The December 21st prompt in The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice, by Kelli Russell Agodon & Martha Silano, is to write a poem beginning with the line 96% of the universe is made up of the dark and unknown. I modified that ever-so-slightly…
Martha Silano
A partial list of what I want (a poem)
The December 20th prompt in The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice, by Kelli Russell Agodon & Martha Silano, is to write a poem ‘enumerating your wishes and desires’.
Saturday morning (a poem)
Now back to some regular poeting…
The November 29th prompt in The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice, by Kelli Russell Agodon & Martha Silano, is to ‘[w]rite a poem that begins with the next thing anyone says to you.’ If nobody else is around, it suggests calling somebody up, or turning on the TV or radio, and using the first thing you hear. Of course, with my luck, the first thing I encountered was a commercial that opened with somebody asking ‘What’s up?’ Meh. I kept watching, in case the program to follow, The Dick Van Dyke Show, offered something better. The episode opened with Mary Tyler Moore asking ‘What’s this?’ Okay, okay…
Open letters to my invisible nemeses (a poem)
The November 25th prompt in The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice, by Kelli Russell Agodon & Martha Silano, is to ‘[w]rite an experimental poem to all the things in your life that you either worry about, are afraid of, or events that have shaken you up [sic]. Allow the repetition of “dear” to guide you…’ I wouldn’t call any of these ‘experimental’, but I think I have the rest covered…
You know… (a poem)
The November 21st prompt in The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice, by Kelli Russell Agodon & Martha Silano, is to ‘[w]rite a poem to the “You”.’ (I didn’t get to the part about using three of my favorite words, or lots of words with an “oo” sound, though.)
Why I don’t drink wine anymore (a poem)
The November 21st prompt in The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice, by Kelli Russell Agodon & Martha Silano, is to ‘[w]rite a poem that begins After three glasses of wine or After three shots of whiskey and continue writing about the antics that follow.’
The Slow Demise of Modern Democracy (a pessimist’s poem)
The November 19th prompt in The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice, by Kelli Russell Agodon & Martha Silano, is to ‘[w]rite a poem that has more multisyllabic [sic] words than single syllabic [sic] words’. Apparently, the following is what happens when I purposely try to increase the syllable count…
I wanted to say… (a poem)
The November 13th prompt in The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice, by Kelli Russell Agodon & Martha Silano, is to ‘[w]rite a poem that begins with the line I wanted to say…’.
In which I imagine a happy moment with you (a poem)
The November 12th prompt in The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice, by Kelli Russell Agodon & Martha Silano, is similar to the HoneLife prompt I followed about a week ago. The only real difference is that Agodon & Silano’s prompt calls for the use of a newspaper or magazine. I used the last issue of City Arts magazine.
that small smudge of hope (a poem)
The November 6th prompt in The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice, by Kelli Russell Agodon & Martha Silano, is to pick a particular line from a particular page of the nearest book, then use that line as the title of the poem—and within the poem, if possible. I started by using my copy of The Daily Poet, which yielded the intriguing line ‘and they began selling steamed seawater’. Unfortunately, what I was getting from that was unsatisfying.
Then I got e-mail notifying me that HoneLife’s new poetry group had posted its first exercise. I followed the link to find that the prompt was very similar. The main difference was that the prompt called for turning to a random page, and pointing to a line without looking. Then it called for using that line as the first in a 3- to 5-line poem. I ended up going with a line from Franz Wright’s Kindertotenwald as reproduced in the deluxe edition of David Sylvian’s new release, there’s a light that enters houses with no other house in sight. Since I normally do not use lengthy lines, I broke up the line into three, then added four stanzas of three lines each to complete the poem.
Ordinary Average Thoughts 