Hi Teen Voices participants and mentors,

I know most of you are amidst the process of working with us on poems for the book, but it never hurts to keep writing.

So in the interest of poetry, I wanted to share a local opportunity with you folks. It’s the Winona Daily News poetry contest, open to submissions now through April 1. The theme this year is the news, so we’re asking local poets like you to respond with a poem to a current event.

Find the contest description and rules here. Winning poems selected by a panel of three judges get published in the Winona Daily News, and all entrants are invited to share their poems at a public reading event at the Book Shelf April 26.

Best,

Marcie

Introducing… odes! Odes are a fun kind of poem written in praise of something.

Well-loved Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote a lot of odes, including this, his Ode to the Onion (or Oda a la Cebolla). Here’s the English version. And for the folks who prefer to read in Spanish, here’s the Spanish original.

He writes to praise the onion (which is a pretty magical thing if you think about it). I love the line where he says “You make us cry without hurting us” because wow, sometimes I really want to chop onions because I need to cry about something but can’t otherwise.

Write an ode to your favorite vegetable. If you aren’t quite up on the ode-mode, try a love letter. But keep it specific. That’s what makes these poems tick. Readers won’t know what you mean when you say an onion is beautiful, but if you describe it as a “luminous flask” with “crystal scales” then everybody sees onions in a new way, and poetry magic happens.

Happy writing,

Marcie

Here’s another prompt from Ken, based on another famous poem by William Carlos Williams. By focusing on observation and detail, you can counterbalance whatever tendencies your poems may have toward too much abstraction.

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends

upon

 

a red wheel

barrow

 

glazed with rain

water

 

beside the white

chickens.

– William Carlos Williams (1883 – 1963)

Using “The Red Wheelbarrow” as a model, write a poem in this style in which you present some objects that, taken together, seem to have an intrinsic relationship, even if that relationship is transitory, occurring only at that instant of time. This operates like a freeze frame in a movie, except this is the movie of your life.

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