other means to focus your anger in a poem.)

(If you need a book recommendation, I can happily point you to Moyer’s. Lot’s of great poetry and explanation, via Moyer’s interviews,  about how a broad range of talented poets go at their work.)

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: 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.