Welcome Back!

The Public Domain Poetry Project returns

Welcome to The Public Domain Poetry Project where we deconstruct an older poem by using each line (one per week) as a jumping off point for a brand new poem. Participants are encouraged to share their poems in the comments below, or to leave us a link so we can read them elsewhere. If this sounds like fun to you, please consider subscribing for free so you don’t miss next week’s prompt. Thanks for visiting.

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I’m enjoying the last showy, extravagant blossoms in the garden, but looking forward to fall

Who’s ready to write some poetry? Who’s ready to think about anything but the dumpster fire of national and international news? Who’s ready to take an older poem and spin it into a whole bunch of new poems?

I know I am, on all counts. Summer was wonderful. But it was also busy, sometimes stressful, and involved almost no writing at all for me. I feel like a bit of discipline, a few deadlines, and a helpful prompt or two (or eight?) might just help me shake off this summer sluggishness and rekindle that poetry flame for the colder months ahead.

Last January we started a twelve week poetry journey using Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Travel” as a weekly jumping off point. We used each line of her poem as inspiration for a new poem. If you played a long every week, you ended up with twelve new poems at the end. But even if you only responded to the prompts here and there, you still had something to show for it. Even if you never wrote a word, if you followed along and read some of the poems generated, I feel like that’s pretty lovely, too.

All levels of participation are welcome and celebrated. But maybe, if you were a reader last time, you’ll want to try some writing? Or if you wrote but didn’t share in the comments, perhaps you’ll give a us a peek this time around?

I spent probably too many hours one day recently on poets.org reading through their extensive collection of poems in the public domain. A delightful but very deep rabbit hole. Still, I came away with no clear choice. A week or two later I stumbled across a poem in a completely different context that seemed to fit in so many ways. I hope you’ll agree.

…we are not writing perfect, polished poems. We are making… poem attempts.

Like last time, I want to stress we are not writing perfect, polished poems. We are making, to borrow a term from a creative writing teacher I know, poem attempts. We are taking a line each week and seeing what we can build from it’s spare parts. We might use each of the words in a line as the first word in the lines of our new poem. Or we might scramble the words to give them a new meaning. We might even not include the line in our new poem in any way, but simply use it as a jumping off point. No pressure, no perfection, just poetry.

If that sounds like it might be fun then watch for new post next Wednesday, September 24, in which I’ll kick off our new installment of The Public Domain Poetry Project. I’ll announce our new poem and post my first poetry attempt. Then you can share your response in the comments, or not. But I hope you will.

If you know somebody who might like to play along with us, please invite them to join by subscribing for free.

If you’re new to The Public Domain Poetry Project, the links below will bring you up to speed.

See you next week!