Look back over the poems you have written this month. Pretend that they, even in their rough-draft imperfection, comprise a chapbook. The prompt is to write cover blurbs or a short review of your supposed chapbook in the form of a poem. Separate blurbs might become stanzas, or a longer review might fill a number of stanzas.
The blurbs or review, if credited, can be credited to “anonymous” or to your own aliases or perhaps to obviously imagined or long deceased poets or critics. I suggest not making up blurbs and crediting them to living individuals due to obvious potential for confusions and legal repercussions. Your poem commenting on your other April poems can be earnest and sincere or over-the-top and tongue-in-cheek. The poem can be a joke, an apology, or a careful analysis of your April poems’ strengths and weaknesses. The trick here is that whatever you write has to become somehow a poem in its own right.
Each poem is as
protean as its author;
each one written on a whim.
3 comments:
Perfect!
Brilliant. I love this idea too - not least because I write novels, and writing a blurb for a whole novel is ever so difficult (for me anyway), so writing it in poem form sounds like quite the challenge.
Thanks, Barbara :)
icyHighs - blurb writing is the distillation of a work and poetry is already a distillation. You're right, it's challenging. As you can see, I took the condensed version way of condensing what I wrote. I'm enjoying your blog posts.
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