Saturday, April 24, 2021

NPM Spring Cleaning Day 24, Prompts

 

Nobody can predict what is going to start a creative spark. But as I've been Spring Cleaning the open tabs on my desktop during this National Poetry Month, one thing I've noticed is that lots, lots of the tabs that are open are prompts and articles that I want to write about. I've written about some of them during this month, but there are still lots more open, so I decided to do an all-prompt post. Who knows? Maybe I will come back and write about them, and maybe some one else will get inspired by one or two of them too.


In October 2019, Tabatha posted this poem called "If I Could Write Like Tolstoy." She wrote her own poem in this same vein, called "If I Could Write Like Edgar Allan Poe." Ever since then, I've had this tab open, and a plan to do my own "If I Could Write Like..." poem. I even tried one this past week. I called it "If I Could Write Like the U.S. Embassy," and it was about travel advisories. Haiti was already at Level 4, which is the worst of the worst, the "Do Not Travel" category. Nevertheless the Embassy managed to strengthen their cries of "Stay Away!" Now we have four official reasons Not To Come Here. Not only that, but the State Department is telling Americans not to travel to 80% of the world. For most of these places, the prohibition is COVID-related. Well, turns out it's easy to write like the U.S. Embassy - just go on and on about how bad everywhere is. But it didn't make much of a poem -- not yet, anyway. To be revisited.

 

Another open link from Tabatha is this list of mentor poems from December 2019. Lots of what seemed inspiring to her also seemed inspiring to me!

 

Margaret posts a new photo each Wednesday to inspire writing in her feature "This Photo Wants to Be a Poem." From that feature, I saved this photo from May last year. I really want to write about it!

 

In September 2019 Laura Shovan posted this great prompt. Lots of people wrote about it, but I didn't, just filed it away for later. 


The Time is Now at Poets & Writers magazine has weekly writing prompts. 


I've lost track of the origin of this one, but a few months ago, everyone was writing poems using new words from their year of birth, using this Time Traveler tool from Merriam-Webster.

 

Here's a Call for Poems posted by Jan. 


So there you go! And now I can close all these tabs!


This is the ninth year of the Progressive Poem! See the schedule below to find where to go for today's line and to see who's participating this year.

April 1 Kat Apel at Kat Whiskers
2 Linda Mitchell at A Word Edgewise
3 Mary Lee at A Year of Reading
4 Donna Smith at Mainly Write
5 Irene Latham at Live your Poem
6 Jan Godown Annino at BookseedStudio
7 Rose Cappelli at Imagine the Possibilities
8 Denise Krebs at Dare to Care
9 Margaret Simon at Reflections on the Teche
10 Molly Hogan at Nix the Comfort Zone
11 Buffy Silverman
12 Janet Fagel at Reflections on the Teche
13 Jone Rush MacCulloch
14 Susan Bruck at Soul Blossom Living
15 Wendy Taleo at Tales in eLearning
16 Heidi Mordhorst at my juicy little universe
17 Tricia Stohr Hunt at The Miss Rumphius Effect
18 Linda Baie at Teacher Dance
19 Carol Varsalona at Beyond Literacy Link
20 Robyn Hood Black at Life on the Deckle Edge
21 Leigh Anne Eck at A Day in the Life
22 Ruth Hersey at There is No Such Thing as a God-forsaken Town
23 Janice Scully at Salt City Verse
24 Tabatha Yeatts at The Opposite of Indifference
25 Shari Daniels at Islands of my Soul
26 Tim Gels at Yet There is Method at https://timgels.com
27 Rebecca Newman
28 Catherine Flynn at Reading to the Core
29 Christie Wyman at Wondering and Wondering
30 Michelle Kogan at More Art 4 All
 
 

1 comment:

Tabatha said...

Wow, "If I Could Write Like the U.S. Embassy" does sound like a toughie, unless maybe you made it a parody? (Have you seen McSweeney's? Here's an example: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/alternative-teaching-modalities-in-hell)