4 Ways to Jump Start Your Poetry: Imagine you’re driving on an unknown dirt road and come to a five-way stop. (work with me here) Not using a GPS, or a map, you need to make a decision on which way to go. You know where you’ve been. Excitement rises at the possibilities. Each direction hides interesting prospects. What do you do? Don’t stick to one direction, choose all 4 unknown paths. Drive with purpose…
No matter what the circumstances, you do you. Almost all Lit mags tell you to read past issues to get a feel for what they want. That’s mostly true. There’s a pattern there, sometimes subconscious, of what the editors are attracted to in a poem. We all have our likes and dislikes, our biases, and prejudices. We try to be aware of our faults and put our predispositions aside. It doesn’t always work. We’re human,…
Bless me oh poetry gods, for I have sinned. I gave my poem a boring, abstract title that even made me lose interest in it. How many poems have you seen with a title like ‘Love’, ‘Justice’, or ‘Morning’? Your brain is left scrambling even before you dive into the poem. It may set up expectations your poem doesn’t deliver. Worst of all is the dreaded, ‘Untitled’. Not only does it miss an opportunity to…
by Elya Braden, Assistant Editor While many of us have been to enough poetry workshops over the years to assemble a notebook or, in my case, several notebooks of poetry prompts, one trick I’ve especially enjoyed from one of my favorite writing teachers, Tresha Faye Haefner, creator of The Poetry Salon, is that of creating your own poetry prompts. I’ve participated in many workshops where the only prompt is a particular poem or maybe a…
