Hi wonderful poets! It was SO GREAT to make poems with you all this week at our meeting with guest Zach Carlsen. You all brought freshness and excitement, and I love that poetry happened as a result.

As promised, we’ll be posting more poem ideas/nudges/thoughts on the blog these next few weeks. You can find them all collected in the Poem ideas category at the bottom of the home page. Not all prompts work for everybody, so if this doesn’t help you, throw it away and make up your own. (It’s a dreary Saturday as I type this, which is reason enough to write a poem!)

Dorianne Laux is one of my favorite poets, and her work is brave and zesty. She has a great poem called “What’s Broken,” which you can find here. In it, she combines a list of apparently mundane broken things into a totally amazing picture of what it’s like to have a broken heart.

So, give Dorianne’s poem a read, then make your own poem about broken things. Or riff off her idea, and make yours about heavy things, green things, dead things, perfect things, dark things, wet things, or expensive things, or…

Happy trails,

Marcie

With news of another mass shooting in the U.S., it’s hard to put my emotions into words. So many things seem not-right in the world, and I feel powerless to address any of them. I know this sounds a little somber, but maybe some of you feel this way too.

Rattle magazine has a great series called “Poets Respond,” where you can read a poet’s take on the news of the week. Poetry by itself doesn’t get us to a solution to society’s problems, but it helps us, the readers, be more human. Maybe I will try to write a poem about San Bernardino tonight.

Check out the series here.

http://www.rattle.com/poetry/respond/

–Marcie R.