Poet Laureate Poem Prompts

Erica Goss served as Poet Laureate of Los Gatos,
California from 2013-2016. She is the author
of Landscape with Womb and Paradox
(Broadstone Books, 2025). Her first poetry
collection, Night Court, won the 2016
Lyrebird Prize from Glass Lyre Press. She
is the author of Wild Place (2012,Finishing
Line Press) and Vibrant Words: Ideas and
Inspirations for Poets (2014, Pushpen Press).

As Poet Laureate for Los Gatos, she organized
the first St. Patrick’s Day Poetry Walk, created
Poems-in-the-Window (local businesses
displayed poems during National Poetry Month), recorded The Poetry Podcast
(50-plus recordings of poems in a variety of languages), established the first Los Gatos
Poet Laureate Scholarship, and launched The Poetry Kitchen, a poetry reading series
at the Los Gatos Library.

Erica’s work is featured in numerous anthologies and journals, including Colorado
Review, Georgia Review, North Dakota Review, Oregon Humanities, Pearl, The
Pedestal, diode, PRISM International, Superstition Review, The Summerset Review,
Ekphrasis, Main Street Rag, Café Review, Perigee, Redactions, Dash Literary Journal,
Eclectica, Up the Staircase, Lake Effect,Consequence, Stirrings, Convergence,
Passager, Atticus Review, Gravel, Tinderbox Review, Caveat Lector, Rattle, Zoland
Poetry, Spillway, San Pedro Rover Review, Comstock Review, Contrary, and
Innisfree Poetry Journal.

In 2023, she received a “Notable Essay” honor from Best American Essays. She
received the Zocalo Poetry Prize in 2019 and the Many Mountains Moving Prize for
poetry in 2011. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2010, 2013, 2017, 2020,
2021, and 2024, Best of the Net in 2016, 2017, 2020 and 2023, and received the first
Edwin Markham Prize for poetry, judged by California Poet Laureate Al Young. Wild
Place was also a finalist in the 2010 White Eagle Coffee Store Press Chapbook Contest,
and received a special mention from Jacar Press’s 2010 Chapbook Contest. Erica was
the host of Word to Word, a Show About Poetry, on KCAT Cable TV in Los Gatos,
and wrote The Third Form, a column about video poetry, for Connotation Press. She
is the co-founder of Media Poetry Studio, a poetry-and-film camp for teen girls. In
2018, Erica founded Girls’ Voices Matter, an arts education program for teen girls.
Erica lives in Eugene, Oregon, and teaches classes in poetry, memoir and video.

Sand Dunes at Sunset, Atlantic City 1885

–a painting by Henry Ossawa Tanner

A shadow stretches
from dune to dune,
cool valley where
tufts of grass
lean towards the ocean.

Out to sea, sails flutter like
the wings of a cabbage moth
I saw this morning in my garden,
searching for a place to lay
a last clutch of eggs
before winter closes in.

So often I have felt
like those shrubs on the beach,
bent sideways from
some elemental force,
its life-changing weight
pressing me into a new shape,

as if my heart were an object
to be molded by wind.
I offer myself as raw material,
a last chance at transformation
before the pale half-disc of sun sets
and that cloud spreads
across the sky.

First published in Two Hawks Quarterly, Spring 2024

 

In a departure from the usual poet laureate poem as prompt, I am inviting you to consider the ghazal (guzzle) as it has been haunting me of late. I have provided three links to example of modern ghazals and would add that the most recent issue of Rattle also celebrates the ghazal. Take a dive into the readings and veer to the place that has the most energy for you. No one is taking names or posting grades–this is an exploration! Thanks for your courage, and have some fun! 🙂

CMarie Fuhrman was born and raised in Colorado, in the shadow of Horsetooth Mountain and Rocky Mountain National Park. She was introduced to wild places and beings by parents who grew up on the land, hunting, fishing, and gardening, and who passed on their knowledge and enthusiasm to their two daughters. CMarie has lived in west central Idaho for almost a decade, having spent nearly her whole life along the backbone of the Rockies.

The Salmon River Mountains have become more than a home for her, more than a character in her writing, but a part of her, inherent to all she is, from the Frank Church Wilderness to the deep waters of the Salmon and Snake rivers. CMarie works with organizations that defend beings like grizzlies, rivers like the South Fork of the Salmon, and Native women’s bodies—where destruction and erasure are mirrored in humans—with an undeniable understanding of the urgency  to protect these places, both wild and urban.

CMarie is the author of Camped Beneath the Dam: Poems and the co-editor of Cascadia: Art, Ecology, and Poetry (Winner of the PNBA, 2023), as well as Native Voices. Her poetry and essays have appeared in numerous publications and anthologies, including Emergence Magazine, Terrain.org, Yellow Medicine Review, Cutthroat, a Journal of the Arts, and others. CMarie is the Associate Director and Director of the Poetry Concentration of Western Colorado University’s Graduate Program for Creative Writing, where she also teaches nature writing. CMarie is an award winning columnist for the Inlander and the director of the Elk River Writers Workshop. CMarie is the host of Terra Firma, a Colorado Public Radio program. She is a former Idaho Writer in Residence and lives in the Salmon River Mountains of Idaho.

This bio was drawn from the author’s website with her permission.  www.cmariefuhrman.com

Camped beneath Hells Canyon Dam
last night it started raining.
I moved my head outside the tent
and let rain fill the hollows of my eyes.

