Poetry Month Prompt #30

April 30: 

Our final day for this year, but I will try to post a prompt bi-weekly.  I tried to make these interesting and a bit challenging. Did you like these? Let us know in the comments 

And, finally, this is an old but challenging prompt. You can take days to write it, then revise to make it coherent and interesting. This prompt was created by Jim Simmerman, taken from The Practice of Poetry. The exercise is to get you into a lyrical mode without a standard structure. Be free, be wild, and laugh as you write: 

1. Begin the poem with a metaphor. 

1. Say something specific but utterly preposterous. 

1. Use at least one image for each of the five senses, either in succession or scattered randomly throughout the poem. 

1. Use one example of synaesthesia (mixing the senses). 

1. Use the proper name of a person and the proper name of a place. 

1. Contradict something you said earlier in the poem. 

1. Change direction or digress from the last thing you said. 

1. Use a word (slang?) you’ve never seen in a poem. 

1. Use a piece of false cause-and-effect logic. 

1. Use a piece of “talk” you’ve actually heard (preferably in dialect and/or which you don’t understand). 

1. Create a metaphor using the following construction: “The (adjective) (concrete noun) of (abstract noun)…” 

1. Use an image in such a way as to reverse its usual associative qualities. 

1. Make the persona or character in the poem do something he/she could not do in “real life.” 

1. Refer to yourself by nickname and in the third person. 

1. Write in the future tense, such that part of the poem seems to be a prediction. 

1. Modify a noun with an unlikely adjective. 

1. Make a declarative assertion that sounds convincing but finally makes no sense. 

1. Use a phrase from a language other than English. 
2. Make a nonhuman object say or do something human (personification). 
3. Close the poem with a vivid image that makes no statement but that “echoes” an image from earlier in the poem. 

From the Muse library: American Children by Jim Simmerman. American Children is an elegy-in-verse. Its thematic pillars—four long elegies—are bridged by three sequences: one of poems in free verse, another of poems in traditional and not-so-traditional forms, a third of “miniatures” that are brief verse snapshots arranged in pairs and processions. American Children explores the many possibilities of form, texture and tone in the elegy—from free verse to formalist, from straightforward to surreal, from somberly meditative to dazzlingly wise-ass.Jim Simmerman has published four poetry collections and co-edited the anthology Dog Music: Poetry About Dogs. He has received fellowships from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, Bread Loaf and the National Education Association. He is a regent’s professor of English at Northern Arizona University. He lives in Flagstaff, Arizona.