​20. If We Were Meat. Humans aren't often on the menu for other animals, apart from the occasional person antagonizing predator into being eaten, or hungry carnivore happens upon human in distress. Many science fiction books, shows, and movies have imagined scenarios in which humans became the favored meat of a deadlier predator. Now it's your turn. What life form would eat us, and how? You can be as literal or metaphorical about this prompt as makes you comfortable.

21. Menace. In horror movies, victims of the predator often get a goading one-liner in before they either escape or are killed. Fortunately, life is rarely like a horror movie (though more and more like a horror show by the year). Imagine a non-imminent-death scenario where you had the opportunity for an epic one-liner but you didn't think of it in time. Instead of giving us the lead up to the line, what do you imagine would have happened differently in your life After you gave the ultimate insult.

22. The Most Dangerous Game. Tell the readers about a time you were brazen, and it ended up working out for you.

23. Reprisal. Give us a complete story in a single tercet.

24. Secret Written From Inside A Lion's Mouth. Ghost line prompts are where you start a poem with lines from someone else's work, and when you are finished, you erase those lines so that only your own work remains. Begin your poem with the following ghost lines: I worried most that the worry would be what finally/did us in.

25. The Sociopath's Wife Knows Endurance. I've read many poems from the voice of the magician's assistant. What other job descriptions lend themselves to the metaphor of being victim? Tell us a story from the perspective of someone in that career.

26. Secret Written From Inside A Vulture's Mouth.  Animal facts often make intriguing entry points for poems. Use an animal fact as the basis for a metaphor in a poem or story. Apart from mentioning the animal in the title of the poem, make no reference to it in the text.

27. How Women Begot The Bible. Persona pieces were a common fixture of performance poetry in the early 2000s. People would choose an interesting character from history and tell a story from their perspective. Instead of going precisely that route, write a poem or story from the perspective of an interesting character from history's therapist, or the best friend they told secrets to.

28. Velocity. What is your childhood bully up to now? How about a close friend that you grew distant from as you got older? Don't google them or Facebook stalk them, just imagine who they grow into. Write that version. Then, if it satiates you, you can look up what they're really like, and write a companion piece.

29. Secret Written From Inside A Shark's Mouth. Another animal fact poem. This time find three or four fascinating facts about the same animal. Alternate stanzas between telling us a story and telling us the trivia that inspired you to think of the story.

Jeanann Verlee's  Prey presents a series of poems about predators and their prey. It's a an exquisitely articulated chronicle of trauma. It's a fantastic book, but it was difficult to come up with a suite of prompts to represent the poems without the fear of inducing trauma on anyone following the prompts, or ignoring the necessity of the subject matter of these poems.

I've tried to be as true to these poems as possible without making this too emotionally difficult for people following the prompts.

1. The Curse. Imagine a curse that would substantially alter your life in a negative way.  How would you navigate yourself in a world where that curse was happening to you?

2. He Wants To Know Why Sometimes In The Face Of Conflict... What do you do when you're faced with an uncomfortable moral conversation or situation? Do you ever sit back and evaluate why you have that response? Is there a historical logical reason? Do you wish your instinctive responses were different?

3. Ode To My Mother's Backhand. It's easy to write praise poems about the people we love, and poetically burn down the houses of those who hurt us. Unless you've been invited to a roast, I don't recommend writing a take down of someone you love. Instead, try and write something positive about something who hurt you. Feel free to stay away from major trauma, and maybe focus on someone who just slightly annoys you or who has caused inadvertant chaos in your life. Maybe someone who cut you off in traffic, or the acquaintance who unknowingly said something terrible about a person you care about. 

4. Secret Written From Inside A Snake's Mouth. What is something you swallowed that you need to get out of you. Again, you can choose to go the traumatic route, but it can also be a guilty pleasure, or a secret that you've been holding on to for years for no discernable reason.

5. The Happy House. If the childhood home you lived in has been sold in the last twenty years, odds are good the real estate agent has put pictures of it online. Google Maps can show you what the outside and the yard look like now. Compare what you remember your house being like (feel free to use photos if you have them) with the way your house looks now. Don't involve people in the poem in any way, just use the physical changes in the house to tell the story.

6. A Good Life. Choose a villain. It can be a villain in your life, a famous villain of history, or a fictional character. Stripping away all judgement, present us with the basic story of their life. Don't remove any of the horrific acts they've committed, just don't use adjectives or metaphor to influence how the audience feels about them. Let the barest bones of their story give the audience everything they need to hate or fear this person of their own volition.

7. The Hunter, His Weapons. Is there a type of weapon you are an expert in? Or, at least, have some experience with? A gun, a knife, a bow and arrow, your mouth, a hammer. Without using an act of violence, tell us about this weapon. Is there anything positive you can do with it? Why are you so familiar with it?

