Poetry Slam

... the five of you who know that the next line is "I knew him, Horatio" not "I knew him well" are feeling pretty smug right now, aren't you? Laugh while you can, because this month's poetry slam is no joking matter. Like Hamlet, we're going to elegize. eulogize?...

Poetry is music is poetry It's kind of a no-brainer, right? Music and poetry go hand in hand: they are both designed to appeal to the emotions. More precisely, a poet or musician is attempting to manipulate your emotions so that you feel what they want you to feel....

After July's longish form, we thought it might be time to take a break in August with a short poetry form called the sevenling. But you're not off the hook: everything you know about metaphor, connection, and structure is still important. And like July's poetry slam,...

The  23rd poet laureate consultant in poetry (that's the actual title) of the United States is as American as they come: Tulsa, Oklahoma, resident Joy Harjo is a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation. She's the first Native American to hold the title, and this July...

Happy Independence Day! Here in the U.S.A. we're not supposed to be celebrating until July, but someone on my block broke out the fireworks last weekend and got me thinking about parties. So this month, June, we're going to celebrate Independence Day early  right on...

Big ideas in tiny packages If you're a fan of our microprose challenge, you know the joy—and the pain—of squeezing an entire narrative into a very limited number of words. It's a matter of distilling your stories, reducing them down to their basic elements, to create...

April is National Poetry Month, and you know what that means! Actually, no, you don't, because honestly we are not well-organized adults all the time and for at least the past few years we've dropped the ball on doing something cool for National Poetry Month. Well not...

Welp, it's February again, which means I'm locked into my annual quest to find something that's not a frickin sonnet for our poetry slam. Not that there's anything wrong with sonnets (and in fact, I'm going to let you write a sonnet this month if that's your jam) but...

Building Blocks December was the season of gifting, and boy did I end up getting a lot of building-themed presents for the kids in my life. Whether you’re working with Legos or Minecraft, it’s still popular to make big things out of little things – and then, um, make...

How long was this year, anyway? There is a little cluster of memes going around this internet - maybe you've seen one - about how 2018 is the year where linear time stopped making any sense. For example, Black Panther came out this year, but like, does...

It's my birthday and I'll poem if I want to. Um, and you can join me if you want to. November is one of my favorite months, for obvious and not-so-obvious reasons. But this year it's even more favoriter (I can make up words if I want, too) because our...

Raise your hand if you had fun with last month's poetry slam, the Golden Shovel. For me, part of the fun was going through other people's poetry, looking for those perfect lines that spoke to me, and then figuring out how I could speak through them. When...

This month's writing prompts are all about opening lines, but I'm still on my terminal words kick. Tritinas, diminishing poems, what's an editor in need of a poetry slam to do? Our September poetry slam takes a page out of Terrance Hayes' book - literally,...

Last month we held onto our burdens; this month let's lighten them a little with diminishing verse. Ordinarily I'd put a big ol' explanation of where diminishing verse comes from right here, but honestly there really isn't one. It's just a bunch of poets...

It's music to my ears How often have you heard that? Especially in reference to poetry? Well, poetry and music are pretty closely related. We'll discover how closely in this month's slam, when you write a poem-within-a-poem using a few rules cribbed from...