The January 16th prompt in The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice, by Kelli Russell Agodon & Martha Silano, is to come up with a list of ten words each about oil and snow, then to alternate a word from the two lists in each line of a poem until all the words have been used. My snow words were granule, icy, angels, crystalline, blanket, powder, pack, flurry, blizzard, and flake; my oil words were fuel, golden, stain, fluid, smooth, slick, viscous, slip, flammable, and commodity.
Kelli Russell Agodon
The following is intended only for mature audiences (A poem)
For this one, I used the November 29th prompt in The Daily Poet, by Kelli Russell Agodon and Martha Silano, which is to take the first thing anybody says to you (or, if you don’t see anybody, the first thing you hear on radio, TV, etc.), and use it as the first line of a poem. I chose to make that first line the title instead.
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Silent blue screen (A poem)
Inspiration has been in short supply the last couple of days. This is Saturday’s sole poem, partly the result of following the November 7th prompt in The Daily Poet, by Kelli Russell Agodon and Martha Silano, which involved taking lines or images from a previously written poem I did not like, and using them to write a new poem.
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Repetition (a poem)
The September 22nd prompt in The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice, by Kelli Russell Agodon & Martha Silano is to pick a word as the title and/or first word of a poem, make every line of the poem start with that word, and make the poem at least ten lines long…
Dream menagerie (a poem)
The August 3rd prompt in The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice, by Kelli Russell Agodon & Martha Silano is to ‘imagine yourself holding five things in your hand: a person, a building, a weapon, and two other items of your choosing.’ I chose Miles Davis, the Eiffel Tower, a flame-thrower, railroad tracks, and an elevator…
On finding a new Ryuichi Sakamoto album on my first visit to a neighborhood record store (a poem)
The August 2nd prompt in The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice, by Kelli Russell Agodon & Martha Silano is to take an item purchased during a trip, then write a poem incorporating that item as an acrostic poem using the name of the city where it was bought. I chose to write about the day I found a copy of the then-new Ryuichi Sakamoto album, Neo Geo, in a small record shop during a walk through an adjacent neighborhood not long after I had arrived in Tokyo.
Clean living is relative, isn’t it? (a poem)
Second time around for the July 31st prompt in The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice, by Kelli Russell Agodon & Martha Silano: write “a gritty, gutsy, and/or groveling poem that includes at least six of these words: stilettos, hangover, whiskey, cigarette, dying, love, begging, naked, jail, dog, hotel.” Compared to last year’s Hotel room, this one is neither gritty, gutsy, nor groveling, but I find it interesting that I gravitate towards the one-night stand—especially since I have never had one…
It’s not rocket science (a poem)
Today’s prompt in The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice, by Kelli Russell Agodon & Martha Silano, is to look for information about an unfamiliar subject, then write a poem about it. I chose to do something a little different…
A rainy Tokyo afternoon (a poem)
Today’s prompt in The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice, by Kelli Russell Agodon & Martha Silano, is to write a pantoum—a poem in which the second and fourth lines of one stanza are used as the first and third lines of the following stanza.
Eleven reasons we’re not together (a poem)
And so it comes back around… The July 19th prompt in The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice, by Kelli Russell Agodon & Martha Silano, is to “write your own list poem using ‘because’ as your refrain word.” (Their main point of reference is Juan Felipe Herrera’s ‘187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross The Border’ poem.) As usual, I picked a tricky one to do…
Ordinary Average Thoughts 