8. Unkind Years. Ask a simple question. Between the subject and the direct object, present a series of scenarios or alternate questions that render the question irrelevant.

9. The Sociopath's Wife Meets The Wheel Of Death. Using a magician's tool as a metaphor, tell a story without a magician.

10. Secret Written From Inside A Coyote's Mouth. Waiting can be excruciating. What is the thing you felt you waited the longest for. Without ever telling your reader if the wait was worth it, describe how you waited.

11. One Winter While Unemployed. Definitively turn down a job offer.

12. Rearrangement Poem For The Mansplainer. Find a speech or internet comment or article that falls somewhere in the spectrum of making you uneasy to being filled with rage. Rearrange the words to completely alter the meaning. Don't change the tenses or leave out words. Let it be jagged. As long as it presents a new message. Either a complete change in the narrative, or a condemnation of the original meaning.

13. Frat Boy. Tell us a story about a time where you restrained yourself from committing violence or showing anger. Tell it from the perspective of the person whose actions you had to restrain yourself from responding to.

14. Casanova Comes To Dinner. When you write a poem, if you're lucky, you reach a point where you create a devestating line, which becomes your favorite part of the piece. Or, maybe you get an amazing line in your head, and that's where your poem comes from. For this experiment, freewrite something poetic, but feel free to give it more of a short story or essay feel than a poem. Make it at least a couple of pages long. The longer, the better. Now chop away every line that doesn't devestate you. It's ok if it feels choppy. Don't bridge the lines in any way. Just be left with your favorite parts of the poem.

15. The Summer Of Supplemental Income. A person walks into the room. You, initially find the person attractive. But the closer you look, the more frightening the person appears. Take us with you on this journey of observation.

16. Commodity. Write a pantoum about how things have changed as you've aged.

17. Question For The Boys Who Watched From The Window. Write out a dramatic scene on any subject. Include as much sensory memory as possible: sights, sounds, very specific images. Also use a variety of similes and metaphors to describe the events. When you feel satisfied with the story, go back and remove all the subject sentences, all of the "likes" and/or "as"es that you used for similes. Edit out everything that isn't an image or sensation.

18. Pack Hunt. There was a slam season a few years ago where everyone who ended up making the team representing our venue had, at one point, presented a poem in which a dog died. Injured or dead pet stories are always devestating. So, tell us a story about a pet in which it was never in any peril. And, please, let the animal be alive at the end.

19. Scene Written From Inside A Falcon's Mouth. ​Tell the reader about a time where you acted uncharacteristically. Look deeper into the situation, and see if you can discover that, maybe, at the core of the story, your uncharacteristic act is absolutely an essential part of your character.

After reading through the first half of Solmaz Sharif's collection, Look, I've written out some prompts inspired by her poems. Like most of the prompts I provided, they desired outcome isn't intended to be that you have a bunch of poems similar to Sharif's. I usually glom on to a line or a concept that the author plays with. Or I might just be inspired to write a prompt based on the title that, in no way, reflects what the author wrote on the subject.

I hope you find these helpful. Feel free to Tweet links to any poems you make from these prompts to CantabPrompts.

1. Look. Due to the instant access to current events that social media provides, more current existers are exposed to information about their country than ever before, which creates a much more decisive nation, no matter which nation that is. What is The Absolute Most you would endure from your country before you denounced it.

2. Battlefield Illumination. Using just one image, contained in one sentence, tell a complete story.

3. Lay. Tell us about an uncomfortable position you were in. Physically uncomfortable, not morally ambiguous.

4. Contaminated Remains. Create a detailed warning sign that you wish existed. It can be for something serious such as Rules For Interacting With Alligators In the Wild or something less literal like Guidelines For Interacting With My Overly Fragile Male Ego.

5. Safe House. Pick a dictionary page full of interesting words. Begin each line or stanza with a word from that page. Go in alphabetical order.

6. Deception Story. The doctor tells us the needle is not going to hurt. The bus driver tells you their bus is full but the next one is right behind theirs. The check is in the mail. There are lots of little lies people tell to make both you and themselves feel better. When was the last person someone told you a small deception that you immediately recognized as horseshit? Would you rather have had them tell you the truth? When was the last time you told one of these little rot lies? Do you think the other person believed you? Whom do these small deceptions serve?

7. Special Events For Homeland Security. Advertise or describe a party for a group of people based on a profession or hobby that you would absolutely Never Go To.

8. Dear Intelligence Journal. Write a letter to a piece of entertainment or literature that has, on some level, failed you. Tell it how it could have done better by you.

9. Free Mail. How has a group you belong to been misrepresented by society? This can be your gender, your race, your favorite fandom, your occupation, people with similar physicality, your ability, etc. Don't take the easy way out with this. Get really specific.

10. Force Visibility. Is there a word whose meaning you once knew that you, however briefly, couldn't remember. Does that speak at all to you? The person who used it? The situation in which the word was used?

