April PAD Challenge: Day 7
Today’s prompt is to write a “ramble poem.” That is, I want you to write a poem where you just start rambling without worrying about where you’re headed. Very interesting…
Today's prompt is to write a "ramble poem." That is, I want you to write a poem where you just start rambling without worrying about where you're headed. Very interesting things can happen in these poems. And don't worry about the interesting things, because they tend to just happen if you let yourself ramble.
While these poems can often be wordy on the early drafts, they can produce wonderful final drafts after going through a few rounds of revision (remember May is my unofficial poem revision month). Ramble poems can be made interesting by somehow rambling off and then coming back to where you began AND by rambling from point A to point Z without tying anything up completely. Plus, they're really fun to write.
In the spirit of the ramble poem and of not worrying about revision until next month, here are my words for today:
"Drinking liquids that are green and blue"
Has always appealed to me since my youth
so much that I'm surprised I never poisoned myself
making odd "scientific" concoctions with my brothers
with the chemicals hiding under our bathroom sink.
We thought we would raise the dead or find a cure
to something. Maybe our boredom. Like how,
as a teen, we'd drive around and loiter at parks
and outside the doughnut shop because we could
find nothing better to do at night. Full of energy
and ambition and the world was never going
to slow us down for nothing. At the all ages shows,
on the trails, in the air descending to the river below,
we knew we didn't want to be our parents,
but beyond that we couldn't see. And so there was
blue juice and Hi-C's Ectoplasm drinks. And so
there was a reason to drink liquids that looked
like they might kill us because we wanted to prove
we were better and that we would live forever.
And so our children will want green and blue, too.
*****
I'm going to try and post up some of the first day's highlights later today in a separate post. I'm so proud of the work everyone's done up to this point. And now we've made it through our first week together.
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.
