Day Four

Hello, everyone! Welcome to those of you who are joining us for the first time, and for the rest of you, welcome back!

Our featured link for the day is 30xLace, a tumblr curated by Birds of Lace press and Carrie Murphy, where they are posting a new poem every day of April.

Our featured participants’ blog is Mask and Unveiling, where the poems’ use of rhyme is very sensitive and lovely. I also appreciate the photo of the red panda!

Our prompt for today (again — totally optional!) is a little odd, but here goes. Recently, I read an article about the Scottish science fiction writer Iain M. Banks. His books often have spaceships in them. And those spaceships have extremely odd, poetic names. Like:

Prosthetic Conscience

Irregular Apocalypse

Unfortunate Conflict of Interest

Gunboat Diplomat

Very Little Gravitas Indeed

A Series of Unlikely Explanations

Just Another Victim of the Ambient Morality

Jaundiced Outlook

Frank Exchange of Views

Lightly Seared on the Reality Grill

Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints

Abundance of Onslaught

Refreshingly Unconcerned With the Vulgar Exigencies of Veracity

A Fine Disregard For Awkward Facts

There’s a whole twitter account devoted to tweeting Iain-M-Banks-like names for spaceships. So your challenge for today is to write a poem with a title drawn from one of these spaceship names. Feel free to pick a genuine Banks, like the ones listed above, or to take one from the twitter.

And if you think of your own Banks-like spaceship name title, feel free to use that! The poet Barbara Guest wrote an essay warning poets about starting from the title, but while I’ve found that a wonderful poem usually finds its right title, I’ve also found that the right title can easily lead to a wonderful poem!

Happy writing!