The January 26th prompt in The Daily Poet, by Kelli Russell Agodon and Martha Silano, is to go from large to small over the course of the poem. As usual, I took a slightly different path, and referenced both Kate Bush and Nick Lowe in the process…
Martha Silano
Wishing (a poem)
The January 25th prompt in The Daily Poet, by Kelli Russell Agodon and Martha Silano, is to use an abstract word as the title of a poem, then write that poem using concrete images. This is what I came up with…
A couple with their heads full of clouds (a poem)
The January 23rd prompt in The Daily Poet, by Kelli Russell Agodon and Martha Silano, is to write a poem that either uses the title of a Salvador Dalí work as the title, or includes four items from a list of titles of his work. I ended up doing both.
Upon waking up from the dream in which I’m running around the house honking like Felix Ungar, scaring away the beautiful woman in the Morticia Addams dress in the process (a poem)
The January 22nd prompt in The Daily Poet, by Kelli Russell Agodon and Martha Silano, is to write a two-line poem with no more than thirteen syllables in each line, then give it a title that is either really long or just one word.
Grandpa’s pipe (a poem)
The January 21st prompt in The Daily Poet, by Kelli Russell Agodon and Martha Silano, is to ‘focus on taste, hearing, scent, and touch’ instead of on sight. I diverged from the prompt after that, going back to a childhood memory instead of noting things throughout my day…
Running on empty (a poem)
The January 14th prompt in The Daily Poet, by Kelli Russell Agodon and Martha Silano, is to write a poem that consists of one run-on sentence—commas okay, but no colons or semi-colons. I hate run-on sentences, but I figured I’d give this one a shot.
I ended up, more or less, with a prose poem. I don’t like prose poems, but breaking this one up into lines and stanzas didn’t make sense, so I will just let it be…
The Reading (a poem)
The January 10th prompt in The Daily Poet by Kelli Russell Agodon and Martha Silano, is to pick a letter of the alphabet, and accumulate a list of at least 25 words starting with that letter, then ‘use at least 15 in a poem about something that does not start with that letter.’ Since I did not write anything on Saturday, and today’s prompt did not spark my interest, I tackled this one today.
The list of words I came up with: temptation, text, tunnel, therapist, talk, tears, tarot, train, table, TV, thermostat, tape, tree, today, Tuesday, twin, thermos, telephone, throw, theatre, tombstone, testify, Thursday, trapped, three, Texas, there, talent, truth, think, trumpet, thunder, trap, travel, time, tradition, transit, together, triangle, thought.
I mixed things up further by writing about my experience at a poetry reading on Sunday.
Urban pillow fort (a poem)
The January 6th prompt in The Daily Poet by Kelli Russell Agodon and Martha Silano, is to ‘[w]rite a poem that begins with the image of a stone, then add at least five of these words to it: kamikaze, landslide, spill, bridge, vaccine, read, red, hollow, mismatch, tilt, freeway, pillow, harmonica, fairy shrimp.’ (I skipped the ‘extra credit’ part, which involved ending with ‘a soup image’.)
Meatloaf and crackers (a poem)
I was trying to follow the January 3rd prompt in The Daily Poet by Kelli Russell-Agodon and Martha Silano, which says to use fifteen words that you don’t normally use in your poems. I opted to grab several books and pick random words. Unfortunately, I wasn’t satisfied with the results I was getting, probably because I was still choosing the words—and they tended to be the kinds of words I would choose, whether or not I had used them before. So, I ended up with a tanka.
I want to be more like the color red (a poem)
The December 23rd prompt in The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice, by Kelli Russell Agodon & Martha Silano, didn’t interest me—so I went to the December 24th prompt, which provided a few possible first lines for a poem. I chose I want to be more like the color red…
Ordinary Average Thoughts 