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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.

That Night We were Ravenous

Driving from Stephenville in the late October
dusk — the road swooping and disappearing ahead
like an owl, the hills no longer playing dead
the way they do in the daytime, but sticking their black
blurry arses up in the drizzle and shaking themselves,
heaving themselves up for another night of
leapfrog and Sumo ballet — some

trees detached themselves from the shaggy
shoulder and stepped in front of the car. I swerved

through a grove of legs startled by pavement, maybe a
hunchbacked horse with goiter, maybe a team of beavers
trying to operate stilts: it was the

landscape doing a moose, a cow
moose,
most improbable forest device. She danced
over the roof of our car in moccasins.

She had burst from the zoo of our dreams and was
there, like a yanked-out tooth the dentist
puts in your hand.

She flickered on and off.
She was strong as the bible and as full of lives.
Her eyes were like Halley’s Comet, like factory whistles,
like bargain hunters, like shy kids.

No man had touched her or given her movements geometry.

She surfaced in front of us like a coelacanth, like a face
in a dark lagoon. She made us feel blessed.

She made us talk like a cage of canaries.

She reminded us. She was the ocean wearing a fur suit.

She had never eaten from a dish.
She knew nothing of corners or doorways.

She was our deaths come briefly forward to say hello.

She was completely undressed.

She was more part of the forest than any tree.
She was made of trees. The beauty of her face was bred
in the kingdom of rocks.

I had seen her long ago in the Dunlop Observatory.

She leapt from peak to peak like events in a ballad.

She was as insubstantial as smoke.

She was a mother wearing a brown sweater opening her arms.

She was a drunk logger on Yonge Street.

She was the Prime Minister. She had granted us a tiny
reserve.

She could remember a glacier where she was standing.

She was a plot of earth shaped like the island of
Newfoundland and able to fly, spring down in the middle of
cities scattering traffic, ride elevators, press pop-eyed
executives to the wall.

She was charged with the power of Churchill Falls.

She was a high explosive bomb loaded with bones and meat.
She broke the sod in our heads like a plow parting the
earth’s black lips.

She pulled our zippers down.

She was a spirit.

She was Newfoundland held in a dam. If we had touched her,
she would’ve burst through our windshield in a wall of
blood.

That night we were ravenous. We talked, gulping, waving
our forks. We entered one another like animals entering
woods.

That night we slept deeper than ever.

Our dreams bounded after her like excited hounds.

 

“That Night We were Ravenous” from THAT NIGHT WE WERE RAVENOUS by John Steffler, Copyright©1998, 2007 John Steffler. Reprinted by permission of McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. All rights reserved.

It was not the breadbasket but you could see it from there–Rachel Barton

This post has been removed in order to be submitted for publication elsewhere.

About Poet Laureate Kathleen Flenniken

Kathleen Flenniken served as Washington State Poet Laureate from 2012 to 2014. She won the Washington State Book Award for her poetry collection Plume.  Her first book, Famous, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and was named a Notable Book by the American Library Association. Flenniken’s other awards include a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Artist Trust.  Her third collection, Post Romantic, was released in October 2020.

Seven Seas–Kathleen Flenniken

The one we’ve fished to death,
that tosses ships till they sink,
so deep the fish at the fissures
squiggle instead of swim, glow
instead of gaze.

The one inside a conch shell
that sweeps us from the couch
to its shore—our first metaphor.

The sea of ones and zeros
with tributaries pressing Send,
where our secrets glitter
in the data gyre.

The sea of refugees, turned away, turned away, turned away,
crashing the razor-wire fence.

The sea of cash, thick
with trawlers’ tangling nets, green
with the drowned and drowning.

The sea of regret
that surges and retreats
and sucks at our feet,
a tide that takes us nowhere.

And the final sea of liquid light
we’ll only know from below.

from Post Romantic (University of Washington Press, 2020)

 

A Cast of Strangers–Rachel Barton

A stranger walks beside you
casting seeds into the wind
See how they fly helter-skelter like
a sheet of starlings or the swirling
chaff of years past like so many minnows
schooling or dispersing

Maybe a stranger casts you off from shore–
a slipped stitch in a sea of pearls–
the dinghy small in a great slough
the craft’s chine inclined to narrow
and you a bit wobbly
until you settle on the bare board
of a bench and begin to row

It won’t be a stranger casts you out
–ne’er-do-well pub crawler
or even worse some demon spawn–
but your own kin sick of your stink
–bad habits like fish gone off–
and no remedy for it but absence

‘til a stranger comes again to lift you up
from the cold cobbles of despair and self-loathing
Casting about for a purchase you seize
on her robe and all becomes light
You see the crystalline web
that binds us–animal vegetable mineral—

and at that moment a silver cast to your hair
your bones home at last in weathered skin
a constellation of moles and liver spots
a small company of barnacles
(which do not seem strange to you at all)
O frabjous day–the journey begins

Wow! This was a difficult challenge–to use a word/concept in a variety of contexts. This is my draft, so far, which may evolve as the month proceeds.

About Poet Laureate Diane Raptosh

Diane Raptosh’s fourth book of poetry, American
Amnesiac (Etruscan Press), was long-listed for
the 2013 National Book Award. The recipient of
three fellowships in literature from the Idaho
Commission on the Arts, she served as the Boise
Poet Laureate (2013) as well as the Idaho
Writer-in-Residence (2013-2016). In 2018 she
won the Idaho Governor’s Arts Award in
Excellence. A highly active ambassador for
poetry, she has given poetry workshops
everywhere from riverbanks to maximum
security prisons. She teaches literature
and creative writing and co-directs the program in Criminal
Justice/Prison Studies at the College of Idaho. Her most recent
book of poems, Human Directional, was published by Etruscan
Press in 2016. Her sixth book of poems, Dear Z: The Zygote Epistles
was just published by Etruscan Press in early summer 2020. Her
seventh book, Run: A Verse History of Victoria Woodhull, will be
published in the form of a triptych by Etruscan Press in spring 2021.
For More information go to her website.

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