April 8, 2023 - Prompts below
Curdled Breezes
The wind is a fierce adversary
Chastising me with her frosty gaze
She will attempt to break me with breezy bluster
But I fight back - mano a mano
Outrunning her guileless gusts
Attempting escape, Lisa takes flight,
but quickly surrenders to the dessicated drafts
calm flurries propping her up
amid giant earthy elms
We sip then swallow the summer storm
choking on the dry dew of defeat
even as flosculous forests fade
Then, when the red snow falls on Finland's fields
I stand on the sliver silence
noiseless echoes vibrating in space and time
Emotionless and overcome with the loss
the gale falls peacefully into infinitude
“Twenty Little Poetry Projects” — the challenge is to use them all in one poem:
1. Begin the poem with a metaphor.
2. Say something specific but utterly preposterous.
3. Use at least one image for each of the five senses, either in succession or scattered randomly throughout the poem.
4. Use one example of synesthesia (mixing the senses).
5. Use the proper name of a person and the proper name of a place.
6. Contradict something you said earlier in the poem.
7. Change direction or digress from the last thing you said.
8. Use a word (slang?) you’ve never seen in a poem.
9. Use an example of false cause-effect logic.
10. Use a piece of talk you’ve actually heard (preferably in dialect and/or which you don’t understand).
11. Create a metaphor using the following construction: “The (adjective) (concrete noun) of (abstract noun) . . .”
12. Use an image in such a way as to reverse its usual associative qualities.
13. Make the persona or character in the poem do something he or she could not do in “real life.”
14. Refer to yourself by nickname and in the third person.
15. Write in the future tense, such that part of the poem seems to be a prediction.
16. Modify a noun with an unlikely adjective.
17. Make a declarative assertion that sounds convincing but that finally makes no sense.
18. Use a phrase from a language other than English.
19. Make a non-human object say or do something human (personification).
20. Close the poem with a vivid image that makes no statement, but that “echoes” an image from earlier in the poem.
