Prompts

April 30, onward into poetry! Alas, poetry month comes to a close, and so do my daily writings. It’s been incredible to share different moments of poetry with you, and to be mindful of how poetry can enter each day. As the marathon posting comes to a close, I think of the good stuff we…

April 29, sonnet. Sharing one of my favorite poets, Terrance Hayes, and a few poems from his collection, American Sonnets For My Past and Future Assassin.

April 28, inspiring quote. Ok, so is it cheating not to pick a poetry quote for poetry month? No! I say anything can inspire a poet, including the great Kurt Vonnegut in his opening lines of Slaughterhouse Five. This line is the maxim of a poet. We approximate towards meaning, some embracing music some embracing…

April 27, poem in your pocket. Today we walked with Basho.

April 26, ekphrastic. This type of poetry is some of the first that I ever appreciated and wrote on my own. Back in my undergrad, my poetry mentor and professor introduced me to Anne Sexton and her collection TRANSFORMATIONS as well as the poem below. I adored the idea of taking something well known, like…

April 25, favorite word right now. If you’ve read my poetry, you know this word needs no introduction… But really, space is fascinating and I cannot contain my enthusiasm for it! Just the incredible, primordial expanse of the “place” and the fact that all of us are made of stars. We come from the ancient…

April 24, hybrid. I love a good prose poem. I also love the ancient chimeras of myth and the cryptids of American folklore. Ohio’s got three of them! Hybrids are beautiful and strange, like their animal/human counterparts. We have interchangeable names for the poetry/fiction/nonfiction chimera and all relate to the lovely word prose. The beautiful…

April 23, annotated poem. Very lucky that yesterday included a revision workshop and I got to start annotating a poem that I really love, but just isn’t in the right place right now. The process really helped me see the vision of the original piece and move beyond it.

April 22, collage. Happy Earth day! On this beautiful, thundering day I participated in the Lit Cleveland Poetry Festival at Case Western Reserve University. It was a wonderful day of workshops with brand new faces and a couple familiar ones. I learned so much and I made a new friend–amazing to say as an adult!…

April 21, published poem. Sharing a poem from pre-pandemic from a poetry month feature called Ohio Loves You (presented by the now sadly defunct Barnhouse Journal). What I love about this poem is the ars poetica feel and the playful nature.