Greetings fellow poets!

Some days when you wake up, it’s raining and you’re out of coffee (or tea, in my case). Sometimes the alarm doesn’t go off and you dash into your car a half-hour late. By the time you return home, you’re wet, hungry, and you have a wicked headache from caffeine deprivation. This is the kind of day when writing anything seems impossible. This is a cento day.

According to Poets.org, the definition of a cento is:

For the complete page on centos, go here: Poetic Form: Cento.

So, since the forecast here is calling for rain at least through Thursday, it looks like tomorrow and the day after will be a cento day, too. Your poem spark mission for this week: write a cento. Don’t stress-out. Feel free to mix up the lines with some of your own. Feel free to use just the end-of-line words from another poem for yours. Feel free to use just a title. It’s difficult to light a candle in the rain, but with the right spark, anything is possible.

If you’re looking for poems to steal (uh, I mean borrow) from, here are a few favorites:

Eleanor Wilner Moon Gathering

Anzhelina Polonskaya Sky

Stanley Kunitz The Portrait

Jane Hirshfield A Hand

Greetings!

Because today is the day before Halloween, I think it is fitting that we dedicate this week’s spark to our favorite spooky poems. The first piece of poetry that I remember as spooky was from Shakespeare’s Macbeth:

It still brings a chill to my spine. Such ominousness! There are so many more, and a great place to begin to read them is on Poets.org’s front page: Poems in the Graveyard. From there it’s only a short click to this next page: The Graves of Poets.

I read the list of poets and their gravesites. Surely the spookiest is that of Hart Crane, “Drowned while returning to New York from Mexico, Body not recovered.” Of course, I clicked his page link and found this gem of a poem, At Melville’s Tomb. How fitting! Here are the first few lines:

Almost prescient, these words. Did Crane know where his death would find him? Perhaps.

This week’s spark: write a spooky poem. Simple enough, yes? Or, if you cannot bear the walk into darkness, post a link to your favorite spooky poem (title and author if there is no link). Good luck! Happy hunting.

Greetings and Salutations!

Every day, once my house has sighed quietly in the wake of two kids gone to school and the tea in my cup begins to paint the air with ephemeral threads of steam, my thoughts turn to poetry. How can I describe this silence? What does it mean to spend time reading poems? What is the Spotlight Poem today on Poets.org?

Inevitably, I put these thoughts away in order to go about my day, but I always hope I can find a few minutes to jot down a phrase or two that might grow into a poem with enough care and attention. This is important to me, but I’m not sure why. What is it that makes me want to collect words? Why do poets love to play with language? The answers are as many and varied as there are poems in the world.

Here is an essay by Amy Lowell that speaks about The Poet’s Trade. In this short piece, she outlines her belief that a poem must be crafted, “As a matter of fact, the poet must learn his trade in the same manner, and with the same painstaking care, as the cabinet-maker.” Another poem written by Heather McHugh, begins as a narrative about poets traveling and follows them as they speculate about poetry and its root meaning: What He Thought. It is in the end of the poem where a greater meaning becomes surprisingly apparent to the reader. Poetry seems to spring not out of craft, but from a spontaneous gift on the part of the writer.

Your task this week is to write a poem about writing a poem, or about what it means to be a poet, or about how it feels to be inspired. Write a poet’s poem. Write a poem that only another writer will truly understand, but try to do it in a way that invites the non-writer into the poet’s world.

Here are some examples of what I’m talking about:

Thomas Lux Render, Render

Harryette Mullen All She Wrote

Charles Bukowski so you want to be a writer?

Richard Wilbur The Writer

Have fun. Be creative. Good luck! I leave you with this quote from this page on the Poets.org website, various quotes from On Poetry and Craft: Selected Prose of Theodore Roethke.