A symbol is another one of those lovely shortcuts to meaning that poets are so fond of, a word or image that represents an idea. If you don't "get" all of the symbols in a poem, you should still be able to read and appreciate the poem -- but picking up on these little abstractions can really enrich your interactions with a text. Of course, symbolism isn't unique to poetry, but permeates every part of our lives... we just don't necessarily notice it. Being a good reader of p

Topic 21: Write a poem about chickens - alive chickens, dead chickens, crossing the road, laying, chicken fights, etc. Write a poem inspired by chickens. Form : any Line requirements: 8 lines or more Get involved for free at www.pigpenpoetry.com Eggs On Sundays we have eggs as our contempt for hens demands we eat the children they’re denied singing all about the sunny side the funny side is, deep within her box the hen just goes on pecking looking out across t

Topic 20: Write a poem inspired by watching a neighbors yard through the fence or jumping into their pool or a poem inspired by voyeurism. Form : any Line requirements: 8 lines or more Get involved for free at www.pigpenpoetry.com Weeds There was no house next to ours, just a vacant lot with a shed on it and two horses. The men who looked after the horses were Gordon and Dave. The horses never told us their names, so we gave them different ones each week, depen

It is less than two months since I last swore off writing poems. I still have not written a poem, unless you count a couple of rude limericks and a rather angry verse that repeated the word "fuck" several times but didn't really say much else. So, no poems. The world has not fallen apart. But I have. I've still carried on life much as always, making sure that I get information from myriad sources on as many subjects as possible to stay informed and ahead of the game if po

TS Eliot smoked himself to death. At the end, he was more kipper than man, fit only for consumption by his own cats. They were – like the continuing and eternal success of poetry – to remain in his imagination. Lungs and poets have a poor relationship. For Shelley, that didact and dire romantic target of Eliot’s contempt, contemplation would have been more profitable were it of sea-legs rather than those without trunks. Even lovers cannot breathe the ocean. D

With the prose novel so firmly entrenched as the fiction writer’s main outlet these days, it’s easy to forget – or to never have known – that the novel is a relative newcomer on the writing scene, less than five hundred years old and only really popular in the last two hundred. When you consider that the earliest known narrative poem is probably over 3000 years old, the novel is a positive half-millennium-old baby. So, what is a narrative poem and how do you write one? Putt

"I read your book. That was cool, being published. Are you going to do it with a real book some day?" "This is a real book. See? Cover, pages, words..." "You know, like a story." "Oh, a novel? No. I choose not to write prose. I'm a poet." This is the conversation I've had a few dozen times, mostly with family members or people I've met locally. Oddly enough, never with poets... Now, I could write an academic essay on the narrative tradition and how the novel as

"You should turn this into a song." "But it's not a song, it's a poem. What's wrong with it being a poem?" "Nothing's wrong with it being a poem, it's just that more people listen to songs." "Well maybe if people stopped expecting poems to be turned into songs, more people would read poems." "But you don't have to read a song, you just have to listen to it." "Don't you think it's pretty sad that people want all the work done for them? When you read a poem you find your own mu

“What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.... And people flock around the poet and say: 'Sing again soon' - that is, 'May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.” -- Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or Every day I remind people that a poem is not a diary, t