Prompt: Write a poem about a landmark. It can be a famous landmark (like Mount Rushmore or the Sphinx) or a little more subdued (like the town water tower or an interesting sign).
SIGNPOSTS
On the northside:
grass clippings,
popsicle sticks,
Sunday newspaper circulars.
On the southside:
crushed soda cans,
crumpled lottery tickets,
church service schedules.
Prompt: Pick an animal; make that animal the title of your poem; then, write a poem.
CHICKENS
The family pet is a precarious
decision, like adopting someone
you know will die before you
and yours.
We could not agree on a dog
or a cat; the former too much
like a third child, the latter yet
another unpredictable in-law.
Guinea pigs were a consideration,
but since we left the Bronx,
willingly taking in a rodent
didn’t make much sense.
Six more months into this
recession and backyard chickens
would fit right in with canned food
and ammo in the basement.
Eggs in the morning, amusement
throughout the day, and when times
get rough, heartbreak is lessened
by a delicious dinnertime memorial.
Prompt: Take the phrase “The problem with (blank)” and replace the “(blank)” with a word or phrase. Make this the title of your poem and then write a poem to fit with or juxtapose against that title.
THE PROBLEM WITH ADAM SANDLER
Dick and fart jokes aren’t
nearly as funny on the fifth
telling, and the sadsack schmuck
with a heart of gold who gets
the girl anyway lost its appeal
years ago.
Well-deserved kudos for Jewish pride
don’t offset the absolutely unforgiveable,
inhumane and sadistic casting of
Rob Schneider in every movie.
Digital guru Steve Rubel interviews Jeff Jarvis, author of “What Would Google Do?“, who makes an interesting point that I suspect many marketers are going to have in the back of their minds when the economy ultimately turns around and they reassess their marketing strategies and measure the results of their responses to the meltdown.
Mr. Rubel: Are customer service and peer-to-peer advocacy the new advertising? And if so, how does that change the ad industry?
Mr. Jarvis: Advertising is failure.
If you have a great product or service customers sell for you and a great relationship with those customers, you don’t need to advertise.
OK, that’s going too far. There is still a need to advertise — because customers don’t know about your product or a change in it or because, in the case of Apple, you want to add a gloss to the product and its customers. But in the book, I suggest that marketers should imagine stopping all advertising and then ask where they would spend their first dollar.
In an age when competition and pricing are opened up online and when your product is your ad, you need to spend your first dollar on the quality of your product or service. If you’re Zappos, you spend the next dollar on customer service and call that marketing. If the next dollar goes to advertising, there has to be a reason — and if the product is good enough, that reason may fade away.
Prompt: Write an outsider poem. You can be the outsider; someone else can be the outsider; or it can even be an animal or inanimate object that’s the outsider.
HEARTBURN
She wears it on her sleeve
because it does not fit
in her chest, too full
of life to be contained,
much too easy to break.
Prompt: Write an origin poem. It can be the origin of a word, person, plant, idea, etc.
METAPHORICALLY SPEAKING
Pen, pencil, paper,
notebook, Moleskine, laptop,
iPhone, quiet park, café table,
noisy bar, bathroom stall,
lower back, scarred wrist,
broken heart…
A poem is not truly alive
until it is read out loud
for someone else to feel.
April is National Poetry Month, so it’s a perfect opportunity to live up to my URL and flashback to the late 90s when I worked at The Academy of American Poets and was terrorizing the NYC poetry slam scene!
I’ve attempted National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) twice, cranking out 15,000 words on the second try, but tomorrow, for the first time ever, I’ll be participating in the Poem-A-Day (PAD) Challenge!
The inimitable Robert Brewer — editor of Writer’s Market and Poet’s Market, and proprietor of the wonderful blog, Poetic Asides — will be posting a daily prompt and I, along with at least 150 others (and counting), are commiting to write a poem inspired by that prompt.
Every. Day.
Doesn’t mean any of them will be good, but every day in the month of April, before the clock strikes midnight, I’ll be posting a new poem here and over at Poetic Asides.