Poetry Ideas

The contest winners for the Texty Ladies National Poetry Month poetry contest have been announced today. It was difficult to choose the winning entries, as you can imagine, but a contest generally requires a winner so there you go. It was fun reading the entries and we received quite an eclectic mix. They were all winners in my book!

We learn as we go and I think to make our next contest easier for the participants and judges, we will post a blurb about what the judges will be looking for in that particular contest. My personal preference and belief about poetry is that the meaning should not be a complete mystery to the reader; they should not have to work overtime to discover its purpose. Not that it has to be simple and spelled out for you. Like other forms of art, a poem can be subjective just not a complete mystery. Those are my thoughts on the subject anyway. I should clarify that the meaning or message was fairly clear in the poems submitted to the contest.

I'm still tinkering with Poetry Play Thursday. I'm not sure if I should switch up the format each month or just pick a different form of poetry to explore each week. For May, I'd like to give a structured prompt for people to use, not just one word but something like the following:

What if _____________?
I might _____________
What if _____________?
I could _____________
What if _____________?
I would _____________
(Ask a Question)______________?

Would anyone be interested in trying something that structured?

What if there was no daylight?
I might run with wolves and howl at the moon
What if the moon spoke in whispers?
I could learn the secrets of the universe
What if words brought life to dreams?
I would write of the pack, intuition and truth
What if we listened to the Wild Woman within us?




Wild Woman by Pamela Sweet is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.