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.
The Daily Poet
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.
The pop-song life (a poem)
Today’s prompt in The Daily Poet, by Kelli Russell Agodon and Martha Silano is to write a poem about how you learned a particular word. The example given in the book is about how one of them (I assume it was Kelli Russell Agodon, but which of them ‘I’ refers to is not clear) learned the word ‘omit’ back in 1970. This made me think of how I learned the word ‘alibi’ from a Partridge Family song in 1971, so that’s what I started writing about. When I finished the poem, however, the two stanzas referring to that specific experience did not fit—so the poem no longer has anything to do with learning words…
Opposite Day (a poem)
Today’s prompt in The Daily Poet, by Kelli Russell Agodon and Martha Silano is to write a poem about opposites—specifically, to make two lists of characteristics, with one list being the opposite of the other, then writing a poem in two voices, going back and forth between the lists. I took a different approach to the theme…
A brief rumination on the meaning of a flag (a poem)
Today’s prompt in The Daily Poet, by Kelli Russell Agodon and Martha Silano is to write a poem for Flag Day. Although the prompt suggests writing specifically about the American flag—and I did keep that in mind—I concerned myself more with the meaning of flags in general, because the meaning of a flag can shift for any number of reasons…
6-Inch Alien (a poem)
Today’s prompt in The Daily Poet, by Kelli Russell Agodon and Martha Silano involves using a tabloid headline for inspiration. I found one, 6-INCH ALIEN, on the Weekly World News web site…
Ordinary Average Thoughts 