11. Break Up. Write two poems on a similar subject. Create a their poem by allowing the two poems to converse with one another. Maybe alternate stanzas from each. Find some way to merge them into a poem with two distinct voices.

12. Ground Visibility. Create a poem out of a series of disjointed images. Don't bridge them with narrative exposition. Allow the images to tell the story on their own.

13. Desired Appreciation. We all have misconceptions about how being a certain age will change our relationship to the world. What did you think would change after your most recent Significant Birthday. Did it? Will this keep you from putting expectations on your next Significant Birthday?

14. Inspiration Point, Berkley. Maybe you know a painter named Barack Obama or a computer analyst named Stormy Daniels. Tell us about a person who has a famous name but isn't the famous person associated with the name.

15. Defenders/Immediate Family. Tell us about an unglamorous job you performed. Something that needed to be done but would be consider either/both gross or emotionally taxing.

16. Stateless Person. Tell us about a person mostly ignored by history. Perhaps the spouse or child of someone famous. Maybe an inventor of something vital to our society. Educate us. But, you know, poetically.

17. Family Of Scatterable Mines. Make a list of five unrelated possible destinations you might fly or long-distance-drive to: tropical vacation, wedding, funeral, family reunion, moving, etc. For each destination, detail what you would pack (feel free to be surreal or metaphysical). Each trip should have its own stanza, but don't let us know what your destination is, or the reason for your trip, let us guess based on what you've packed.

18. Master Film. Life is complicated and overwhelming almost all the time, right? Was it like this for our grandparents? Our ancestors several generations back? Imagine one of your ancestors between jobs or relationships. What was that like for them?

19. Expellee. Do you remember a time when you were sick as a very young child? Did you know what was going on around you or did it seem alien?

20. Mess Hall. Late twentieth century movies about childhood and coming of age would have you believe that every time kids shared a dining hall, a food fight erupted. I must have gone to the wrong schools. Do you have any memories involving dining halls or being in a restaurant with a large group of friends/acquaintances/coworkers?

21. Theater. When were you the most frightened you've ever been? You don't need to explain why, just focus on the details of the when.

22. Soldier, Home Early, Surprises His Wife At A Chick-Fil-A. What was the most inappropriate surprise you've ever received that didn't involve trauma? Mild embarrassment is okay, but the focus of this should be something that was more irritating or amusing than emotionally damaging.

23. Vulnerability Status. What's the most ridiculous facial expression/pose you've ever been in? Were you aware that it was unusual at the time, or was it pointed out to you? What events preceded it? Was the facial expression/pose ever repeated? Have you ever seen anyone else make something similar?

24. Reaching Guantanamo. Write a series of five letters to the same person. It should be a very personal series of letters. Once you are finished writing them, go back and white out/erase/somehow obscure the personal information that you wouldn't want to share with the world at large, or remove information you think the government would classify before sending the letters.

While switching out bookcases  this week, I found a pile of books that I had been missing since  February. Many were books that I have already done interactions for, but one was Roll Deep by Major Jackson. As I think I'm ready to start reading poetry again, after a several month long hiatus, I decided to read this, simply as it was on the top of the pile.

I'll probably do a few different types of interactions with it in the next few days, but I figured I'd start by making a series of prompts that each poem inspired.

1. Reverse Voyage. Tell a story about the place where you live that mainly focuses on the architecture and geography. Not just rolling hills, cracked pavement, the ocean. Tell us about the stores that have disappeared, the ugly yellow fence that is older than you are, the faded yellow lines in the middle of your street. What does the physical landscape tell you about what it's like to live there right now?

2. Greece. Give us the opposite of homesickness. Show your reader a place that is important to you by intertwining at least one piece of historical importance  of the area, one specific memory involving you and another person (if there was one) while you were there, and a sprinkling of that time's meteorology (was it raining? were there birds? could you smell trees or the local capitalism?).

3. ​Spain. Layers of morning pastries flaked gingerly/then fell, soft as vowels, on a china plate. Get your simile on and describe a conversation using food imagery. It can be a disccussion that changed your life, or it can be about how bored you were on a first date. Make us hungry with the wish that we'd been there, or let us journey into the meal with you to escape the conversation.

4. Brazil. How we move in our day to day lives is our own form of dance and martial art. Tell us about a particular motion you do (if you can't think of one, ask someone who would notice this sort of thing about you to help you out) and how it signifies your relationship to your everyday life.

5. Kenya. Write a security briefing about part of your day. Identify the threats around you, and how you intend to avoid them, imagine which information you contain is most likely to be targeted for espionage, and point out any suspicious behavior you encounter.

6. Italy. If someone were dreaming of you, what would they be dreaming about? 

7. On Disappearing. If you were to suddenly disappear from the place where you lived, how do you think people would speculate your absence? Would the place be significantly different without you?  Would anyone figure out where you'd gone?

