Every couple of years some out-of-touch New Yorker writer, or some bitter, unsuccessful poet, writes an article about how poetry is dead. And, as much as poets should ignore them, the people who write these articles are either so amazingly ignorant, or else such trash writers, that we can't help but analyze how the article is wrong.  It's especially fun when you know the person who wrote the article, and you think "Of course they think poetry is dead, every time they open their fetid mouth on stage, flies appear. Their poetry was dead on arrival, but some of the rest of us are doing just fine."

I remember reading several articles during the Great Boy Band Boom of the late 1990s that announced that rock and roll was dead. Really, journalists are just eager to declare as many things as possible "dead" before people realise that journalism is, not dead, but certainly corrupt and irrelevant.

Write a premature eulogy for an art form that is doing just fine, thank you very much.

Celebrities are just like us, I've heard. They eat, they sleep, they poop, they accidentally text embarrassing photos to corrupt journalists. It's completely possible that you've run into someone totally famous as the two of you went about your daily routines, and, presumably, you both survived.

Write about a time when you crossed paths with a celebrity and how it did or didn't affect your life.

Or, write about a time you THOUGHT you crossed paths with a celebrity but it turned out to be another schmoe like us.

OR, write about a time you interacted with someone you thought was a schmoe like us, but it turned out to be a celebrity. 

Believe it or not, some people prefer live music shows to live poetry shows. Some people even watch recordings of artists performing before an audience on platforms other than Button Poetry. It's true.

Many a shift at work I've heard coworkers and customers discussing various musicians whose concerts are up o Youtube, discussing various aspects of their performances. Choose a musician, or comedian, or, if you're going to be like that, poet, who has multiple concerts or, at least, clips from multiple performances up on Youtube (or Vevo, or w'evs). Take two clips from very different points in their career and compare and contrast them, go into detail about which you prefer and why.

For example, you might pick a Tina Turner concert from her Private Dancer Tour (1985) and one from Poland in 2000.