2024 November PAD Chapbook Challenge: Day 14

Wow! How are we already 2 weeks in on this challenge? Halloween still feels like yesterday for me.

For today’s prompt, write a poetic form poem. Forms are nice, because they force poets to make decisions and often help us stretch beyond what’s comfortable and into the creative realm to make things “work.” Using this as a prompt on Day 14 wasn’t just luck (see yesterday’s prompt); rather, I was thinking of the 14-line sonnet.

If you’d like to experiment with some shorter forms, here’s a list of 10 shorter poetic forms (fewer than 10 lines).

Remember: These prompts are springboards to creativity. Use them to expand your possibilities, not limit them.

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Write a poem every single day of the year with Robert Lee Brewer’s Poem-a-Day: 365 Poetry Writing Prompts for a Year of Poeming. After sharing more than a thousand prompts and prompting hundreds of thousands of poems for more than a decade, Brewer picked 365 of his favorite poetry prompts here.

Click to continue.

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Here’s my attempt at a Poetic Form Poem:

“Do you need any poems?,” by Robert Lee Brewer

as the world is engulfed in flames
i find myself burning ideas
into the blank slate of my mind.

all of the oceans slowly heat
to raise hurricanes in the south
& shoo the insurers away.

coral bleaches under water
as people call for more platforms
to draw black gold from deep beneath.

across the land parents whisper
about the disappearance of bees
& the decline of birds in trees.

nearly every species on earth
finds itself on the edge of doom
as orbiting space junk balloons.

still even in the fiery night
i find my pen still wants to write
one more line break into the light.

(Note on my form: I decided to write a triversen, a form created by William Carlos Williams. If you’re interested in learning more about poetic forms, check out a list of 100+ forms here.)