8. Mighty Pawns. Tell us about someone you know who is an expert at something not enough people value. Maybe they can solve a Rubik's Cube in under a minute. Maybe they make the best mashed potatoes ever eaten. Tell us about them, why their skill is so impressive to you, and why they would still be impressive even if they lacked that skill.

9. Dreams Of Permancence. Walk around your building or neighborhood until you discover something you haven't noticed before. Tell us about it in vivid detail.

10. Stand Your Ground. I'm not usually a fan of poems that address the nation  or city or neighborhood we are from. Too often, they get so large of scope that they feel generic and trite. But you're a good writer. You can handle it. Address a poem to a place that is important to you. Tell it some things you appreciate, and some things it needs to repair. Bonus points if you can make it a Golden Shovel.

11. Thinking Of Our Shame At The Gas Pump. What would you like your last words to be? What do you think that says about your humanity?

12. OK Cupid. Get yourself blissfully lost in a simile/list poem. Make a statement about how one thing is like another thing and keep chaining similes until you feel like you're finished. Then continue for five or six more similes.

13. Calypso's Magical Garden. If you don't own your dreams, who does? What are they doing with them?

14. Aubade. What things do you wish you could be doing rather than trying, and failing, to sleep?

15. Special Needs. In the mornings, I rub my hands together/back and forth summoning the angels/away from the orthodoxy of façades. Damn. Tell us about a morning ritual you have, what it means to you, and what happens if you are unable to complete it.

16. Inscription. Imagine the object of you affection is a place, a ritual, a type of clothing, a meal, a time of day. Describe them only in metaphor. Don't tell us how you feel about them. Let the images do your emotional storytelling for you.

17. Night Steps. If you've never spent some time staring out a window at night, then maybe poetry isn't for you. What have you seen or not seen when zoning out, your eyes pointed at the outside world.

18. Cries & Whispers. Over the course of a day, write down three things that you're fairly sure you'd forget if you didn't write them down. Let that list sit somewhere for a week. Now come back and tell us whether or not those three things were important, and why.

19. On Cocoa Beach. Revisit your relationship to a place you hate or fear. Is the emotion you've tied to that place rational? Do you think you could overcome it? Why should you bother trying to overcome it when there other, less draining, places to go?

20. Ode To Mount Philo. How you travel through a place shows us a lot about your relationship to a place. If you take a subway through the city, you're going to have a different experience than walking, riding a bicycle, or driving a car. Take us on a small journey through a place that's important to you, using two different modes of transport.

21. Enchanters Of Addison County. Show us a place that's important to you as it travels through seasons. Even if you live somewhere equatorial, there is a difference between the winter and the summer. Physically, what changes about the important place? Are there different people there for different seasons? Does the way you feel about the place change as well?

22. Self-Portrait As The Allegory Of Poetry. What's in your trash can right now? Why?

23. Pathetic Fallacy. Ask a series of spiritual questions of yourself. Don't answer them.

24. Fundamentals. Write a three stanza poem where the first stanza is focused on something aural, the second stanza deals with how something is named, and the third stanza incorporates camera angles and perspective.

25. Canon Of Proportions. Tell us about a famous person born before the 20th century, and how they would interact with a piece of modern technology. For example, Jackson mentions that Thomas Jefferson was never a frequent flier. Tell us about Napoleon's arguments over fraudulent credit card charges, what games Mahatma Gandhi plays on his cell phone.

26. Energy Loves Here. Find an album or playlist that's important to you, and freewrite to it, occasionally making reference to images or lyrics that appear in the music.

27. Why I Write Poety. Let's assume you've already written a poem about why you write poety. Write a poem about what's keeping you from writing poetry more often.

I.

The page where my interest was lost,
premier and pretentious,
a great grey gust of gibberish.

Phileas Fogged down in the derails.

Do you remember when we named the dog
Indiana? A wooden chalice chosen holy?

On the red line to work the other day
I saw people whose skin color was not
the same as mine, and that didn't tell me
anything deep about who they were
as people.  I did not try and imagine
who they were. I did not smugly appropriate
their experiences. Whether or not they're American
is not important. I hope they had a phenomenal day
in the wondrous weather. Unless they're jerks.
Then, I hoped they all stubbed all of their toes.

Last night in the undulating darkness of the thesaurused night
my unconcsciousness theatred a script of fancy.
I shan't describe it to you.

Orwell says happiness can only exist in acceptance.
I am jubilant that this book is not for me.


II.

My eyes are in the text while
my heart is in the kitchen
                               the bedroom
                         on a beach somewhere with a better book.

The exasperating sea of prose
summed up by the coda
where the writer admits having nothing interesting to say

He wins awards for writing about how he doesn't know how to write
beginnings or endings. The middles are choppy, too.


III.

The difference between experience and writing about 
experience is more than perspective.
Is more than let me tell you.
Is more than show.

