Big Window

12 Links to Writing Prompts on the Web

Here's a list of links to writing exercises from all around the web:

• My own! Check out the Open Series here on Big Window.
• Kelli Russell Agodon provides 30 writing prompts for National Poetry Month at her blog, the Book of Kells.
• Lists of great writing experiments by Bernadette Mayer and Charles Bernstein.
• At the Poefusion blog, Michelle Johnson dishes out several new prompts a week. 
• So does Easy Street, Two for Tuesdays, and Writer's Island.
• Totally Optionally Prompts and
• Read Write Poem form communities of writers who share work on a regular basis.
  
• You can generate a new writing prompt with the Language as a Virus site.
• The Poetry Resource Page provides a long list of ideas.
• Feel free to add your favorites in the comment field below.

Open 35: Abstract Map (or Let's Get Lost)

Write a directive.  It can be poetry or prose. Credit for this exercise goes to my friend Mary Adams.  The model is "After Apple Picking" by Robert Frost.  It should be written as a set of impossible instructions.  Use the second person: "You will see angry bees swarming a phone booth."  If you give this one a try, feel free to post a link to it in the comment section. Happy Trails! 

After Apple Picking

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it's like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.        

Robert Frost

{photo by Leenda K via flickr}

Open 34

 

Here's a writing prompt you might want to try.  The idea comes from Pablo Neruda's famous Book of Questions.  Write a poem that is entirely made of questions.

(this photo "star, not star."  was originally uploaded to flickr by wacky doodler)

Open 33: Quijote

(Quijote, originally uploaded by JuliusTheCat onto flickr)

Your next poem is inside this photo.  I promise you--it is right here!  All  you have to do is be its scribe.

Open 32: Writing Like a Kerouac

Here's a new writing exercise.  Let me know how it works for you.  Feel free to post your results in the comment section below.

Here's a passage by Jack Kerouac about how to get your writing mojo on.  I'm lifting it from the Language is a Virus website.  Let it be your guide as you write using the photograph posted below as your springboard.

List of Essentials


• Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
• Submissive to everything, open, listening
• Try never get drunk outside yr own house
• Be in love with yr life
• Something that you feel will find its own form
• Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
• Blow as deep as you want to blow
• Write what you want bottomless from bottom of mind
• The unspeakable visions of the individual
• No time for poetry but exactly what is
• Visionary tics shivering in the chest
• In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
• Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
• Like Proust be an old teahead of time
• Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
• The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
• Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
• Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
• Accept loss forever
• Believe in the holy contour of life
• Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
• Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
• Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
• No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
• Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
• Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
• In Praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
• Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
• You're a Genius all the time
• Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven
  
  As ever,
  Jack

Jack Kerouac "Belief & Technique For Modern Prose: List of Essentials" from a 1958 letter to Don Allen, in Heaven & Other Poems, copyright © 1958, 1977, 1983. Grey Fox Press.

Photograph by Richard Misrach.

To see more writing projects posted on Big Window, click here.

Eat my Shorts

Remember Bart Simpson's famous words from the 90s?  Of course you do.  Here's an irreverent exercise for poet bloggers.  Check out the surrealist machine called The Eater of Meaning.   Type in the URL of your blog and start the engine.  The results are a cut-up version of your blog.  For example, the heading of my Ashbery story below turned into:  I Wandering my Housewife Daydreams.  Add your favorite distorted headline as a comment.  Or write a new poem using that phrase as the title or first line.

Open 31

This writing prompt begins with a photograph.  You can use the one by Travis Ruse that I have posted below, or find one on your own and print a copy.  Draw a  4x4 grid onto the photo.  A ruler is not necessary!  You will end up with 16 boxes.  Write a 16 line poem, using each square as the leaping point for each line. 

Altering Alters All

Dan has posted some great new work on his Altered Books blog.

Open 30: The Furniture Poem

One of my colleagues from the WomPo list serve asked whether we could think of any poems about furniture. At first I found the concept ridiculous.  Then I remembered having written a poem called "Easy Chair."  And then I remembered another one I wrote called "Scat Sofa."  I felt very silly then.

If you'd like a writing exercise for today, write some lines about a piece of furniture. Post it as a comment if you'd like. 

Fun with Spam

The clock is ticking on this one.  Make a poem out of spam and enter it today.  Here's the scoop on the Spam Poetry Game, Round 2.  It's an email from Cecil Touchon.

Date: Mon, 7 May 2007 20:42:42 -0500

From: Cecil Touchon <touchon at SPRYNET dot COM>

Subject: THE SPAM POETRY GAME

The following are the instructions for Round Two (Round One happened on 5/21/2005.)

You can see the results from round one here.

Below are some random words found in some recent spam trash.

Did raise, sure surface. Again, widely, I pass. Plant complete
      letter hundred fast high. Dog interest car letter. Ground,
      write, life hat, lay. North paint thought map. Among end night
      evening then much complete. Game, age grow a. Other row burn
      hand art and eye. Little field own for get use, mile. Left need
      by bat region. Ready either energy earth. I, men captain must,
      will me burn. Had, see, seem, was head sit.

Please take this material and do with it what you will to create a poem. If you add words put them in brackets. If you remove  anything put it as a remainder after the poem. Here are the rules. Time limit 48 hours from this email.

send your poem to info at ontologicalmuseum  dot org 

NaPoWriMo 2007

Every poet knows that April is the cruelest month and that fact alone makes it the perfect time for National Poetry Writing Month or NaPoWriMo 2007.  This year there's even a logo for it.

All that is required of you, dear poet, is one poem a day.  Are you in?

Open 29

Write a poem that is a close-up.  Now go closer.  Closer.  There.
Photo by Gary Shrimpling, from his photoblog Mystery Me

Open 28

Your next mission, if you choose to accept it....

Write a poem using the name of a breakfast cereal as the title.  Yeah, you know!  Special K, Cap'n Crunch, All-Bran, and so on.

Sampling

See this and other pages of Altered Books here.

Open 27

This writing exercise comes from Bernadette Mayers' 82 Writing Experiments:  Write a soothing novel in twelve short paragraphs.

I'm off to the beach tomorrow.  Call it an early spring break?  Maybe that's why the idea of soothing appeals to me.