Form It is a prompt that focuses on exploring our topic through form poetry. This time, we’re going to “form” a mountain.
Prompt Guidelines and Options
1. Consider how you are feeling today, as you approach your topic. Are you sorrowful? Overflowing with joy or good humor? Maybe you’re in a snarky frame of mind. Or feeling perplexed. Perhaps you’re just in the mood to tell a story or express gratitude or awe. You could also consider the nature of the topic itself. Think on these things before you…
2. Choose a form that either matches or purposely works against how you feel as you approach your topic, or that matches or purposely works against the nature of the topic itself. Options:
Acrostic (good for creating puzzles and mystery or dedications)
Ballad (excellent way to tell a story)
Catalog Poem (useful for building intensity, praise, or a sense of magic)
Ghazal (helpful for emphasizing “longing” or for exploring metaphysical questions)
Haiku (good for creating immediacy or focusing in on emotion)
Ode (excellent way to praise something or someone you love or admire)
Pantoum (useful for plumbing depressive or anxious themes)
Rondeau (helpful for giving form to extremes of either sadness or dark wit)
Sestina (good for exploring confusion, questions, worries, neuroses, fears in an oblique way)
Sonnet (excellent way to confine a bombastic theme or rein in a potentially sappy or overly-sentimental theme; also an excellent way to “work against” a topic humorously)
Villanelle (useful for themes that feel resistant to answers; also can be used to “work against” a topic, using mocking humor)
3. Be specific. Think nouns instead of adjectives.
4. Consider doing a little research about the topic you are covering: its history, associated words, music, art, sculpture, architecture, fashion, science, and so on. Look for unusual details, so you can speak convincingly and intriguingly.
That’s it! We look forward to hearing you form poetically, about a mountain.
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Featured Poem
Thanks to everyone who participated in last week’s poetry prompt. Inviting us on a mountain trek, here is a poem from Laura we enjoyed:
Assent
Top-
most
in my
mind’s
ear now
is how it felt
each first time
I summited. Say,
Freter’s Hill, for which
the way up began where
my street ended. Later, Pinnacle
in Little Rock. Still later, Cadillac in
Maine. And also Mount Nebo, Petit
Jean, mountains whose tops I drove to,
and even Observatory Hill, where the way
to the top is paved and easy. There’s something
about rising above it all, no farther to go, destination
met. An accomplishment, a satisfaction, and if I’m being
honest, a shred of something like disappointment too, or
sorrow. Of course I can recall a view from each of these. But
I mean it about the mind’s ear, because there was a particular
sound that is partly the ambient noise of each place in each time,
especially if the wind was having its way. But there is also a sound
that is silence, a pressing in when the ground has run out, a something
that startles into attention, like a teacher who gets her students to hush
by not raising her volume, but whispering. It is the same sound everywhere,
yet new and peculiar each time. A thing I have missed, a forgotten phenomenon.
The lure and allure of it is every bit as strong as Everest is for some. Silence, I give.
The highest ground in my neighborhood is Summit Street. I’m planning my ascent.
—by Laura Brown
Photo by Pawel Pacholec. Creative Commons via Flickr.
Browse more mountains & valleys poems
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How to Write a Poem uses images like the buzz, the switch, the wave—from the Billy Collins poem “Introduction to Poetry”—to guide writers into new ways of writing poems. Excellent teaching tool. Anthology and prompts included.
“How to Write a Poem is a classroom must-have.”
—Callie Feyen, English Teacher, Maryland
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Donna Falcone says
Laura, I really enjoyed your mountain shaped poem, Assent, last week. So nice to see it once again… and I really like the title! 🙂
Megan Willome says
Laura, I really love this poem! I love the shape of it and this whole thing about sorrow and silence.
Sandra Heska King says
What they said.