Form It is a prompt that focuses on exploring our topic through form poetry. This time, we’re going to “form” a bear.
Prompt Guidelines and Options
1. Consider how you are feeling today, as you approach your topic. Are you sorrowful? Overflowing with joy or good humor? Maybe you’re in a snarky frame of mind. Or feeling perplexed. Perhaps you’re just in the mood to tell a story or express gratitude or awe. You could also consider the nature of the topic itself. Think on these things before you…
2. Choose a form that either matches or purposely works against how you feel as you approach your topic, or that matches or purposely works against the nature of the topic itself. Options:
Acrostic (good for creating puzzles and mystery or dedications)
Ballad (excellent way to tell a story)
Catalog Poem (useful for building intensity, praise, or a sense of magic)
Cinquain (a good form for creating a sense of focus on a single experience, possibly with a twist ending or a terse ending)
Ghazal (helpful for emphasizing “longing” or for exploring metaphysical questions)
Haiku (good for creating immediacy or focusing in on emotion)
Ode (excellent way to praise something or someone you love or admire)
Pantoum (useful for plumbing depressive or anxious themes)
Rondeau (helpful for giving form to extremes of either sadness or dark wit)
Sestina (good for exploring confusion, questions, worries, neuroses, fears in an oblique way)
Sonnet (excellent way to confine a bombastic theme or rein in a potentially sappy or overly-sentimental theme; also an excellent way to “work against” a topic humorously)
Villanelle (useful for themes that feel resistant to answers; also can be used to “work against” a topic, using mocking humor)
3. Be specific. Think nouns instead of adjectives.
4. Consider doing a little research about the topic you are covering: its history, associated words, music, art, sculpture, architecture, fashion, science, and so on. Look for unusual details, so you can speak convincingly and intriguingly.
That’s it! We look forward to hearing you form poetically, about a bear.
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Featured Poem
Thanks to everyone who participated in last week’s poetry prompt. Here is a recent poem from Rick we enjoyed:
Semiprecious
once words
leave the silkiness of the mind,
they harden like amber
if not contained
in form
—by Rick Maxson
Photo by Levan Gokadze. Creative Commons via Flickr.
Browse more bears & beasts poems
Browse more writing prompts
Browse poetry teaching resources
How to Write a Poem uses images like the buzz, the switch, the wave—from the Billy Collins poem “Introduction to Poetry”—to guide writers into new ways of writing poems. Excellent teaching tool. Anthology and prompts included.
“How to Write a Poem is a classroom must-have.”
—Callie Feyen, English Teacher, Maryland
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- Poetry Prompt: My Poem is an Oasis - August 26, 2024
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Laura Lynn Brown says
Fear a furry foe?
Maybe in the wild. Here, child:
hold a fuzzy friend.
Katie says
Laura,
Love this! 🙂
Katie says
Some haiku I played around with this evening:
Ursa Major, that
Great Constellation, Daddy
Bear to Little Bear
&
Said Ursa Minor
to Great Bear, “Will you carry
me home, now Daddy?”
Katie says
a couple more haiku:
Mammal, furry, large
wearing a very short tail
clumsy and heavy.
&
clumsy and heavy
mammal with very short tail
furry and large: bear
Rick Maxson says
Winkie The Bear
It didn’t matter that he had one eye.
He called to me from the highest shelf,
but the sales clerk wouldn’t let me buy,
she said, I can’t, he only has one eye.
He seemed so sad, it made me cry,
that little brown bear all by himself.
It didn’t matter that he had one eye.
with the broken toys on the highest shelf
Rick Maxson says
I was tired. There should be a comma, not a period, after “eye” in the next to the last line.
Katie says
Pooh Bear you sit on our bed
bunny rabbits surrounding,
what goes through your head?
“Will they let me play
when they learn I can’t hop –
there’s just no way?”
Pooh Bear have no fear
There’s just one rule:
Be kind to all here.
Shannon says
Katie, I love this!!
Katie says
Thank you, Shannon!
Our grands love to play with these stuffed animals when they visit. They race upstairs and grab them off our bed and have such fun with them:)