Form It is a prompt that focuses on exploring our topic through form poetry. This time, we’re going to “form” a box.
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 box.
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Featured Poem
From a recent poetry prompt, here is part of a poem from Kaiya we’d like to share:
Our songs pierce through the quiet dark
Our minds surrender to our hearts
A wolf, a wind, one in the same
And like the winds, we are not tame.
—by Kaiya Rose
Photo by Lee Coursey. Creative Commons via Flickr.
Browse more boxes & baskets
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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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- Journeys: What We Hold in Common - November 4, 2024
- Poetry Prompt: My Poem is an Oasis - August 26, 2024
Rick Maxson says
Made Things
I have gone into the narrows
of wet spruce and boxcar roofs,
baked for miles of track. Poetry
gleaned in the glide of stacked
beams out the slightest portal, then
set neat on lath, ten wide, five high.
In the galloping sounds that raise
a house, a cadence, and cesuras
found in the reaching for a nail,
the cantos of the carpenters,
make walls and windows with each room.
Hearts and poems live in such things.
Katie says
Beautiful.
Katie says
Ode to Apricots
You smiled up at my appetite,
from the cylinder
in the salad bar.
Small halves of sunshine,
wet and shiny
mouth-watering.
Wooing me to spoon
you onto my plate
as I smile and drool.
Gingerly I carry you
back to my table
where I dip into delight.
Neither your color
nor your texture
not even your taste, disappoint.
Katie says
What box
Has chocolates
In it?
To sample
Maybe try one
And see if
Nuts are hiding
Swathed in caramel
Another nougat
Mallow or
Peanut/walnut
Leaving
Every bit more
Reason to leave the lid open.