1. Word-A-Day Triggers. Several online programs (e.g., Merriam-Webster (MW) and Dictionary.com) will email you a “word of the day” if you subscribe (for free) to their services. These are often used by those who wish to expand their vocabularies. I suggest using the daily word as a trigger to write a new poem. Here’s an example from my 2005 Marsh Hawk book I Take Thee, English, For My Beloved where I wrote a prose poem titled with and prompted by an MW word of the day:
RESTIVE
“The work is treated as thesis, an antithesis is posited, and a synthesis arrived at which in turn becomes thesis.”
—from “In Support of Meta-Art” by Adrian Piper
The farmers are monitoring the sky. Rain dilutes sweetness in the grapes. Knuckles knot into themselves, mimic the knees of hundred-year-old grapevines. The cabernet hang like purple testicles. I am always fingering a bunch. Sometimes I pinch off a globe, split its skin before my lips and suck at its membrane. The farmers measure brix mathematically. I want my body to determine truth like Cezanne painted rocks instead of images. When I see the winged shadow glide over the fruit-laden fields of September’s wine country, I know better than to question how my body doubles over. How my mouth gasps. I feel blood flowing out of a creature, somewhere, felled on its path. Its last vision will be a vulture’s open beak. Sweetness, let the harvest begin under the lividest sun. “Sweetness”—perhaps I mean You, dear “God.” Lord, I am praying for life and living—I am making poems.
2) Collaborative haibuns or haybuns. These forms combine prose and a haiku or a hay(na)ku (the latter is a newer poetry form where the first line is one word, the second is two words, and the third is three words). If you come across some evocative prose by another writer, let that prose be a trigger for writing a haiku or hay(na)ku. When combined with the prose, you’ve created a new poem collaboratively. In this example, I was impressed by the prose of Benj Gabun Sumabat. With Benj’s permission, I responded with a hay(na)ku to create a collaborative haybun (the term for a poem combining prose and hay(na)ku) entitled “Sarakem”:
Sarakem
Sarakem is an Ilokano word that roughly translates into English as “seek out” rather than “look for.” The latter implies that something tangible has been misplaced, that what was once yours simply needs to be recovered. Sarakem, however, gestures toward something more interior. It is the deliberate act of venturing inward and outward, of searching with intention until you find your way back to yourself.
It reminds me that maybe nothing was ever truly lost, because nothing was ever mine to possess in the first place. What remains is the capacity to seek, to become, and to keep returning. Beneath all the noise and detours, I still carry within me what it takes to become something and everything I long to be.
Sarakem—to sail beyond the horizon and its waves; to surrender yourself to the endless work of becoming, and to the painstaking tides of seeking who you are. It is to understand that the journey is about allowing each current to reshape you until, one day, you recognize yourself in the waters you have crossed.
Sarakem—
You search
not from Loss
Poetry—
a wholeness
that encompasses Loss
Sarakem
Poetry: Sarakem
“What is Life”
~
3) Ekphrasis. Ekphrasis are poems triggered by visual art. Often, what makes an ekphrasis poem effective is that the poem goes beyond being an illustration of the visual. The most effective ekphrasis poem often moves far afield of the triggering image while still hearkening its presence. An example is my hay(na)ku poem, “After Chazal.” Chazal, a 19th century floral painter, didn’t paint sunflowers but Van Gogh, born after Chazal, famously painted several. Yet the poem transcends the matter of sunflowers with its third line (elevating the significance of pollen), in the same way I feel that Van Gogh transcended the loveliness of Chazal’s typical floral bouquets to create something more muscular or realistic, thus resonant or evocative:
After Chazal
Sunflowers
release gold—
dust of illusion
The above example is from my 2019 Marsh Hawk book, The In(ter)vention of the Hay(na)ku: Selected Tercets 1996-2019