2014 April PAD Challenge: Day 8

Spent yesterday catching up on sleep after attending the super fun Austin International Poetry Festival with Tammy. If you’ve had any issues with posting or anything else related to the…

Spent yesterday catching up on sleep after attending the super fun Austin International Poetry Festival with Tammy. If you've had any issues with posting or anything else related to the challenge, please send me an e-mail at robert.brewer@fwmedia.com. I hope everyone's been having fun!

Today is a Tuesday, so two prompts:

  • Write a violent poem. Could be person on person violence, person on animal, animal on animal, nature on person/animal/nature, and so on (insects, erosion, cosmos, etc.).
  • Write a peaceful poem. I suppose this might be the opposite of a violent poem. But perhaps not.

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Here's my attempt at a Violent and/or Peaceful Poem:

"opportunity: threat"

he presses a gun to your head
says you have just one shot at this
so you darn well best get it right

and you think i've never been right
in a lifetime of bad mistakes
missed opportunities always

revealing themselves afterwards
like that night in alabama
when it might have been more than lust

but then you realize the gun the man
held to your head is no longer
present and neither is the man

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Today's guest judge is...

Tom C. Hunley

Tom C. Hunley

Tom is an associate professor of English at Western Kentucky University, the director of Steel Toe Books, and the bassist for the litcore rock band Manley Pointer. Forthcoming are his fourth full-length book, Plunk (Wayne State College Press), and an edited collection of essays called Creative Writing Studies: An Introduction to Its Pedagogies (Southern Illinois University Press).

Tom’s poems have been featured three times on The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor and five times on Verse Daily. Among his publication credits are Atlanta Review, New Orleans Review, Five Points, TriQuarterly, North American Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and New York Quarterly.

He divides his time between Kansas and Oz.

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Poem Your Heart Out

Poems, Prompts & Room to Add Your Own for the 2014 April PAD Challenge!

Words Dance Publishing is offering 20% off pre-orders for the Poem Your Heart Out anthology until May 1st! If you’d like to learn a bit more about our vision for the book, when it will be published, among other details.

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Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems. He's fascinated by the constant balance (or lack of) between violence and peace. Learn more about him here: http://www.robertleebrewer.com/.

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Don't get violent; find your inner peace with these posts:

Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Editor of Writer's Digest, which includes managing the content on WritersDigest.com and programming virtual conferences. He's the author of 40 Plot Twist Prompts for Writers: Writing Ideas for Bending Stories in New Directions, The Complete Guide of Poetic Forms: 100+ Poetic Form Definitions and Examples for Poets, Poem-a-Day: 365 Poetry Writing Prompts for a Year of Poeming, and more. Also, he's the editor of Writer's Market, Poet's Market, and Guide to Literary Agents. Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.