And at a vast distance were visible, as a stain upon the horizon, the domes and cupolas of a great city—an image or faint abstraction, caught perhaps in childhood from some picture of Jerusalem. And not a bow-shot from me, upon a stone and shaded by Judean palms, there sat a woman, and I looked, and it was—Ann! She fixed her eyes upon me earnestly, and I said to her at length: “So, then, I have found you at last.”
What The —
What is forgetting ?
A chapbook of dull poetry gathering dust, unread . . .
Today’s prompt asks you to begin by picking 5-10 words from the following list.
Next, write out a question for each word that you’ve selected (e.g., what is seaweed?)
owl / generator / fog / river / clove / miracle / cyclops / oyster / mercurial / seaweed / gutter / artillery / salt / elusive / thunder / ghost / acorn / cheese / longing / cowbird / truffle / quahog / song
Now for each question, write a one-line answer.
Try to make the answer an image, and don’t worry about strict logic.
These are surrealist answers, after all!
After you’ve written out your series of questions and answers, place all the answers, without the questions, on a new page. See if you can make a poem of just the answers. You may find that what you have is very beautifully mysterious, and somehow has its own logic.
In my opinion the above prompt is unworthy of a response, and shows what is wrong with modern approaches to the very concept of poetry. But you do you . . .
The problem you have is you’ve nothing to say
These MFA promptings are good for a yawn
So scribble some shit and then call it a day
Since most of your readers have long since moved on.
Cover-art Triptych
Hergé: Prisoners of the Sun
Seven Crystal Balls break first, with terrors—
Lightning vaporizes Rascar Capac
And leads us south into Andean errors
While the maidens chant to Pachacamac.
You have to have read it to have known it;
The Inca splendor, glimpsed in perfect art.
Truth recognized, and Hergé has shown it . . .
Calculus and Haddock: both play their part.
Hermann Hesse: Demian
For this gnostic nonsense, I drank and smoked alone. . .
wore scarves, became a misfit, took drugs, lived Art;
wandered at night in some existential zone
and saw myself a sufferer who dwelt apart.
Laing: The Politics of Experience
This Scottish doctor made me lose my way;
The psychedelic artwork had me fooled.
Yet I love the cover-art to this day . . .
(Though it took me a while to get un-schooled.)
PROMPT #1:
try to write a poem based on a book cover
Lyrical Confusion
CONNECT/HOOK 