Friday Poetry Prompt

Riffle through your old poems and pull from them a poem that has yet to find a home. Perhaps it isn’t quite finished or perhaps it is different thematically from your other work. Experiment with this poem in one, or all, of the following ways:

Write a “part two” to the poem.

Arbitrarily rearrange the words, lines and stanzas on the field of the page based on some principle that you invent. For example, perhaps words beginning with a particular letter are flush with the left margin while words beginning with a different letter are always indented so many spaces from the left margin. Maybe nouns contain extra spaces or are centered. Use your imagination.

Cut your poem up and rearrange its words. Paste the new onto a colorful piece of paper.

Most of all, enjoy the process. And feel free to post your results in the comments area below.

3 thoughts on “Friday Poetry Prompt

  1. Roy Beckemeyer

    After much cutting and pasting and tabbing only lines beginning with letters from the second half of the alphabet, this came about:

    morning light grazing fields

    frost heaved stones
    emerge blindly
    from soil,

    their cold cores
    stretch into their long
    morning shadows –

    never
    having sought a sun
    they could not see,

    they warm,
    in the end,
    in spite of themselves

    Reply
  2. Pingback: Links to Some of My Poems that Can Be Found on the Web | phanaerozoic

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