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