Here's a thing: I wrote my April 1 poem standing up, leaning over my desk, while my kindergartener stood beside me, asking what I was writing. I spent about five minutes on it, and I wrote it in a burst after the first line came to me. It was the first first line I’ve heard in months. I wanted to grab it before it got away.
It’s not a terrible poem, but it’s not great. What it is is a draft. It’s part of the process of shaking things loose and getting back to writing. I wrote it in five minutes because that’s what I had.
I hope you’ll write in this spirit each day this month: do what you can, and trust that each word, each line, each poem is leading you somewhere new.
April is, for most of us, a terrible time to write a poem a day. Let’s do it anyway.
Prompt #2: Transformations
Make a list of at least 10 things that turn into something else. This could be literal - a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, a baby into a toddler - or you could draw from fairy tales and mythology, where some girl always seems to be turning herself into a tree. (I’m a big fan of wikipedia-research for this kind of thing - getting just a few facts can wiggle things free in your brain and re-strange even the stories you thought you knew. The page on metamorphosis has great (as in horrifying) images of dragonflies and grasshoppers and the pages on Greek mythology and fairy tales might remind you of wild specifics you’d forgotten.)
Flip through the poetry deck you created (or page through old notebooks) and select three things that interest you - ideally, an idiom or saying and two specific sensory details or images. [edit: I forgot to link this! the very first post suggested creating a set of index cards from images/lines/phrases from old notebooks or digital files. It’s linked now.]
Write a poem using whichever of the transformations appeal to you. Use the idiom as your title and include the details the poem itself. If you like a formal constraint, write the poem in couplets and aim for at least eight of them.
Sharing your work helps sustain momentum. I’ll leave the comments open, so you can share a poem title, a snippet of a line, or something else about your writing life. If you’re on twitter, you can share with the hashtag #writemore.
Title and first two lines:
"Pull your head outta your ass"
Not even the devil needs three wives.
Their mother knew–his nose shone