As of today, there’s just one week to go in our annual challenge. We hope you are feeling cool, calm, and confident in your writing. And if not . . . well, you’re poets. Nobody expects you to be cool, calm, and confident. They kind of expect you to be more like this:
Our featured participant for the day is Sarah Davies, whose response to Day 23’s superhero prompt conjures a hero called Imaginarywoman.
Today’s featured resource is this BBC archive dedicated to the poetry of Robert Burns. You can read about his life, read his poems, and hear them read by dozens of folks, including former-prince-now-king Charles.
Finally, our (optional) prompt for the day is another one pulled from our 2016 archives. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem that begins with a line from another poem (not necessarily the first one), but then goes elsewhere with it. This will work best if you just start with a line of poetry you remember, but without looking up the whole original poem. Or you could find a poem that you haven’t read before and then use a line that interests you. The idea is for the original to furnish the backdrop for your work, but without influencing you so much that you feel as if you are just rewriting the original! For example, you could begin, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day,” or “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,” or “I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster,” or “they persevere in swimming where they like.” Really, any poem will do to provide your starter line – just so long as it gives you the scope to explore.
Happy writing!
