Poet Laureate Poem Prompts

A poet prompt may take you in many directions, depending upon what draws your eye or hooks you--is it a line or phrase, a story, a particular form, a feeling? Everyone will have a response unique to his/her own life experiences and attention to craft. Be yourself!

After the poet laureate bio and poem prompts on these pages, you will sometimes find the editor's response. You can see how her mind works around and into a mentor poem and what she has taken away from the experience to bring to her own work.

About Poet Laureate Sandra Alcosser

Sandra Alcosser has published seven books of poetry, including A Fish to Feed All Hunger and Except by Nature, which have been selected for the National Poetry Series, the Academy of American Poets James Laughlin Award, the Larry Levis Award, the Associated Writing Programs Award in Poetry, and the William Stafford PNBA Award. She is the National Endowment for the Arts’ first Conservation Poet for the Wildlife Conservation Society and Poets House, New York, as well as Montana’s first poet laureate and recipient of the Merriam Award for Distinguished Contribution to Montana Literature. She founded and directs the MFA program at San Diego State University, and has been a writer-in-residence at National University of Ireland, University of Michigan, University of Montana, Glacier National Park, and Central Park, New York. She received two individual artist fellowships from the NEA, and her poems have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology.

From Pacific University MFA Faculty Biographies (https://www.pacificu.edu/about/directory/people/sandra-alcosser-visiting-faculty)

Sweat

Friday night I entered a dark corridor
rode to the upper floors with men who filled
the stainless elevator with their smell.

Did you ever make a crystal garden, pour salt
into water, keep pouring until nothing more dissolved?
a landscape will bloom in that saturation

My daddy’s body shop floats to the surface
like a submarine. Men with nibblers and tin snips
buffing skins, sanding curves under clamp lights.

I grew up curled in the window of a 300 SL
Gullwing, while men glided on their backs
through oily rainbows below me.

They torqued lugnuts, flipped fag ends
into gravel. Our torch cong
had one refrain–oh the pain of loving you.

Friday nights they’d line the shop sink, naked
to the waist, scour down with Ajax, spray water
across their necks and up into their armpits.

Babies have been conceived on sweat alone–
the buttery scent of a woman’s breast,
the cumin of a man. From the briny odor

of black lunch boxes–cold cuts, pickles,
waxed paper–my girl flesh grows.
From the raunchy fume of strangers.

From Excerpt By Nature published by Graywolf Press, 1998. Copyright ©1998 by Sandra Alcosser. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.

About Poet Laureate Tom Sexton

photo credit: Daily Bulldog

Tom Sexton was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, and lived in the city through his high school years. He earned degrees at Northern Essex Community College and now-Salem State University, and then pursued graduate studies at the University of Alaska, where he stayed and founded the creative writing program at the Anchorage campus. He taught there for decades and co-founded the highly respected *Alaska Quarterly Review*.

The author of many volumes of poetry, his most recent collections are Li Bai Rides a Dolphin Home (2018), A Ladder of Cranes (2015), and For the Sake of the Light: New and Selected Poems (2009), all from the University of Alaska Press. His Lowell books are A Clock with No Hands and Bridge Street at Dusk. Among his honors are being appointed Poet Laureate of Alaska (1995-2000) and being named a Distinguished Alumnus of Lowell High School. Tom and his wife Sharyn have lived in Alaska since 1970. Recently, they have lived part-time on the coast of Maine.

(This short bio is from Loom Press )

On the Death of Seamus Heaney

He is crossing those four green fields now.
On the horizon, blossoms falling like snow.
A chorus calls his name. He does not break stride
toward a small house. He can hear his mother’s sigh
Now he eyes his father holding a tall ladder
and at the top of the ladder stands his brother
skimming the gable, shaping the letters S.H.
in wet plaster. It covers his hands and knees
as blood did on the day he died. They turn
to go inside where his mother is churning butter.

After His Long Day

–for Peter Sears (1937-2017), after Tom Sexton

He does not fly over these hills or fields. Instead
he crosses the quad of every campus he inspired.
Surrounding him, a susurration of aspen and maple,
his loneliness calling his name. But he doesn’t stop–
his students wait for him. He climbs the steep ramp
to the library’s entrance without a breath to spare
though he finds another quick enough for the cat, any cat,
who might appear where dew lies thick on the high grasses.
His cronies who have paid the ferryman lean into his ear.
Ask me, William begins, and he tells them,
what if the river is an animal throwing the ice
right off its back! This leap of the mind on the page
is what he lives for, then and now. He has no need
to drink from the river.

–Rachel Barton

I was inspired by the dream quality in Tom Sexton’s poem, imagining the afterlife of the poet. The italicized lines and title are drawn from Peter’s last book, Long Day (Lynx House Press, 2019): “Driving Around,” “The Dew Lies Thick on the High Grasses,” and “The Ferryman at the River Lethe.” “Ask Me”, a poem by William Stafford, is the prompt Peter used at every workshop during his tenure as Oregon Poet Laureate and is referenced in his poem, “When the River Thaws.”

About Parliamentary Poet Laureate John Steffler

John Steffler served as the Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada from 2006 to 2008. Though he was born and educated in Ontario, Steffler spent many years in Corner Brook, Newfoundland, as a professor of English at Wilfred Grenfell College.

John Steffler’s books of poems include That Night We Were Ravenous (McClelland and Stewart 1998), The Wreckage of Play (McClelland and Stewart, 1988), and The Grey Islands (McClelland and Stewart, 1985), among others. His novel The Afterlife of George Cartwright was shortlisted for the 1992 Governor General’s Award for fiction and won the Smithbooks/ Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award.

These excerpts were drawn from Waterfront Views, Contemporary Writing of Atlantic Canada (http://waterfrontviews,acadiau.ca/flash/steffler/steffler_bio.htm) and from the University of Toronto Libraries, Canadian Poetry Online (https://canpoetry.library.utoronto.ca/steffler/index.htm) For additional information, see also the Atlantic Canadian Poets’ Archive (stu-acpa.com/john-steffler.html). For a more complete list of his poetry books, see Penny’s Poetry Pages Wiki (https://pennyspoetry.fandom.com/wiki/John_Steffler).