So I spent Saturday posting 12 different poems from the half marathon

I purposely didn’t post the prompts for the poems. Also I don’t know if I did them in the order presented.

I feel like I don’t want to post more poems so soon.

I can. Serena finished with Midnight Verse.

So I have options. But I don’t want to.

Instead, I think that I want to tell you what the prompt was for the 12 poems – including the ones that I chose to do something else for. All of the prompts are from the poetry marathon

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Hour 1 – Often when I read a poem, there will be a line (or 5) that sounds spectacular and presents a really interesting idea, but then doesn’t explore it.

One of these lines is from the poems Selkie Weaning Young (Redux) by Diana Khoi Nguyen. The line that particularly stands out to me as containing multitudes is: “This is how she found us/ the past draped about us like a cloak”

You can read the whole poem (it’s short!) to see if there is another jumping off point for you, but if you do end up using the line in your poem, make sure to say “after Diana Khoi Nguyen” in a right aligned line after the title. That way the original poet still receives credit for their idea.

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Hour 2 – Write a poem about an experience, but from the perspective of another. For example you could write a poem about your wedding from the experience of your spouse, or you could write a poem about an argument with a stranger from the perspective of the stranger.

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Hour 3 – I ignored this one entirely because the prompt was too complicated… so I am not going to even bother posting it here.

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Hour 4 – Your challenge is to write a poem about the topic of marriage, without ever using the word marriage, and while also ideally avoiding the words spouse, husband, and wife.

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Hour 5 – Write a mystery poem. The crime could be real or imagined. The poem could be clue based or narrative. The details are up to you.

Hour 6 – (I adjusted this slightly because I don’t at all want to be attached to flat earthers.) The earth is actually flat, you look over the edge and what do you see? Describe it. Disclaimer: I am in no way, shape, or form a flat-earther

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Hour 7 – Redacting is the act of censoring or obscuring part of a text. Sometimes it is done by the author themselves, and more often it is done by someone else.

I want you to write a poem and then during or after writing the poem choose at least one, or ideally five or more words to redact from the poem. How is the poem changed by this simple act? This is not the same as a “black out” or erasure poem”. The words you are using are your own, and well over 50% of them should be visible.

When writing on physical paper, you can do this easily with a marker, ideally a black sharpie. If you are writing your poem in a Word document, you can use the highlight feature and set the highlight color to black, this creates a black box over the word or words. Or you can just write the word redacted in place of the word you wanted to use

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Hour 8 – Every year I include a song prompt. The idea is that you start the song and write a poem while listening to it, starting the song over as needed (or not). There have been protests in the past when I include one with lyrics, so this year I’ve included one with lyrics that you can listen to here and one without, which you can listen to here. No titles or artists given to increase the element of surprise.(I only included the first link)

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Hour 9 – Describe your profession through a funny/humorous poem.

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Hour 10 – The first three words of your title should be “what is love”. That can be your whole title, in and of itself, probably followed by a question mark, or you can add more context onto the title before proceeding to the poem itself.

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Hour 11 – Extraordinary in Ordinary”- pick an ordinary object and make it extraordinary. You can do it by giving it some special attributes or a different background and story.
Contributed by Bhasha Dwivedi.

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Hour 12 – Write a poem that is pretending to be something else, a set of instructions, a recipe, an letter, a news report, etc.

(Why yes, this prompt was inspired by This is Just to Say, which is a poem pretending to be an apology)

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As you can see the prompts were not the only thing that inspired the poetry… but it did help.