To celebrate National Poetry Month, OWC is once again hosting Verse of Ages. Get ready for a month of prompts and myriad ways to stretch your imagination! Skip the rules and see how words spark ideas and then go where they take you.
Here are some ways to use the prompts, but these are just guidelines:
- Use the word-of-the-day in a poem.
- Free associate to see where the word takes you.
- Build a web of connected ideas and images to add to your quiver.
- Change the word’s part of speech.
- Use the word to build a compound word.
- Brainstorm a list of rhyming words, slant rhymes, words that repeat the consonant sounds, words that repeat the vowel sounds.
- Explore the word’s synonyms and antonyms.
- Dig through a Thesaurus or mine the adjacent words in a dictionary.
- Combine words on consecutive days and work them into a single poem.
Short or long; formal, blank, or free verse; topical or fanciful or anything in between—your choice. Wind up your imagination and let it spin. A poem a day? Go for it! Start writing Monday, April 1, and to plan share your work at a Poetry Slam on May 7th at Stack’s Coffeehouse, 1831 N. Killingsworth in Portland from 7 to 9.
