The challenge this month was to write "in the style of" Valerie Worth. You can learn more about Valerie Worth and read some of her poems at Spotlight on NCTE Poets: Valerie Worth, with Lee Bennett Hopkins, a post by Renée M. LaTulippe at No Water River.  Worth's poems are meditations on the little things in world around us. Writing in free verse, her keen sense of observation and economy of language make everyday objects seem extraordinary. When William was in third grade (spring 2010) his teacher had the class copy and illustrate poems that "spoke" to them in their journals. Th ..read more

This month Every Day Poems offered up a challenge to "craft a Cento from some of your favorite Every Day Poems lines." They also added this extension. For some extra fun, you’re invited to hand-letter your Cento poem, using a different style or color for each unique line you’ve gathered from another poet. Or, you could put each line on a different slip of paper and collage your poem together. Challenge accepted! Here is my untitled cento. (Click to enlarge.) It reads: the whole world’s chanting desire between stars or heartbeats beyond reach, beyond reckoning  and in slow-mo ..read more

The challenge this month was to write in the form of bouts-rimés. In The Teachers & Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms, Ron Padgett describes the form this way: A bouts-rimés poem is created by one person’s making up a list of rhymed words and giving it to another person, who in turn writes the lines that end with those rhymes, in the same order in which they were given. This post by Lady in Read Writes has an infographic on the history of the form. What must be mentioned is that the tradition is to write 14 rhymed lines in the form of a sonnet.  We didn't follow these rules exac ..read more

 The challenge this month was to write in the form of diminishing verse. You can learn more about this form at Writer's Digest. You can also find helpful information at Astra Poetica, Word Wool, and YeahWrite. Wikipedia calls these Pruning Poems. Basically, the last word in each line is reduced in diminishing (pruning) fashion, by removing the initial letter of the last word in the line without any other changes to spelling. One example might be trout/rout/out.  I'm grateful I didn't need to think about addressing the theme of transformation in my writing, be ..read more

This month's challenge was writing a poem from the lines generated as we played with an exquisite corpse. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about this form. Exquisite corpse (from the original French term cadavre exquis, literally exquisite cadaver), is a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule (e.g., "The adjective noun adverb verb the adjective noun." as in "The green duck sweetly sang the dreadful dirge.") or by being allowed to see only the end of what the previous person ..read more

The challenge this month was to write a poem in the form of monotetra. You can learn more about it at Writer's Digest. I believe I suggested this one when we were mapping out the year. It looked interesting and I'm always a sucker for form. This form includes any number of quatrains written in tetrameter (8 syllables in each line), with each quatrain using a single rhyme (mono-rhymed). The last line in each stanza repeats the same four syllables. This was a lot harder than I imagined. I found the single rhyme hard to work with. I much prefer AB rhyme patterns. I wrote two really bad ..read more

The challenge this month was to write a poem in response to a quote. Initially, I thought we would be writing to the same quote, but several examples were shared, I decided to use one that spoke to me. Over the last few weeks, the calendar has been looming large for me as the month of June and the second anniversary of my mother's death approached. That anniversary is today. Knowing that we would be sharing our poems at this time, and because she's been much on my mind, I decided I wanted to write a poem for or about her.  The second challenge was to include the theme of transformation, w ..read more

Hello All! I'm so happy to be hosting Poetry Friday.  I have spent the last few months preparing to move out of the building I have spent the last 29 years in on campus. It is my home away from home. There is much I will miss about it. The physical move of all our things occurred this week and still continues, as bookshelves are installed, and furniture moved in. I have been adrift for weeks, with no place to land, settling most days in the library before my classes meet in the late afternoon. We will be allowed to move in next week, and I can't wait.  In seeing my new office, I am s ..read more

This month's challenge was to write in the style of Neruda. Oh boy. I haven't read much Neruda, so finding a poem as a mentor text was hard. I was familiar with the bilingual, illustrated selection of Neruda's Book of Questions that was published by Enchanted Lion Books last year. I thought about writing a poem composed of questions, but I went down the rabbit hole of reading Neruda's odes and got lost. They're pretty amazing. If you haven't read them, the best way to describe them is a lengthy (usually) stream of consciousness about everyday objects with a hefty dose of meandering seemin ..read more

My poem for Day 13 of National Poetry Month is written to the photograph The Johnstown calamity. A slightly damaged house. Pennsylvania Johnstown, 1889. The Great Flood of 1889 When the South Fork Dam gave way the Little Conemaugh River ran  like the Mississippi a flood of water and debris hit the unsuspecting town fires burned for three days it wasn't pretty even in stereoscope Poem ©Tricia Stohr-Hunt, 2023. All rights reserved. I hope you'll join me tomorrow for my next poem highlighting a piece of history. You can read the previous poems as images on Instagram or ..read more