Poetry Challenge #151-Tidy Whities Unite!
Today is a day dedicated to mentioning unmentionables—specifically underwear: bloomers, nickers, pantaloons, briefs, boxers, tidy-whities. . . whatever you call what you wear under your outer clothes.
“Underwear of some kind appear in nearly every culture.”
Back in the Middle Ages (400AD-1400AD) men sported undies more like string bikinis than tidy-whities.
As for the lady of the castle: a bra is a bra is as my grandmother called it, “torture device,” the earliest existing example of which is about 600 years old.
Poetry Challenge #151
Tidy Whities Unite
In honor of National Underwear Day (Aug 5, 2020), write a brief poem about undies.
By brief meaning: A poem using no more than five words per line, and no more than three lines, write a poem about whatever it is you wear under your clothes-- but if you’re one of those who prefers wafting in breezes…call it Commando!
Set Your Timer for 7 Minutes
Start Writing
Don’t Think Too Much About it; Just do it!
Cindy Faughnan and I began this 7-Minute Poetry Challenge MORE THAN 1563 days ago! (without a miss!!!) We now take turns creating our own prompts to share with you. If you join us in the Challenge, let us know by posting the title, a note, or if you want, the whole poem in the comments.
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Poetry Challenge #150-BRRRING-A-DING-DING
Pennsylvania 6-5000, the telephone number, immortalized in a Glenn Miller Orchestra song, will, to this day, connect you to the front desk of The Hotel Pennsylvania in New York. All you have to do is add on the modern area code.
Let’s break it down: Hotel Pennsylvania is located nearest the Pennsylvania telephone exchange, or PE, named for Penn Station in New York City. So, to reach the hotel in the 1930s, people would dial PE6-5000 or 736-5000, swapping in numbers for letters. Tack on the modern 212 area code and you’ve got a modern, 10-digit phone number. Not so different from what it was in the 1930s.
Poetry Challenge #150
BRRING-A-DING DING!
What’s the first phone number you remember learning? How old were you?
Mine is easy: 747-7747. I was in second grade. To make it easier still, we live at 707 Moraga lane. I think the 707 was a coincidence, but who knows? Back in the days of one-per-house attached phones with curly cords, there well may have been a correlation between house numbers and phone numbers.
Imagine you are calling that first number. Or someone who would have back then, is calling you on that number. Write a Conversation Poem between you and that someone else. And…
Make the number of words in each line the same as that phone number. My poem for example will be 7 lines long. First line 7 words, 2nd line 4, 3rd line 7 and so on. Any zeros are Wild! Writer’s choice! And…
Alternate lines of dialogue as you would in a conversation.
BRRRING! “Hello! Is this the party to whom I am speaking?”
Set Your Timer for 7 Minutes
Start Writing
Don’t Think Too Much About it; Just do it!
Pennsylvania 6-5-OH-OH-OH Playlist:
Cindy Faughnan and I began this 7-Minute Poetry Challenge MORE THAN 1563 days ago! (without a miss!!!) We now take turns creating our own prompts to share with you. If you join us in the Challenge, let us know by posting the title, a note, or if you want, the whole poem in the comments.
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Poetry Challenge #149-Tastes Like Sunshine
“Each of us spends an average of fifteen full days a year doing nothing but eating,”—Bill Haduch, Food Rules
According to scientists, the link between food and memory began as a human survival tactic known as conditioned taste aversion. Our bodies are programmed to forever remember foods that made us sick, along with when and where we ate them, so we will be sure to avoid eating them in the future. Along with remembering bad food experiences, we are also programmed to remember delicious food experiences.
Poetry Challenge #149
Tastes Like Sunshine
What is the most delicious thing you ever remember eating? Where were you when you ate it? What were you doing before? (Or what did you do after?) Who were you with?
Write a poem about it.
Extra points for using a simile to compare the taste of that food with some non-food thing. A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two things often using the words "like", "as", or "than.”
The title of your poem will be the place you were when that food memory was created. in that memory. Fill in the blank:
Tastes Like ________________.