No matter how much I enjoy a turkey
and cheese sandwich, no matter my fascination with
the post-credit adventures in Super Mario Odyssey,
if all I have to say is ass bounce reveals moon
twinkling over top hat
while the crumbs catch in my goatee,
then that is all I should say.

I'm not sure how to start
telling you how much I enjoy
sitting in the solitude of my air
conditioned house collecting purple
snowflakes while the turkey and cheese
sandwich that I am unsure how to describe
sits on the plate whose importance I am having
trouble describing to you reminds me of a dream
I'm not going to tell you about because I lack
the ability makes me wish I was white water
rafting while this book fell behind the shelves
confusing the lonely spider.

5. Yodaing Your Inner EE Cummings

The best E.E. Cummings poems (and they're not all great) are rhyming jumbles of misordered syntax that make complete sense the very first time you read them. The worst E.E. Cummings poems sound like pretentious, forced, classroom exercises. You understand why a bunch of publishers passed on some of his manuscripts.

You were probably smacked in the eyes with some Cummings poems in high school or college, if those were your thing. If not, there are a plethora of sources .

Try writing two or three poems modeled after his syntax and rhyme scheme. Know that the end result is not to have two or three good EE Cumming homages. Allow them to be awful, if you need to. If you hate them, pull some odd syntax from the wreckage of these poems and delete the detritus before anyone else sees them. Save a list of rhyming end words for lines that you didn't want to salvage. Maybe you can use them in future poems, if you decide to write something with internal rhyme.

Once you've filed away all the pieces of these poems that you want to save, take your favorite weirdly grammared phrase, and make that a title for your next poem.

6. Google Translate Is Just 21st Century Slang For Babelfish

In the early twenty-first century, several poets, myself included, had poems where we took source material, entered it into the Babelfish online translator in English, and asked for it to be translated into, say, Spanish. Then we had it translated to, say, Mandarin. Then we ran it through, say,  Arabic. Finally, we translated it back into English.

What we were given was vastly different from the original input, and, oh, but wasn't it wryly amusing to see how the translation telephone game had changed our words.

For this exercise, run something you've already written, but maybe don't love (or maybe something you love, your choice) through at least three different languages via Google Translate. If you end up liking the poem that comes out of that exercise, cool! You've got a poem. But, if not (and it's probably going to be a not), find unusual phrases that you never would have come up with on your own, but make sense to you, and try building poems around those phrases.

Or, to put it another way:

In the early 21st century, many poets, including me, had poems using our original material that the Babelfish translator introduced in English and suggested to translate it into Spanish. Then we translated it and spoke to Mandarin. Then we went through it, we spoke Arabic. Finally, we translate it into English.

What we offer is very different from the original input and oh, but it's not ridiculous to see how the game of mobile games changed our word.

Before this exercise, run things you've already written, but you can not (or maybe liked your choice) like at least three different languages ​​with Google Translate. If you like a poem from workouts it's very cool! You have poetry. But if it does not happen (and maybe not), find unusual words that you never get to yourself, but it makes sense for you and try to create poems about it.

Or also, to say:

​In the 21st century, we introduced Babelfish Artiner in English, including poetry, including poetry, and offered it for Spain. Then we got killed and talked to the monitor. Then we left and talked in Arabic. After all, we ask you to speak English.

What we find is different from the original settings, but it does not prevent the tone of the sound changing the tone.

We've done things we've written before, but you can not (or maybe choose the best) with a Google Translator on at least three different occasions. If you want poetry from good works! If you are not a poet (and perhaps you are not), learn great words that you are not, but try to build poetry with and with you.

I laid out several recentish collections of poetry on my desk, and then formed them into a pile. I picked up the top book, and looked for words in the text that made for an interesting line, and then kept going until I was done with that particular poem. Then I grabbed the second book, shuffling the pile immediately. You don't have to do any of this. I just wanted to make this totally random.

I am writing these poems in a notebook which I've called "What I'm Currently Reading". I write each mini-erasure in one color ink pen, switching colors every time I switch books.

I haven't finished my poem yet, but here are my first two pages of mined lines/stanzas, and the corresponding text they came from:

Logic is ten percent recovered from bone
opened to crude reason

The brain monsters a residence
in the captive ritual of absence

imagine your head is god
soft fontanels of youth
break this smoking hole
beyond churchless quiet

deliver me past noticed
the abandoned bed of shy recognition
                                                 No
                                                 wonder

These days you sleep in an older language
Nothing pretending to be sick but comfortable

Behind angry forgiveless power
each death: a lost howling

There is no ruthless in blame
who sang a permission of filling pages

I'm barely made of childhoods
a form of architecture I found ragged

If I scratched forth yesterday's treachery
by factually exposing each death defying twitch
If I interrupt a word in fullest wiggling tumble
feathers made of plastic grace
singing clamor and providence
fragment unthreatened as a tombstone
dug up in sin

