To Someone…:Tuesday Tryouts

8:17 a.m. — Atlanta

Elaine de Kooning

Hello everyone. I hope all is well, as we pull into the various parts of our year, depending on where we are. I am continuing the easier prompts with another image prompt, and may continue to do so until the new year is upon us. I may also return to some of the more popular prompts. You all sound frantically busy.

Epistolary prompts are the thing of the moment, what with We Write Poems‘ prompt for this week, and the ezine Poemeleon asking for epistolary poems. While many [most?] of us have gotten out of the habit of writing letters, for poetry, the form can be rewarding and fun. While the two resources above offer a general approach, I am going to give you some self-portraits to focus on.

Pick the self-portrait that speaks to you. You may approach the letter poem in several ways. You might write a poem to the person you see, based on what you read in their faces, or see them doing, or what is around them.

Goya

You can have the person in the portrait writing you a letter, or have the person writing to herself or himself. The contents of the letter are where your imagination comes into play, as well as your powers of deduction of what you see.

What should your poem look like? Anything you want. While the form is a letter poem, the only must I can see is that you address someone. This is when you can use the second person ‘you’. Oddly, when I look for examples, I have a hard time finding anything helpful. I must have my search terms wrong. Although it’s not a strong example, I will give you a link to a poem I wrote on Douglas Robertson’s The Net Mender. You can see the art which inspired the poem.

 

Dali

 

Write in free verse, or pick a more structured form you think suits the content of what you write. Above all, have fun with this.

I shall not see you Friday, but will calendar last week’s post, so that should your insatiable hunger for prompts require them [I know who you are], you have sources. I will update the ones from the last few days. Then I am heading to my daughter and brother and Thanksgiving, not a holiday I grew up with, but I do like turkey sandwiches. I shall see you Tuesday with another prompt to carry you gently into December. That’s right, we are that close.

Happy writing all.