Promptly This June: Unplugged Poems

Googling 'poetry prompts' brought me this, from Writer's Digest.

 

Wednesday Poetry Prompts: 221

Categories: Poetry Prompts, Robert Lee Brewer's Poetic Asides Blog, What's New.

May 29, 2013 | Robert Lee Brewer

   

Over the past weekend, I took Friday off work and “unplugged” myself from nearly all my electronics (except my phone, which I barely used) until Monday night. So four days and four nights (if including Thursday night) without e-mail, social media, blogging, websites, etc. As a person constantly immersed in media, it felt liberating to pull the plug.
For this week’s prompt, write an unplugged poem. The plug could be attached to computers, but maybe it’s a metaphor for relationships that need the plug pulled. Or a phase of your life. Or a way of thinking. Or a toaster. Just a toaster.

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I'm going to have to do this with pen and paper first, to remember being unplugged. When I took my first poetry courses in college, it was all pen and paper.




The Cool Lamp


Our cool blue lamp broke in transit
One item from a household of goods
Chairs and antique platters, movies and crystal and hope
Driven here in a POD and set in the new driveway.

We unpacked ourselves less carefully than we could have.
We rushed into a larger space than we knew, going in.
Sharp pieces hid in many corners.

Unused but not discarded
The strong metal base sits in a closet
Dusty and dim as the hopes and crystal, now
Disconnected from our energy.



© By Mari Kozlowski, June 18, 2013


 

Promptly This June! June 12th, The Man in the Park

Here's one I picked up from WD's online prompt source, http://www.writersdigest.com/prompts.

The Man in the Park

 

May 3, 2013 | Brian A. Klems

  

 

 

You get back to your studio to develop pictures from the hour you just spent in the park. All of the pictures turn out well, except for a select few. In six photographs, there is a man in the frame. Something seems slightly off, and rather strange about each picture. Who is he and what is weird about the photographs?

500 words or less.

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Neela laid out her afternoon's work, smiling-- the colors, the action she'd captured on film, were the makings of a fine collage, a set piece to be bleached and stained, in parts, hung against other finds from the park like the twisted twig still adorned with half a cocoon, or the heron feather, her prize of the day. Four hours of shooting & gathering, and another two in the darkroom, she considered well spent. She walked around her craft table pushing pics towards or away from each other, as a natural arrangement suggested itself.

 There was core of ten, she felt, the lynchpin of the piece emerging in her mind's eye-- each filled with movement from animals, wind-rippled leaves and a generous splash of sun-struck cityscape in the background. She slid the group of photos together and apart, testing her ideas. One of the core had an odd blue edge to it, on the right side. She swung her overhead light to a tighter focus, and noticed that several more of the core had the same edging of blue.

(unfinished)


 

Promptly This June

 That's my unsubtle play on words, since here it is, already my little sister's Birthday, June 9th.

 Of course I called her, hush now.


 If you've been keeping up with me, you know I've just had major surgery, a full hysterectomy. I've been home for over a week now; I went in on a Wednesday and came home that Friday. Normally I don't heal all that fast, so this amazing turnaround is heartening. Still, I've blocked out my calendar for June and July as Healing months.

 Healing is boring sometimes, though, when you can't go outside alone, or drive, and you don't look decent enough to have visitors that aren't related. So I've decided to use a new prompt here, every few days or so, to keep my head moving and the ideas flowing.

 I won't keep them to fiction alone, variety is Necessary right now.

First one, below. 'Night night!

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From P&W, my easy source for prompts.

Ten-Second Essays

 

Read James Richardson’s aphorisms or “ten-second essays." Pick one that resonates with you, and use the aphorism as an epigraph or starting off point for a poem.


11.
ll stones are broken stones.

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Around the edge of the sidewalk, in the street or garden

stones are broken, pieces of hardness

not hard enough to have stayed whole

like your child's heart that still beats in two places--

a half-forgotten past and the idealized future

we were building with curved cast-off tiles 

when the moon came down and shattered us, too.



© By Mari Kozlowski, June 9, 2013