Greetings and Salutations, my fellow poets!

Every year I usually dedicate the spark that falls around Halloween to spooky poems. However, just as I was googling my usual favorite creepy poems for this spark, I happened to glance outside: the brilliant autumn wind whipped a few dry leaves past my window just as one of the many crows that live around my house launched itself skyward. It wasn’t spooky at all. It was exhilarating. The wind, the sky, and the smell of mold and dry chaff that rattles around the yard at this time of year are all spooky, but those things can also be so much more.

With that in mind, here are a few of my favorite spooky poems:

Shakespeare — Three Witches from Macbeth

Poe — The Raven

Jonson — Third Charm from Masque of Queens

But also, here are some excellent poems that capture the spirit of autumn, beyond spookiness:

Glück — October (section I)

Hoch — Late Autumn Wasp

Wright — Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio

Faiz — When Autumn Came

For this poem spark, write an autumn poem. It can be spooky or it can be majestic and haunting. It’s up to you to choose what part of this season speaks most strongly when you glance outside. Good luck!

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Greetings fellow poets!

Last Monday my husband and I took the kids to the National Aquarium in Baltimore, Maryland. It was a delightful trip. The primary aquarium building sits on Pier 3 of the harbor. As we made our way through the building using a series of escalators, water surrounded us. The harbor outside surrounded the building. The enormous tanks within surrounded the people filtering through the exhibits. At every level, we were able to peer over a balcony edge down into the lowest tank filled with stingrays flying gracefully through the water.

Of course, I don’t really visit anywhere without thinking of the implications for poetry. As I walked with my family through the exhibits, different poems about water flickered through my thoughts: Elizabeth Bishop’s At the Fishouses, and William Carlos Williams’ Landscape With The Fall of Icarus were the first two that came to mind.

When I finally came home that evening, I searched the web to find other water poems:

Meng Hao-jan’s Night on the Great River

Walt Whitman’s As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life

Pablo Neruda’s Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market

Your spark: write a poem about water—the ocean, a sea, a river, a lake, or even the rain. The form of the water is up to you. The important thing to remember is the water itself, in all its lovely and mysterious forms. Good luck!

Hello fellow poetry entrepreneurs,

I’ve been going through a bit of a dry spell lately with poetry. Sometimes, when faced with a blinking cursor and white page, the only thing that works is to fall back onto my favorite method for sparking a poem: pick ten words at random from your favorite poetry book.

I’ve been reading a lot of Jack Gilbert this year; his poetry seems to be sticking with me as I go through each day. So, without further ado, here are ten words from his book, “Refusing Heaven“:

permitted
meditation
reinvention
angels
future
hush
fervor
brain
ignorance
becalmed

Jack Gilbert has a tendency towards abstract concepts that remain grounded in reality, or at least, his version of reality. Most of the verbs in his book are simple ones: break, said, wakes, etc. The action and setting revolve around these small verbs, letting the reader create movement in his/her own way from the message of each poem.

You task for this poem spark: borrow ten random words from your favorite poetry book, chapbook, essay, online journal, or use the ten words I found and write a poem. Don’t overthink and don’t try to hunt for the “best” or most complicated word. Instead, let the words come to you. They’re waiting for you to give them a home: a poem in which to get comfortable enough to speak clearly.

Good luck!