One of the unexpected side benefits of my poem-a-day month has been that I have found myself using the poem prompts almost as I would journal prompts. You can look back over the 22 poems I’ve written (yes, I’m a little behind) and get a pretty good sense of my emotional state in the past few weeks, the days when I’ve been down and the days when I’ve been up.
Blogging has been a wonderful tool and definitely made me a better writer, but for me, it’s never been a confessional-style journaling tool. I’m not a blood-and-guts kind of blogger, preferring to save my most revealing moments for longer-form work. I’ve published poems and essays about my life, but that’s not what blogging has ever been about for me, even though I knew it would limit me as far as popularity. I don’t see this as “emotionally shut down,” but simply as self-awareness about what I want blogging to be, and how I want to function as a writer. I want you, my readers, to feel like you know me, but not like you know all of me.
So the poems I’ve been writing, which are all attempts to capture certain moments or emotions, have really been valuable to me, personally and as a writer. As a poet, I like some of what I’m coming up with, but even more, I’m finding some of that release that every diarist knows, when we hit upon the exact right word that expresses what we’re feeling, and our soul feels a little lighter. It’s a nice combination, and I’m trying to think of ways to keep it going after my month is over. I know Poetic Asides does a Wednesday Poetry Prompt, and I’m wondering what else I might be able to find.
Related articles
- Poetry and Pockets! (pm27.wordpress.com)
- An Interview with James Dewar, Poet (cherylandrews.wordpress.com)
, for example. This is great especially if you are unfamiliar with the style of music or with certain songs, and can really enrich your reading experience. As far as the classroom goes, I would see this more as an extra credit project, as it doesn’t really address literary elements, but it could prove that a student did a close enough reading of the book to catch every song reference. One recent popular YA novel, 
, would lend itself really well to an assignment like this.
(review coming soon). One playlist would be of the songs that are mentioned as inspiring Dave Grohl as a musician, which run the gamut from the Beatles to Metallica to Fugazi, and others might be songs by Dave himself in his assorted bands: Nirvana, Foo Fighters, Them Crooked Vultures, Queens of the Stone Age, etc. The other would be a playlist of all the songs mentioned in 
, which would be a massive undertaking, but such fun!
as jumping-off point, and another speaks of 
was an incredibly useful book for me, and I’m so glad I kept it on my list after reading 
. I am wrapping up my senior elective this week, and so I thought I would post the final assignment I gave them (feel free to use or adapt if you like):
