Today is Earth Day, so I would like to challenge you to write a “pastoral” poem. Traditionally, pastoral poems involved various shepherdesses and shepherds talking about love and fields, but yours can really just be a poem that engages with nature. One great way of going about this is simply to take a look outside your window, or take a walk around a local park. What’s happening in the yard and the trees? What’s blooming and what’s taking flight?

What came out of today’s prompt was a poem about North Uist in the Outer Hebrides, where I feel very happy wearing no make-up.

Nature Spa

No make-up on North Uist
hair salt-washed, wind-blown dry
face tanned by circling sun
of summer’s stretching days.

Drift of bog myrtle where I look up
to high lark’s song floating
and touch the croak of corncrakes
in flowered meadows.

And when sun dips low and gold
I tread the beach, hear sea music,
feet smoothed, exfoliated
by shellsand shining white.

Our prompt for today is an old favorite – the erasure! This involves taking a pre-existing text and blacking out or erasing words, while leaving the placement of the remaining words intact. I’ve been working on an erasure project that involves an old guide to rose-growing. Here’s an example of an original page, side-by-side with my “erased” page:

One easy way to get started is just to photocopy a page from a book or magazine, and black out words. Or you can copy a text into Microsoft Word, and turn the words you don’t want white. Erasures can feel almost like a game – carving new poems out of old texts like carving statues from blocks of marble — and so they take some of the anxiety out of writing. They can also lead to surprising new ideas, as the words of the original text are given new contexts.

The first book I thought of was ‘Jane Eyre’ and I selected a passage from the first chapter:

‘I returned to my book–Bewick’s History of British Birds:  the
letterpress thereof I cared little for, generally speaking; and yet
there were certain introductory pages that, child as I was, I could
not pass quite as a blank. 

Nor could I pass unnoticed the suggestion of the bleak shores of
Lapland, Siberia, Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, Iceland, Greenland, with
“the vast sweep of the Arctic Zone, and those forlorn regions of
dreary space,–that reservoir of frost and snow, where firm fields
of ice, the accumulation of centuries of winters, glazed in Alpine
heights above heights, surround the pole, and concentre the
multiplied rigours of extreme cold.”  Of these death-white realms I
formed an idea of my own:  shadowy, like all the half-comprehended
notions that float dim through children’s brains, but strangely
impressive.  The words in these introductory pages connected
themselves with the succeeding vignettes, and gave significance to
the rock standing up alone in a sea of billow and spray; to the
broken boat stranded on a desolate coast; to the cold and ghastly
moon glancing through bars of cloud at a wreck just sinking.

I cannot tell what sentiment haunted the quite solitary churchyard,
with its inscribed headstone; its gate, its two trees, its low
horizon, girdled by a broken wall, and its newly-risen crescent,
attesting the hour of eventide.’

Here is my erasure poem, based on this passage.

Today, I challenge to write a poem that states the things you know. For example, “The sky is blue” or “Pizza is my favorite food” or “The world’s smallest squid is Parateuthis tunicata. Each line can be a separate statement, or you can run them together. The things you “know” of course, might be facts, or they might be a little bit more like beliefs. Hopefully, this prompt will let your poem be grounded in specific facts, while also providing room for more abstract themes and ideas.

The Other

I know that you smile
I hear the words you speak but
cannot read your thoughts

I’d like to challenge you to write a landay. Landays are 22-syllable couplets, generally rhyming. The form comes from Afghanistan, where women often use it in verses that range from the sly and humorous to the deeply sardonic and melancholy. Check out this long investigative article on landays for a fascinating look into a form of poetry often composed in secret, and rarely written down. You could try to write a single landay – a hard-hitting couplet that shares some secret (or unspoken) truth, or you could try to write a poem that strings multiple landays together like stanzas (maybe something akin to a syllabic ghazal?)

I found it quite difficult to settle on a topic, but was eventually moved by today’s news.

To cross the Mediterranean
is to turn your face to the wind and not look back.

And now for our prompt, which takes us from 2015 back to the 1700s. After all, it’s the eighteenth of April, which means that today is the 240th anniversary of the midnight ride of Paul Revere! Today, in keeping with the theme of rush and warning, I challenge you to write a poem that involves an urgent journey and an important message. It could be historical, mythical, entirely fictional, or memoir-ical.

I had to think long and hard about an urgent journey and an important message – eventually I chose to go to the southern hemisphere in 1916.