“One must ask children and birds how cherries and strawberries taste”— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Set Your Timer for 7 Minutes
Start Writing
Don’t Think Too Much About it; Just do it!
Cindy Faughnan and I began this 7-Minute Poetry Challenge MORE THAN 1550 days ago! (without a miss!!!) We now take turns creating our own prompts to share with you. If you join us in the Challenge, let us know by posting the title, a note, or if you want, the whole poem in the comments.
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Poetry Challenge #148-Give Something Away.
Today, July 15th, is National Give Something Away Day. What will you give away? Clothes or toys or books that you’ve outgrown? Cookies or a hat that you made?
When it comes to words, the best writers seem to agree:
“The details are the life of it, I insist, say everything on your mind, don’t hold back, don’t analyze or anything as you go along, say it out.” -Jack Kerouac
You could give away some time—either volunteer for something or spend some time with someone.
You could give away a compliment or a smile.
So many choices for Give Something Away Day!
Poetry Challenge #148
Give It Away!
Think of what you might give away and write a poem about it. What is it? Where will it find a new home? What will it mean for that person? How will the receiver feel about it? How will the given away object feel about being given away? Will you miss it?
Write your poem in couplets—two lines that rhyme.
Set your timer for 7 minutes
Start writing!
Don’t think about it too much; just do it!
Don’t forget to give something away today—Maybe this poem!
Cindy Faughnan and I began this 7-Minute Poetry Challenge MORE THAN 1525 days ago! (without a miss!!!) We now take turns creating our own prompts to share with you. If you join us in the Challenge, let us know by posting the title, a note, or if you want, the whole poem in the comments.
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Poetry Challenge #147-Moody Blues
Lock Down has meant more tube time for me (and maybe you?) I’ve been watching Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, which brought to mind Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (by Rachel Cohn & David Levithan, pub 2006). In the show, Zoey hears others singing their emotions—often accompanied by flash mobs; Nick (in the book) creates playlists reflecting his emotions. Which has me thinking about our personal playlists, which brings me to the subject of poetry, specifically our own poems.
Poetry Challenge #147
Moody Blues
As Zoey, Nick (and Norah) illustrate, mood matters*. Depending on our moods, we listen to different music, move differently, talk differently—sometimes (often) subconsciously. How often have others pegged our moods just by looking at us?
For today’s prompt, let’s revisit our past poetry efforts with an eye, and ear, to mood. Flip back through the poems you’ve created over the past weeks, month, or this time last year. As you reread, ask yourself what is the mood of this poem? Is it happy or sad? Is it scary or curious, loud, quiet, silly?
With mood in mind revise your poem. Pull out the thesaurus and change words. Make scary poems, spookier; smoochy poem, more lovey, jolly poems happier—happier sounds, happier, snappier nouns and verbs—and sounds. There are 44 recognized sounds (phonemes) in the English language—use them!
Set your timer for 7 minutes
Start writing!
Don’t think about it too much; just do it!
Get in the MOOOOOOOOD Dude!
Moody Blues Playlist:
*Back in the old days we’d set Moody Blues’ Night in White Satin to replay. Over and over and over we’d let it roll over us. Admittedly, we did this with many songs, and by the end we know all the words. But in the case of Nights in White Satin, it was all about moooooood dude!
Cindy Faughnan and I began this 7-Minute Poetry Challenge MORE THAN 1500 days ago! (without a miss!!!) We now take turns creating our own prompts to share with you. If you join us in the Challenge, let us know by posting the title, a note, or if you want, the whole poem in the comments.
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Poetry Challenge #144-Global Garbage Collector Day
Boy howdy, where would we be without those garbage trucks to roll down the street gobbling up trash! Buried under piles heaps mounds of smelly yuck is where. Pee-yew!
It’s not easy or safe being a garbage collector. In fact, it’s one of the “Deadliest jobs in America”—and that was before CoVid struck.
