Rachel's Repository of Prompt Poetry

prompts and links and stuff?

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel Leastlikely) — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 21:33:00 +0000

hello?
do you know any really good prompt sites?
it's too bad we've lost Poetry Instigator and some of the other really cool things I link to over there on the right.

what do you think your poetry is for? where does it come from? where does it go?

Banter

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel Leastlikely) — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 18:15:00 +0000

Banter is what two roosters do when there's nothing to do but watch the weather.
The bond of shared responsibility momentarily blocks the instinct to fight as clouds roll in and the world asserts its changeability.
Change is the death of roosters.
Earth, water, air, duty. The rooster looks skyward and clucks to himself, feeling that this is the quietest he's ever been.

Three Word Wednesday
written in Grandview

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel Leastlikely) — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 18:44:00 +0000

a thing i've been doing on my computer:

open a random picture
open one of those magnetic poetry applications
make weird art

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel Leastlikely) — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 21:29:00 +0000

"A haze hangs over the city," she tries.

She tries: "A lenient master is a cruel master."

"Heavy hangs the head that wears the crown."

"I bet he's lonely in that big house."

She tries breathing.

She tries: "I'm strugging for independence."

She tries: "Posting this to Facebook shows courage. Not to post it shows cowardice."

"No one listens to me."

"No one listens anyway."

She tries smoothing the fur of a buffalo rug.
She tries feeling guilty.

"I just don't see it ever coming right," she tries.

"I need a god," she tries.

She tries praying.

She tries spooning coconut milk over her lips.
She tries playing games.
She tries cycling downhill, tries not to brake.

"I should have--"

She tries: "I must discover the meaning of 'will'."

She tries: "That cat is dying."

She tries dying.

"Only necessary things," she tries.

"I opened my eyes and it was still morning."

"Maybe it's all true."

Oppositions

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel Leastlikely) — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 03:48:00 +0000

A Go board
A black and white photograph
Two cats, not necessarily
black or white
My little way of thinking
or not thinking
A sketch I'm doing to avoid thinking
The future, not necessarily
of staying or going
and yet one must decide sometime

Easy Street Prompt # 29

I'm Glad You Asked.

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel Leastlikely) — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 23:38:00 +0000

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Gc3RW0NHlg

Go Club Of Greater Central Lincoln -- Cheerleader
Wildsource Pizza Club -- Dustman
Murky Basement Fanciers Of The Great Plains -- Webmaster-in-training
Allies For The Investigation Of Suspicious Colonic Spasms -- Grant Writer
Impossible Body Temperature -- Founding Complaint
Lapsed Meditators Anonymous -- Member In Good Standing
We Believe In Love (WBIL) -- Lesser Evangelist, zero conversions
MMPRPG Wives And Widows -- Correspondence Clerk
The Vast HeadChurch Of Laurie Anderson -- Neophyte

I'm Coming Back

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel Leastlikely) — Thu, 31 May 2012 21:16:00 +0000

I've been addressing my fears
one by one

I've been making step by step diagrams
in my head
of how I'd kill an animal I meant to eat
or an animal that meant to eat me

So, naturally, the internet
is okay now

accidentally wrote a poem in twitter. more of a pun, really. but so true.

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel Leastlikely) — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 21:19:00 +0000

i wonder if i quit taking the pill, would i regain the ability to conceive -- of the existence of good in the world?

ENVERSIONING

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel Leastlikely) — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 00:21:00 +0000

my friend challenged me to write a story about a typo. this is more of a stream-of-consciousness prose poem. i gave up a little too quickly.

It can go one of any number of ways. That's the thing about time. That's the thing about things.

You get up in the morning. It's the 21st century. It's dumb like that. Things occur to you like "I'm going to create my day. I'm going to manifest my desires. I'm going to nurture my artist. I'm going to make him express himself. hey Hey Hey Hey." But it never turns out like that. Every day is the same, in its own unique way. Every day you fail to do this thing.

But it could change. It could change right now.

