Willawaw Journal

Online Poetry & Art

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 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.

 

From Tom Sexton’s collection, A Ladder of Cranes, ©2015. Reprinted with permission from University of Alaska Press.

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).

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.