From Crossroads: Creative Writing Exercises in Four Genres by Diane Thiel. (textbook, 2005) Choose a place or a building that has evocative memories for you. Let your piece stay focused on the place as a “container” for memories.(I’m going to write about a bunkhouse. First line: Skunks lived under it.)
Have you written a sonnet lately? Now is a good time. Yes, there is the rhyme scheme but you can squeeze that a little bit. You don’t want to have your lines end at the breaks. That will result in Dr. Seussishness. Enjamb, let the lines flow into the next. The rhyme should be really subtle in this old rhymed form. Write the Black Lives Matter poem. Did Ovid write about Covid? He would’ve. (He didn’t write sonnets either but so…as I used to say as a teenager.) Make it contemporary. No flowery handkerchief language.
Write a poem using a real place in your life in an important way. PS Make it really good!! (From Writing Poetry by Barbara Drake) The real good part is mine EK
From the Spring issue of Peninsula Poets.
From Writing Poetry by Barbara Drake: Write a poem that teaches the history of your family to those who come after you.
From The Practice of Poetry. Write a poem in which the name of a color is frequently repeated throughout the course of the poem. Consider symbolic associations (blue=sadness) as well as personal associations. (green=the phosphorescent algae on our little lake). Get the color into the title of the poem.
A member poem from the Spring issue of Peninsula Poets.
From the Spring Issue Peninsula Poets.
When you were a kid, you believed things that may not have been quite accurate. I thought I could see atoms when they were actually dust motes, but never mind that! Take something inaccurate you used to believe and go with it.
Poetry Society of Michigan 