Greetings and salutations!

As anyone who has ever suffered a medical emergency, or the death of a loved one, or any other sort of life-altering event that casts the ordinary business of living aside, sometimes one needs to live day by day, seizing each moment and savoring every precious second. Indeed, sometimes the only way to live is to get through each minute, but at the same time, one should never ignore the gift that is each minute.

There are many poems that celebrate this juxtaposition: the human poised between death and life. On Poets.org’s home page this week is an essay speaking of just this philosophy: Carpe Diem: Poems for Making the Most of Time:

Here are some poems that embody the spirit of living, living despite the pain and uncertainty that follows us everywhere, living with joy alongside the quiet specter of mortality:

Ellen Bass Dead Butterfly

Li-Young Lee One Heart

Rick Campbell Heart

This spark: write a carpe diem poem.

Good luck!

Greetings and Salutations!

Now that summer has blanketed the east coast with the first heat wave of the season, I’ve been thinking about how much my garden is appreciating the warmth and rains. The roses are in full bloom and my lavender is just about ready to crack open those beautiful buds. Everywhere I look, something is blooming. What better poem spark to do than write about the flowers?

On Poets.org’s front page I followed a link to Poems about Flowers. Here are a few of the ones I liked best:

Deborah Digges Telling the Bees

H. D. At Baia

William Shakespeare My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun

Your poem spark: write a flower poem.

Here are some photos to help you along: Flowers on Flickr. Good luck!

Greetings and Salutations!

Narrative poems are among the oldest of forms of poetry, if not the oldest. Long before the written word was invented, people told stories to each other, often using rhyme and rhythm to help remember the story so it could be told over and over, and through the centuries, poets have been using narrative to tell a story in verse. Granted, the modern version of narrative poems can take many forms: prose poems, blank verse, free form, and many other devices can be used to convey a sense of plot and tension. Some of my favorites:

Chaucer The Canterbury Tales

Homer The Illiad

Carolyn Forché For the Stranger

Dorianne Laux Tooth Fairy (Since Dorianne is the Guest Poet at Poets.org discussion forum for the next two months, we have the rare opportunity to ask her questions about this poem.)

Your mission for this poem spark: Write a narrative poem. It doesn’t need to be long or complicated; it just needs to tell a story. Good luck!

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Greetings and salutations!

We are right smack in the middle of National Poetry Month, and many of us are busy writing a poem a day for NaPoWriMo. If any of you are like me, you are probably scraping the bottom of the barrel right about now, searching for inspiration. Of course, sometimes when both the mind and computer screen are blank, I find myself repeating words over and over in the hopes of stirring something useful out of the muck. (What’s that you say? What about paper? Yes, of course, blank paper is equally frustrating, but at least doodles are possible.)

Poets.org’s useful page on anaphora offers this definition:

Repetition, hmm. This could be useful, I think. Here are some delightful examples of anaphora in poetry:

Walt Whitman Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking

Gregory Orr A Litany

So, in honor of the deep frustration that leads one to repeat words over and over in the hope of inspiration, for this spark, write a poem that uses anaphora. Good luck!

Salutations fellow poets!

My husband and I own a basic telescope and a lovely pair of astronomical binoculars. I’ve discovered that the beauty of the night sky has not even come close to diminishing, even though I’ve lived in Pennsylvania for six years now, after spending eleven years living beneath the orange glow that is the night sky in northern New Jersey. I think it will take decades before I tire of seeking out constellations, comets, meteor showers, and the occasional lunar eclipse. On a clear night, I can even see the Orion Nebula with my naked eye, well, if I squint, that is, which brings me to this poem spark: how many poems have been writing about heavenly bodies?

Unsurprisingly, there have been many. Poets.org has an entire page devoted to Poems about the Heavenly Bodies. Obviously, the sky has always been a source of fascination for us writers. Here are a few good ones:

Ann K. Schwader Dead Light

Chris Forhan The Actual Moon, The Actual Stars

Eleanor Wilner Moon Gathering

Mark Jarman Unholy Sonnet

Your mission: write an astronomical poem. Write it about a star, or the moon, or a constellation, perhaps even the sun. Any of the stuff up there in the cosmos is a good subject, so don’t be wary. Let us go together where many poets have gone before. Good luck!

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