I am transparent in summer
Always speckled weird that tastes superior
I wonder if some seaside faded fireflies
will calmly mention the sleep they do not believe will arrive

Poems excised from:

1. Sam Sax "On Trepenation" (http://www.wintertangerine.com/on-trepanation/)

2. Rachel McKibbens "Deeper Than Dirt" (https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/deeper-dirt)

3. Major Jackson "Dreams Of Permanence" (https://newrepublic.com/article/61818/dreams-permanence)

4. Matthew Zapruder "Poem For Massachusetts" (http://floatingwolfquarterly.com/5/matthew-zapruder/5/poem-for-massachusetts)

6. Rachel McKibbens "Letter From My Brain To My Heart" (http://quondam-dreams.blogspot.com/2013/03/you-have-my-permission-not-to-love-mei.html)

7. Li-Young Lee "Trading For Heaven" (https://books.google.com/books?id=W2WcAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA41&lpg=PA41&dq=li young+lee+trading+for+heaven&source=bl&ots=65nbEzC0w3&sig=h0RkP4aLLzGb0wdWuraPQJIxxYI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiG8aKSmbPYAhUQMd8KHexGAlUQ6AEISTAF#v=onepage&q=li-young%20lee%20trading%20for%20heaven&f=false)

8. William L. Boyd "Backup For A University"

9. Patricia Lockwood "The Hunt For A Newborn Gary" (https://books.google.com/books?id=g7SKDQAAQBAJ&pg=PA20&lpg=PA20&dq=patricia+lockwood+hunt+for+a+newborn+gary&source=bl&ots=fp-3C-zzQS&sig=pjvUfxocm0oC9hY6xB68W2BLIY8&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiFg6b7mbPYAhVCZN8KHXThAfgQ6AEILjAB#v=onepage&q=patricia%20lockwood%20hunt%20for%20a%20newborn%20gary&f=false)

10. Danez Smith "Faggot Or When The Front Goes Up"

11. Matthew Zapruder "I Drink Bronze Light" (https://pen.org/i-drink-bronze-light/)

12. Major Jackson "Tour Of The Food Distribution Point, Ifo"

I often find myself getting stuck in the same writing patterns. Even when I'm writing about people or subjects I haven't tackled before, I use similar verbiage, images that cropped up in previous poems. And that's okay. Lots of writers get famous by having a style that allows themselves to repeat images across entire manuscripts. Self-referentialism isn't the worse thing that can happen, but it can be tiring to write, especially if you're not doing it on purpose. So for January, my goal is to write at least eight poems that don't necessarily sound like poems I've already written. Here are the eight prompts I'll be working with to alter the way I write:

1.) The Grand Erasure. Erasures can be great, but they're tough. Typically, an erasure takes an existing poem, or essay, or speech, or story. The poet then takes a marker or scissors or some implement and whittles the words in the poem down until it creates an entirely new piece of art. (examples: Form N-400 Erasures, Trump Inauguration Erasure,  Louis CK's Apology Erasure, and this entire website of erasures)

We're not getting that specific at all.

Take at least five books of poems. Open the first book at random. Locate a word on the page that speaks to you, then find another word nowhere near it that might follow, keep doing this until you have at least the beginning of a phrase, maybe as much as a stanza. Now open a second book and do the same thing. This second book that you've randomly opened to might continue the theme or it may not offer anything remotely similar. That's ok. We're not trying to get a whole poem out of these erasures, we're mining for images and phrases we may not have come up with. Don't steal an image. If a poem says:

A bear opens a refrigerator with an app designed for otters
but the refrigerator doesn't care
It opens for anyone hungry
It does not care who calls it cold
Sometimes we have to be cold to preserve the parts of ourselves
other people need

you should not take "a bear opens a refrigerator" or "the parts of ourselves other people need". Instead maybe "a bear...designed for...hungry...calls...to preserve...need"

That's probably not something you would have come up with without seeing it in someone else's poem.

The idea of a Grand Erasure is to get maybe ten of these phrases or stanzas, and then use as many of them as you see fit to write a new poem or poems. There's no rule about using all of what you've scavenged. You can rework the phrases or images you find however you want. Don't be a slave to what you've removed, let it guide you to a poem that you wouldn't have otherwise written.

2. Remix To Sing

This is a pretty basic prompt that I don't use as often as I should.

Take a piece of your own work, or a poem you love by someone else, and create a new poem using only the words from that text. You don't have to use every word, but use as many as you can to say something different (not necessarily taking the opposite stance from the original...make it surreal...take a poem about frogs and make it a love song to Florida if the text allows it). As with any of my prompts, don't feel boxed in by the rules. If you want to use a word more times than it appears in the actual text, go for it. Is it lacking the preposition you want? Add it in.