I never saw lightning but heard thunder
roll from beneath me, the earth
upside down, hooves of animals
bolting through clouds
it started raining lamprey and sturgeon

it rained so hard last night I was young again.
It rained so hard the earth moved
from the graves of my grandparents
their bones started dancing on the rocks
dancing like hail.

It rained so hard the river was young again.
Neither of us had our second names
we chewed dirt with our first teeth
we ran together with salmon, steelhead
the shores lifted their skirts at our passing—

last night the rain brought back my grandmother
she put my head in her lap
she told me stories, she told me carp
sucked the bones of my grandfather
her tears filled my eyes.  Her braids tickled
my cheeks.

This morning the skies are clear.  A fly dances
on my nose.  In the flooding light I move earth
worms from the trail. Sometimes
I toss their wet brown bodies back into the river.

Reprinted from her chapbook, Camped Beneath the Dam: Poems, with the author’s permission. 

Arianne True (Choctaw, Chickasaw) is a queer poet and teaching artist from Seattle, and has spent most of her work time working with youth. She’s received fellowships and residencies from Jack Straw, the Hugo House, Artist Trust, and the Seattle Repertory Theater, and is a proud alum of Hedgebrook and of the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She lives near the Salish Sea with her cat. Arianne is the 2023-2025 Washington State Poet Laureate.

I – razbliuto

It’s hard to be in love with
someone who can change so much.

My city left me behind chasing
a seat at the table when
our table was already set,
overflowing with possibility
and art and people who can’t afford
to live here anymore. I live an hour
away now and don’t know how to feel when
I see her. Something like longing. Something
like disappointment. Something I worry is
like a word I learned once at her side,
the Russian word that names the feeling
you have for someone you once loved
but no longer do. I worry that’s true.

II – in Russian

There’s no such word in Russian. You can say,
“I once loved you but no longer,” but there’s
no shorthand for it. No sum up. Despite being
in the books of so many experts, so many linguists —
no such feeling in its source language. Best guess:
a typo in a 60s tv show. Replicated somehow to now.
A not-Russian word that only exists in English.

III – object permanence

I feel home, though, in some of the same places.
Pioneer Square and the Seattle Center, bookends
of a past continually overwritten and a future imagined once,
two half-truths preserved in architecture.  These buildings at least
feel real to me, like they’ll still be there when I turn around.
It’s hard to feel steady when you’re surrounded by disappearances,
a constantly changing view. How much was ever really there?
I trust the old bricks and concrete most in this city.
[Still not more than the trees that grow up the ravines.]

IV – no what

it’s hard to tell        someone you left
everything they would’ve needed to change
for you to keep wanting them.
you shouldn’t try. living things change,
it is just hard to love living things
(harder not to) the city is a living thing,
you know. like I am a living thing to
the microscopic creatures that populate
my body who make it somewhere
I can live too. no me without them.
no city without who? hard to say
for a city bleeding out. what are you losing?
when will you notice? and what
will you do then?

V – somehow it’s not happening here but

Sometimes I have to speak so plainly that my voice gets lost in the words.
It’s to be understood when you’re swimming against misconceptions.
It still only works when someone will listen. Is willing to hear.

VI – why here

My writing exists because this is home. Me born to another city
is another artist, who knows her medium? Something about this
place keeps breathing me words. Maybe it’s the dense undergrowth,
so many places for a whisper to catch and hide, to wait for you.
So easy to move slow here, easy to spend an hour on the bus
or twenty minutes walking. Cars dull my senses, speed me up
to where I can’t catch the details anymore. I write more when
I am slow in the world, and this home made that so easy
for so long. It’s harder to get here now, but when I can
the whispers are still waiting, falling with the pine needles
or pushing up with irises, caught in the air of a bumblebee’s
fuzz as they sleep in a rosebud. Other places have flowers,
but these ones know my name.

VII – whole-body ear

I wear thinner shoes now
and can feel the streetcar
fifty feet away, every move
and stop spreads sensation
across the soles of my feet.
This place always teaching
me new ways to listen.

VIII – what about the other colors

Thick pigeons flock and split
like a grey kaleidoscope no one is turning
in the one hour we have of snow.
So many land together three stories up,
a whole crenellation of plump birds.
The rest must’ve gone west somewhere,
maybe past the clock tower,
I can’t see them now.

IX – cadence

I think what I want is for hometown to mean something.
Something tangible, more than longing or nostalgia,
to mean something with a body. Some kind of right
to live in your home. Some new knowing (not new
to me) that these streets were parents for some of us.
Some of us were raised by buildings and bus routes
and empty auditorium stages, by old old trees,
by blackberries and sticky rhododendron blooms and
the salmon that come home every year to become
the stream again. Some of us were raised by
pavement and school fields and drainage ditches.
By strangers and being a stranger show after show.
By the water that runs over all of them. (us.) None
of these are just images. This is not a poem, it’s
a map. This is not a poem, it’s a lineage. I am
telling you my family. I am telling you my home.
I am telling you one of the saddest things I know,
that none of that is allowed to matter more than
money in the city that’s been built here. Maybe
what I miss is like parents before you find out they
are only human too. I am not surprised by the
changes here anymore. But I am surprised
by the things no one notices. I live in shock that
we have no right to our home.

This poem was commisioned and published by Front Porch–Seattle Department of Neighborhoods. Reprinted with permission from the author.