Imagine, for instance, that insterad of sitting here the way you are sitting, halfheartedly vaguely interacting with a page of wordsk and who knows what they mean or whether they're worth your trouble, you are in fact on a great big clippers hip, sailing from this town to that, in a sailor suit and hat. Seriouisly. Other people have better lieves than you, that's what made them great. They didn't dream it, they be'd it.

Inagine, for instance, that instead of sitting here you are running up that road, running up that hill running up that building running up that electrid bill.

You see, you can't even genuinely put yourself in that picture. You're stuck in the hopelessly quotidian lonely little details of your own personality. You know what you're going to do next? You're going to go buy a tub of ice cream and a bag oc cheetos and go watch Project Runway by yourself. You call that romance?

But it could go any number of ways. You're swerving on an attomic level. You're headed towards Dreamtime. You've got potential. You've come a long way, baby.

So make of it what you will. This tissue of lies.

Thus Spake Biggus Dickus

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel Leastlikely) — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 05:48:00 +0000

prompt: Write a poem using only words that start with "s" (duh)

and having done so, can't help thinking of that scene in Life Of Brian where they make fun of people with speech impediments.

Surely science swerved

sunday's sermon

somewhere southern.

Superman salvo

sleeps sans shuddering,

so saith sage serpents.

Sudden shame?

Seek several suggestive shapes

subconsciously severed.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 17:07:00 +0000

wow, i'd
better post something
so my new comments
settings can take
effect

no more porn
spammers
here

The Small Misfortune Of A Rum And Coke

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 02:54:00 +0000

Sometimes one thing
insufficient in itself
is not improved by addition
of a second thing

noxious rum
in a glass of ice

a person
seeking love

This is a such an evening, my friend
so sit by me
in the dimmest light we can find
and drink.

nothing prompted me today but the desire to produce something. well, and this rum and coke i have here, and a sense of melancholy. and, yes, the unsettling but gratifying knowledge that somebody's actually reading this damn thing. though, knowing this, i have also had to ask myself if i shouldn't be trying harder to write something that might actually be edifying to read...oh well! clearly i have resisted the impulse, so, no need to worry. :)

raw

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 04:44:00 +0000

and this is it. typos and all.
(don't let it scare you. it is possible to generate worthwhile writing with this tool, i just wanted to try out the Publish feature.)

"Write Or Die Poem 6/40/10

Lack of focus or experimental mood
decidedly disollute and like
i saw a firefly dying on my bathroom floor
i couldn't get it to fly away or glow
and i took this as a bad omen

cause where else am i supposed to look for love
having paved every alley
in weird silk and succeeded
in never feeling much for my sex partners

but what if

and what the fuck

so there's me and my paper sack
full of the things i should be doing
and all i can muster is this self-disgust
and the lonely bare bulb of a mind

too scared to go down any imaginative uncertainties
unbelieving
and unsatiable like
a kid who only eats saltines but will not
by any means stop eating

how can you be so hungry for this d unnourishing

we might well ask

and yet this is the right age for it
in all ways, look around

No it's not true it's
a world, still,
and it's full

not hungry

full of reality. and i am within it
one of many tiny moving bits of data
to be processed
and then gone"

Good News For Me!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 14 May 2010 18:28:00 +0000

I recently found out that I'm getting a poem published, in an upcoming anthology of Nebraska women poets, called The Untidy Season. Gonna be released next spring. What's another few months?

This is pretty great news for me. First acceptance in my adult life, and I can't help thinking it'll be ever so slightly easier now that I've got my name in a book. Onward and upward!

My secret? Get on etsy and buy an Oscar Wilde prayer candle, and fucking bribe him with money.

Of course the real secret is supposed to be perseverance, so, I guess we should all really just keep sending out the submissions. If this publication thing is really so important..