You might not end up with your finished product purely by remixing. You may get done with the remix, and think it doesn't do what you want it to. That's okay. Now you have the beginning of something you wouldn't otherwise have. Tear out what you don't what. Add transitions that are absolutely not from your original text. Scrap 3/4s of the poem, but keep a series of images or phrases that you like.  Discover that, out of this three page poem that you chose, that there's only a five line section that you like. Congrats, you have a five line poem. Save the rest in a word doc or notebook for later.

3. The iPod Shuffle

You can use Spotify, or a CD shuffle, whatever technology you have that allows songs to show up at random.

Take the first ten (or twenty, or whatever number you like, it's your life) titles of songs that come up. Use all those words in a poem. But it can't be a love poem. It can be about something or someone you love, but it can't be about A Nebulous You, or a pick-up line poem. It can be surreal. It can be about work. Anything but a love poem.

Ok, and then also use all those words for a love poem. Who am I to tell you what to do with your words?

And remember, if you don't like the first ten (or however many you choose) titles that come up, shuffle again.

4. Taming Your Thesaurus

There are prose writers and poets who cherish their their thesauruses. They utilize the most ornate lexemes to manufacture profound testimony from tedious abstractions.

They make me tired and unimpressed.

Find one of these fancy poems, and thesaurus it down to its most base language.

(Here's one of my favorites.)

Take that poem skeleton, and use your thesaurus (or thesaurus.com if you, like me, burned your thesaurus in a fit of rage during the 90s) to find synonyms that you would never use. Now use them. Choose the five (or ten, or two...it's your life) words that most repel you, and find a way to work it into a poem you don't hate. It can just be a random word in your poem, it can be the title, the whole poem can just be about how much you hate that word/those words.

I buy most of my books in bookstores. When I do order a collection of poetry online, I tend to order the cheapest copy available. Not just to be frugal, or to take the most advantage of online shopping, but because many of these books come used, often by students who have filled the margins with notes.

These notes are usually Hella Basic. Which is fine. It might be their first time experiencing poetry. Or they were forced to take this class and have been told to take notes, but have no idea what parts of a poem are important. Or they are experts and their notes are well-researched and fascinating, and drive me to explore more.

The copy of Yusef Komunyakaa's Talking Dirty With Gods that I received was Hella Basic.  But without me having to do any editing, they produced a poem I quite like. These are the notes with the linebreaks, punctuation, and capitalization as they appeared in the book. Stanza breaks occur when there are many notes for one poem, although there are some stanzas that represent several poems, which only had one note in them.

A Young Reader's Guide To Yusef Komunyakaa's
Talking Dirty With Gods, As Written By A Young Reader

Beastly man
Virgin huntress
legend that
Judas in the Bible
hanged himself on.
He stands for a betrayer
-a skinning knife
monster made of different parts
God of doors that had 2 heads
formalist - relation to title?
sociological - sum up main points?
painting
river of the dead
shorebird
not too
high,
not too
low
consequences of childlike behavior --> (indecipherable)
copy animal's abilities

-King of the gods
-cares
-makes himself
off as the victim
-entertainer
ladies man
promotes
peace
promotes 
social
interaction
-fire center of attention
-large disastrous fire
-trickster
-player
-used many disgui - bull 
                                            sheperd
                                            eagle
Zeus = Jupiter
-singing
-thrumming
-playful
flirtation
-goddess of
marriage
wife of
Zeus

-twins raised
by wolves & are
the founders of
the city of ROME
-nipples
-a museum in flame
}we start believing
our lies
<strike>he gets aroused</strike>
-act of having weight
Romulus
kills
Remus
to her children

necrophilius
DEAD
:City of the dead
city
Museum
b/c that's where
all the artifacts
are: The sarcophagi
vials of ash, etc.
-b/c its the
city of angels
wealth, <strike>& business</strike>
is busy
-partial shadow <strike>+ an eclipse</strike>
-egyptian god <strike>the end</strike>
of the afterlife/death
-a stone coffin
-EARLY ARCheologists

-a sailor that was always drunk
traitor
-A faun-like God
of sheep & flock.
He was <strike>in</strike> linked to
God of <strike>Isis</strike> Thionisis
Also known as the one
that discovered music
Greek God
Of Lust
[He made people fall
in love (like Cupid)]

- you are in
on it. you're
part of the
process
-a poet
-crazy love
-------difficult to define
<strike>rampant</strike>
}He wAs pAn
being moved on
-a RiveR
(no control)
a handsome,
seductive, jealous
maRRied man
a nobleman
frequently
in love affairs.
(mAnwhoRe)

-wishes
-intimacy
-touch - sexual
---longing
---dry
die > obstacle
He desires
For her to
speak Of
him
intimately
--wants 
to hear her
say his
name
-obsession
--battle

             ?