An “average” garbage day in NYC
One fella, John D. Arwood, (Pres. of Arwood Waste), knowing what a smelly world this could be, designated June 17th as Global Garbage Collector Day, in honor of the hard-working, under-appreciated trash collectors who keep our communities clean. Let’s join in the celebration!
Poetry Challenge #144
Hip-Hip-Hooray! It’s Global Garbage Collector Day
Write a garbage poem—it can be about a garbage truck, garbage collector or kinds of garbage. Toss in as many words that include the letter g as you can. And, at least one onomatopoeia.
Can you make your poem sound like a garbage truck roaring down the street?
Set your timer for 7 minutes
Start writing!
Don’t think about it too much; just do it!
For extra fun, read Trashy Town by Andrea Zimmerman & David Clemesha, illustrated by Dan Yacarrinao. Here’s a link to the Trashy Town Read-aloud.
Cindy Faughnan and I began this 7-Minute Poetry Challenge MORE THAN 1500 days ago! (without a miss!!!) We now take turns creating our own prompts to share with you. If you join us in the Challenge, let us know by posting the title, a note, or if you want, the whole poem in the comments.
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Poetry Challenge #142-You Can Say That Again...
“Play it again, Sam!”
Today is National Repeat Day! (What? Care to repeat that?) Today is National Repeat Day. As if we need an excuse, it’s a day set aside for folks to “seek out activities and experiences” to do over again. Repeating a root canal or Hurricane Katrina are not suggested for this day.
Celebrate by repeating some of the tasks of the day. Wash the dishes twice. Make the same meal for lunch as you do for supper. Watch Groundhog Day twice.
Send duplicate text messages. Or? As the saying goes “If it’s worth doing once; it’s worth doing again,” or if you’d prefer Bogie: “Play it again, Sam!” (Even though, in Casablanca, he never actually said that.)
Poetry Challenge #142
You Can Say That Again! . . . “That”
Repetition can be used in poetry in many ways. You can repeat a sound like a long o sound or an l or t sound.
You can repeat a word several times in the poem like the word “bells” in a famous poem by Edgar Allan Poe.
You can repeat a phrase or a whole line. Or you can repeat a verse like the refrain in a song.
Choose a way to repeat from the list above and write a poem that uses some repetition.
Set your timer for 7 minutes
Start writing!
Don’t think about it too much; just do it!
just do it! just do it! just do it! just do it! just do it!
Cindy Faughnan and I began this 7-Minute Poetry Challenge MORE THAN 1500 days ago! (without a miss!!!) We now take turns creating our own prompts to share with you. If you join us in the Challenge, let us know by posting the title, a note, or if you want, the whole poem in the comments.
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Poetry Challenge #136-Happy 50th Earth Day
The first Earth Day was April 22, 1970—fifty years ago! It is now celebrated by millions of people all over the world who care about our planet.
Check out One Square Inch of Silence which was founded on Earth Day in 2005 to find out how you can participate in expanding naturally silent spaces around the globe.
“The concept of Earth Day was established in 1969 at a UNESCO Conference in San Francisco. On March 21, 1970, a sanctioned Proclamation was signed by Secretary General U Thant at the United Nations. On April 22, 1970, U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson founded Earth Day.”—National Day Calendar.
On this day each year—for the past 50 years—people around the world, promote green campaigns to save the Earth.
Poetry Challenge #136
Happy Earth Day
One way to celebrate our world is to write a poem about it. Because haiku is usually written about nature, today is a great day to write one (or two or three).
Haiku usually has three lines with 5 syllables on the first and third line and 7 syllables on the second.
Think about what you most appreciate about Earth on this Earth Day and write a haiku celebrating that trait.
Set your timer for 7 minutes
Start writing!
Don’t think about it too much; just do it!
Share your Earth Day experiences using #EarthDay on Social Media.
Cindy Faughnan and I began this 7-Minute Poetry Challenge MORE THAN 4 YEARS ago! (without a miss!!!) We now take turns creating our own prompts to share with you. If you join us in the Challenge, let us know by posting the title, a note, or if you want, the whole poem in the comments.