I recommend this, hugely

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 18:56:00 +0000

Write or Die by Dr Wicked

so cool; i know many of us have been dreaming of ways to be forced to write. you sure as hell can't take a break to check facebook without this program noticing. and i cannot overstate the helpfulness of that. damn facebook.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 17:02:00 +0000

I had sort of quit posting here because I wanted to save my best work to submit to the magazines, and at some point I had realized that some of them considered material published on blogs as 'previously published material.'

But in light of certain sentiments expressed on my other blog, it seems appropriate to relax a bit and come back to this. Doing good work is more important than getting published, innit? So since I've found the prompts and stuff helpful in the past, and since, honestly, more people are seeing what I post here than what I post to various editors, well, The Repository is officially re-opened. Besides, I'll totally console myself by putting all these into a book myself.

Though unfortunately it looks like a lot of the blogs I'd been following for prompts have sort of slowed down with the updating. Oh well, soldier on!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 20:11:00 +0000

I gather a deck
of self-concepts
and choose one
and go up to you.

Have you seen this person?

Your face is hard to read.
I go home to consult
my records, check my thinking.

Who was I?
Who can support this story?

Surely I didn't just
ask you, just like that.

for/from poetry instigator?

The Blue Overalls

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 23:53:00 +0000

In the midst of a tedious day's
cleaning, I get
a defiant sense

of the luxury of ugly things.

I find a pair of overalls,
not even old, just blue--
naive, unvariegated blue--

as fashion statement,
useless,
and irrelevant to my lifestyle.

On no occasion
would I wear these overalls.
This fact gives me unaccountable joy
and I rush to try them on.

These elements, unacceptable,
are therefore mine, all mine.

for Poetry Instigator - Neruda & The Mundane

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 21:59:00 +0000

Let no philosophy be
analogous to clothes shopping.
I don't wear fashions
as feelings, or vice versa. My life
is poorly stitched by hand
from the scraps of those ideas,
not from whole cloth.

prompt from Matthew Zapruder @ Poetry Instigator:
"...pick a sentence from a book at random. Then, figure out the action or principle underlying the sentence, and begin the poem by saying you (or someone) is NOT doing that action or doesn’t believe in that principle, thereby negating the premise."

This particular li'l poem(above) is more of a fragment and I don't even know for sure what it means, but the prompt was dashed intriguing.

My sentence is from What Color Is Your Parachute? which is the only book of prose I had on hand. For a moment I despaired of finding anything I wanted to negate in this book of positiveness, but this was a pretty good prompt and I managed to grab hold of something.

The sentence: "It is exactly analogous to your going to a clothing store and trying on different suits (or dresses)"

Ardipithecus

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 19:17:00 +0000

Scientists still can't see
the evolutionary advantage
in bipedalism

wish they still had
grasping feet

are on the verge of admitting
it really was God.

Nature's mistakes
don't flourish.

for read write poem

Body of Work

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 00:04:00 +0000

Where is it done?
Is it located in the nerves,
in the back,
in the strength of the thigh
to walk and climb and do
whatever is necessary?

Probably the shoulders
are the seat of the Will
at its most godly--
the origin
of the muscles of embrace,
shoring up all things.

for read write poem

Coverage

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 16:44:00 +0000

We need health care
to stay pretty for you,
Senators.

A sick woman
is an unsightly woman.
(unless of course
we're talking
consumption)

for read write poem

Doctor's Office Diagrams IV

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 06:20:00 +0000

I always conceived
the uterus
to be huge,

also the heart.

Each, I am told,
about the size
of a fist.

for read write poem
yeah a bit slapdash and probably been said before, sorry about that. gotta keep on truckin'.

Doctor's Office Diagrams III

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 22:16:00 +0000

The exemplary human head is drawn
with the hairstyle of an American politician

for the small fraction of humanity
who might find this face reassuring.

for read write poem

Doctor's Office Diagrams II

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 05:43:00 +0000

There's no witchcraft in blood.
It's shaped like nothing,
like practicality, a modified sphere.

Experience is unpainterly.
The beauty of it always lost
to the body that lost the blood.

At best, taboo
or disgust;
at worst, bare fact.

for read write poem