-Killing
of Babies
​-mostly women
female Babies
T: women try to escape
the fate lives they live
---out of the dead
curled milk - sour

action of having sex
-action of having sex
-engage from 
-past...upbringing
crazy?
sounds? of sex?
-condom?
-cum?
-virgin?
-dildo?
-porn?
-
- Americans - open to sex
non-Americans-closed
-sexual implication
-pain reliever
-enjoying
-pleasure

pain of last love
death connotations,
sin + temptation?
-->demon in the form
of a man (indecipherable) woman
to seduce one in dreams
-not 1st time!
-->not pleasant
-->familiar scent
-->sex, intimacy
}bold but
afraid
-abusive
sun
]
-->actress, model
50s & 60s
-->art of
Dadaism --.
Surrealism
-improper
-
most
evil
time
(opposite
3pm -
most
holy)
--?
-->soul, (indecipherable)
--inability to move on
-->dirty
doves in chimney
creator of
-trap
-found in chimney
-->fire, burning,
escape, 
dirty

secretive
sneaky
Traditional
spAnish.
Remedies
-old person
or
old ways
CHIldren 
or
meN

​Sadly, poet John Ashbery died this week. He wasn't a huge influence on me or my writing, but I often enjoyed how he chose to evoke feelings rather than use a traditional narrative.

To celebrate his memory, I read one of his more recent collections,  A Worldly Country . Here are twenty prompts based on the first twenty poems from the book.

1. Worldly Country: Imagine a day where complete chaos has run over the world.  Not a violent apocalypse, but a day of complete inexplicable weirdness. But just One Day of it. The next day, everything's back to normal. What caused that day? And what happened during it? Will we ever know how it got back to normal?

2. To Be Affronted (directly from the text of the poem): Imagine a movie that is the same/as someone's life, same length, same ratings./Now imagine you are in it, playing the second lead,/a part actually more important than the principals'./How do you judge when it's more than/half over?

3. Streakiness: Imagine that it's not people who prefer to go out in good weather, but weather conditions that prefer to come out only for certain people. What's their criteria? Do clouds have a different agenda than the wind?

4. Feverfew (directly from the text): What if we are all ignorant of all that has happened to us?

5. Opposition To A Memorial: Describe, in detail, the quality of an intangible concept. For example, what would "I can't find my cellphone" look like if it were a house. How would you envision "How am I going to explain this to my mother?"

6. For Now: Forgive yourself for something you did out of ignorance. Still keep yourself accountable, and lay out a way you can, in some way, account for that mistake.

7. Image Problem:  If your life was a novel, let's assume it was divided up into chapters. Where does your fist chapter end? Why there?

8. Litanies: Make a short list. A list of days, or seasons, or flavors in a single packet of Skittles. Something manageable. Now decide which of those things is The Best of them, and offer that thing praise, and excuse it any shortcomings it might have.

9. Like A Photograph: Everyone reading this has, at some point tripped, and then carried on as if nothing had happened. If you have mobility issues, maybe your transport very temporarily stopped working. What was your inner-monologue like immediately following the issue? Did any part of your actions or speech betray that monologue?

10. A Kind Of Chill: Even non-human animals must get bored of their jobs from time to time. Narrate a nature documentary of an animal with ennui.

11. One Evening, A Train: Dismiss someone or something from your presence. Let it know, in no uncertain terms that they/it is not only no longer needed, but no longer allowed near you.

12. Mottled Tuesday:  Something is about to go horribly wrong at a grocery store or retail establishment. Watch it unfold. Tell us about it.

13. Old Style Plentiful: Passive Aggressive Notes was a popular website about a decade ago. Write an extremely passive aggressive ode to something or someone you like, but which is driving you crazy. 

14. Well-Scrubbed Interior: Is there a part of you that you feel is understaffed? Maybe your temper could use more employees, or your heart needs a new manager. Write a want-ad to fill the positions you can afford to fill.

15. Cliffhanger: In all plays, even Hamlet, the scenery/is the best part. Describe the scenery in your favorite play, movie or book. Focus on the scenery. If you can somehow make that tell the story without using any dialog or describing people's actions or motivations, then you are a true professional.
 
16. The Ecstasy: If history was a single building, what would it look like? Would you want to stay there? For how long?

17. Filigrane: Give an evacuation order for part of your past. Explain how it will benefit from leaving you. If the spirit moves you, give it conditions for the possibility of its return.

18. Ukase: Write a celebration of nature using a thesaurus for at least 1/3rd of the words in the poem. You don't have to slot the frilliest words, just the vocabulary you wouldn't commonly chisel.

19. Casuistry: What would happen if morning didn't come when it was expected? What would come in its place? How would you handle it?

20. Andante Favori:  The end of summer can be a depressing time, particularly when you're a kid and have to say goodbye to all of your summer friends (or are summer friends mostly a construct of living in a seasonal economy tourist trap?).  Tell us about how the change of a season affected your emotional well being.