Right up front, let me admit that today, Day 9, is the one day I allowed myself to bail on, as I’ll explain in the section labeled Writing Process below. Today’s parameters are: Prompt: landscape Form: found poetry Device: enumeratio Found Poetry Like a blackmail letter in a sordid crime novel, a found poem is […]
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Today’s Day 8 assignment involves: Prompt: drawer Form: ode Device: apostrophe Ode An ode is a laudatory poem celebrating a person, an object, a place, etc. It can come in any form these days, having shed its ancient (and much stricter) formal requirements. At their best, odes are both a compelling portrait of something and
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Here’s the assignment for Day 7: Prompt: fingers Form: prose poetry Device: assonance Prose Poetry A prose poem is any piece of verse written using the normal typography of prose, while still maintaining elements of poetry, like rhythm, imagery, etc. The words may be arranged typographically like any piece of prose, but the sounds, the
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The second half of our poetry writing course begins with this Day 6 assignment: Prompt: hero or heroine Form: ballad Device: anaphora/epistrophe Ballad Ballads are dramatic, emotionally charged poems that tell a story, often about bigger-than-life characters and situations. They can be long, short, rhymed, or unrhymed — by now there are no strict rules
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The assignment for Day 5 includes the following: Prompt: fog Form: elegy Device: metaphor Elegy Originally requiring specific meters, nowadays elegies come in all shapes and sizes, though they are united by their (often melancholic) focus on loss and longing. As much as it can mourn something that’s gone forever, it can also celebrate it.
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The Day 4 assignment offers these challenges: Prompt: animal Form: concrete poetry Device: enjambment Concrete Poetry Also known as shape poetry, the idea here is to arrange your words on the screen (or the page) so that they create a shape or an image. The meaning of the image can be obvious at first glance,
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The assignment for Day 3 offers these three parameters: Prompt: trust Form: acrostic Device: internal rhyme Acrostic Acrostics have been around for millennia: they’re a creative way to give order and convey multiple meanings at once while staying fairly subtle. There have been two prevalent ways to create acrostics. In one, you follow the sequence
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Here’s the assignment for Day 2: Prompt: journey Form: limerick Device: alliteration limerick Limericks are traditionally composed of five lines of verse. The traditional rhyming scheme of a limerick is a a b b a — the first two lines rhyme, then the next two, and the final verse rhymes with the first couplet. Write
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Today begins WordPress Writing 201: Poetry Class. How great it is to have such a resource available for FREE! I write strictly nonfiction, so this class is a big stretch for me. But I’m determined to work on my writing this year, and what better way to do that than to dabble in something WAY
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My major life activities are reading (usually fiction) and writing (always nonfiction). So I’m delighted when I come across something that combines the two: something like Marcy McKay’s writing challenge What Your Favorite Books Tell You About Your Writing. Marcy runs The Write Practice, a web site and newsletter aimed at fiction writers, but even
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