2020 April PAD Challenge Countdown: T-minus 10

Welcome to the first ever April PAD Challenge Countdown, in which Robert Lee Brewer shares a prompt and a poem (to get things started) in the 10 days leading up to the 2020 April Poem-A-Day Challenge. Let the poeming begin!

Welcome to the first ever April PAD Challenge Countdown, in which Robert Lee Brewer shares a prompt and a poem (to get things started) in the 10 days leading up to the 2020 April Poem-A-Day Challenge. Let the poeming begin!

Welcome to this first ever countdown to the April PAD Challenge! This was an idea suggested to me on Facebook by Mo Hurley, and well, it's just a good idea with so many people locked indoors with little to do but read and write poems. So let's get at it!

For today’s prompt, write a time poem. I don't know about you, but I've felt in a time warp the past couple weeks—with a day feeling like a week (or even a month) and a week feeling much longer. So your poem can about that, or it can deal with time travel. Or write about being late, being early, or right on time. Heck, do a countdown. There's no time like the present.

Remember: These prompts are just springboards; you have the freedom to jump in any direction you want.

Re-create Your Poetry!

Revision doesn’t have to be a chore–something that should be done after the excitement of composing the first draft. Rather, it’s an extension of the creation process!

In the 48-minute tutorial video Re-creating Poetry: How to Revise Poems, poets will be inspired with several ways to re-create their poems with the help of seven revision filters that they can turn to again and again.

Here’s my attempt at a Time Poem:

"Present Tense"

I have a tendency to get worked up
about the future, to get choked up

about the past. But there's no better
moment, in my mind, than this one,

in your arms, listening to the birds
breaking up the morning's silence.

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.