Endurance 1916

the small boat that twists
through mountains and deep valleys
of restless, green waves

holds six men whose hands
grip weathered wood, their faces
pale, furrowed, salt washed

after sixteen days
black, sharp peaks of South Georgia
and one final push

to reach lights of hope,
rescue for those who remain
stranded on ice floes

far from battle fields
of France, this small miracle
where all men survive

Today, I want you to try to write a “social media”-style poem. Namecheck all of your friends. Quote from their texts, tweets, FB status updates, twitter accounts, and blogposts, and the back of the cereal box on your breakfast table. The poem is about you and you are about what you say, think, talk, eat. You might end up with a poem that seems bizarrely solipsistic (like the internet itself, maybe?), but there might also be a spark there of something live and fun and present (like the verbal equivalent of a really great animated cat)

My poem today is a quick blast and a complete contrast to yesterday’s carefully crafted terzanelle. ‘Facebook Friday’ is based on consecutive Facebook posts at 6 pm on Friday 17th April. I’m not sure if it is ‘like the verbal equivalent of a really great animated cat’ but, interestingly, there are some linked themes.

Facebook Friday

Weekend mode on
about to burst into Roll Out the Barrel
avoid six foods too cruel to eat
drink sugar free and skinny caramel frapuccino
a lost gold pen at Sainsbury’s Craigleith
can we find the owner?
good news baby April’s missing mother found
Panama canal and wildlife highlights
a lovely day on the South Bank
poets read at Hebden Bridge
I am so drinking vanilla lattes from now on
happy Friday.

Here we go with Prompt 15.

Today, I challenge you to write a poem that addresses itself or some aspect of itself (i.e. “Dear Poem,” or “what are my quatrains up to?”; “Couplet, come with me . . .”) This might seem a little meta at first, or even kind of cheesy. But it can be a great way of interrogating (or at least, asking polite questions) of your own writing process and the motivations you have for writing, and the motivations you ascribe to your readers.

A poem speaks

I want to be a stream of consciousness
play around
vary
the length of
lines
and just
take whatever comes
instantly
without thinking

Sometimes I’m shaped
so that I come out
with a regular pattern
of lines and verses.

Sometimes they try to make me rhyme
it’s hard to do this all the time
because I find they’ve tried so hard
I sound just like a greetings card.

Mostly I shape myself
nudge the poet and
show the way
I want
to go.

Today, I challenge you to write a poem that takes the form of a dialogue. Your conversant could be real people, or be personifications, as in Andrew Marvell’s A Dialogue Between the Soul and the Body, or Yeats’ A Dialogue of Self and Soul. Like Marvell, and Yeats, you could alternate stanzas between your two speakers, or perhaps you could give them alternating lines. Your speakers could be personifications, like those in Marvell and Yeats’ poems, or they could be two real people. Hopefully, this prompt will give you a chance to represent different points of view in the same poem, or possibly to create a dramatic sense of movement and tension within the poem.

This is my take on a dialogue we’ve probably all had:

Edited Highlights

I see her mirrored behind me,
scissors pointing, hair spiky,
anonymous in black.
We talk to our reflected selves.

OK and Hello: A magazine while you wait?
Going somewhere nice tonight? Just home?
Capuccino? Or did you say Americano?
Can’t hear for that drier.

Booked your holidays yet?
Harris? I thought you said Paris!
That’ll be cold. Tenerife for me,
warm, all-inclusive.

Show you the back?
The final flourish of the mirror
to reveal the dark side of the moon
now highlighted.

Questions and answers
reflected from a thousand mirrors:
cutting to essentials,
colouring our days.

In keeping with the mysterious quality of the number 13, today I challenge you to write a riddle poem. This poem should describe something without ever naming it. Perhaps each line could be a different metaphor for the same object? Maybe the title of the poem can be the “answer” to the riddle. The result could be a bit like our Day One poems of negation, but the lines don’t need to be expressed in negatives.

So it’s another riddle poem.  I decided not to make the title the precise answer!

Companion

You are always there
growing with me,
increasing each year:
I can’t stop you.

Once I liked you,
so proud of you that
I measured you in halves
or even quarters.

Now I hesitate, ignore how
you creep up behind me
with your carpe diem
tapping on my shoulder.

Oh, but every ten years I’m
more open about you:
we bond in champagne moments
when a milestone ends in zero.

You give wine mellowness,
and cheese distinction:
if you make three digits
I’ll smile, respect you.