Tag / June PoWriMo

by J.L. Smith

June PoWriMo Day 23 and 24

Raw excerpt for day 23:
…because I like things that mean nothing
and things that match, even if
it only matches in Chinese,
because I know in English it wouldn’t
make much sense anyway.

Raw excerpt for day 24:
On a Korean Air flight to Incheon.
For eight hours, I felt Kamchatka
was home. I was a dot in the Bering Sea,
a meteor orbiting the peninsula,
never touching the landmass,
just looping around it, past Japan before
crashing onto the Korean peninsula.

by J.L. Smith

June PoWriMo Prompts #23 & #24

Prompts for the 23rd and 24th.

#23 Pick a language. Doesn’t matter which one.Just don’t use English. Pick a word from that language. Why did you pick that word? What does it mean? Try using it in a narrative, but not one of its native origin. (For instance, from French “chaine.” A word often used in dance, this word means to turn rapidly in a straight line. Do not use it in this context, but in a different way.)

#24 This is a take on the erasure poem. Grab a news article off the internet. Copy and paste it into Word (or another word processor). Randomly throughout the article, select a word or phrase that interests you. Select about 10, then erase everything around these selected words. What do you have left? Scramble them. What can you make out of these words? What do these words inspire?

by J.L. Smith

June PoWriMo Prompt #22

Today’s prompt is inspired by the summer drink.  A poem I had just gotten accepted was about drinking hot Kool-Aid.  Yes, you read that right. And, yes, I lived to tell about it.  You will have to wait until Sunday to find out more about this drink, in the poem Korean Cherry Tea.

Of course, I thought about all the COLD Kool-Aid I had consume in my younger days.  That, and how nice, refreshing and comforting such drink is during an unbearable heat wave (OK, so that is a stretch in Alaska).

Think about your favorite cool drink.  Think about summer.  Write about it.  And, if you want, you can even contemplate hot Kool-Aid, if you want.  I won’t judge.

 

by J.L. Smith

June PoWriMo

Prompt for the day:
In the most unusual places, I got nostalgic for the 80s. It was in church, of all places, that the pastor mentioned 80s hair bands. Our pastor has a great love for Jim Carey, Modern Family and other facets of pop culture, that he works into each sermon. Today’s sermon included a story about another pastor’s son, his dark poetry and the 80s power ballad: quiet mediation and angst within a 3 minute rotation. I will let your mind fester on that a bit.

I consider myself a late 80s/90s child, and it got me thinking about the trends of that era. Some of the things that came to mind: Voltron (out again!), Barbie, She-ra and Jem. Yes, I was thinking mainly about toys.

Prompt: think of the era in which your grew into maturity. What were the trends, what did you love from the era? Write 5 minutes (or more) about these thoughts.

by J.L. Smith

June PoWriMo Prompt#18

This is a technique introduced to me at a workshop at the Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference that I found interesting and effective. It is negative inversion. In this technique, you take an existing poem (yours or someone else’s) and flip (or reverse negatively) the nouns and verbs in each of the lines.

Take this example, from one of my poems.
Her whisper guided him along the banks
of the river where the rocks..

Flip the nouns and verbs negatively:
Her scream pushed him away, away from his embrace
across the room and beyond his walls,

or something similar. This is just a crude example. This is a technique of play and word manipulation. Try it out. You may get nonsense or it may take you somewhere you may never go on your own. Try it.