Write a decidedly speculative poem that follows your most instinctive sense of whimsy, in the way that Major Jackson talks about in this video. 

The sonnet is one of the most studied forms of English poetry, so not only are you at least vaguely familiar with its "rules," your target audience is, too. The formal restraints are useful in guiding you toward common poet-reader expectations: a sense of rhythm and compression, a surprising turn, a completed thought. 

Choose a sonnet form to work with and force yourself to write in the received form for at least 4 drafts. Use Wikirhymer and a good thesaurus to help push your imagination to and accomplish the linguistic somersaults the form asks of you.

Really believe you are writing the sonnet. You will likely become overly attached to the turns of phrase you develop-- the ones that don't quite mean what you want them to mean but sound nifty. Then, get some feedback, or allow yourself to read the poem again after some time has passed. 

Destroy the sonnet. Delete anything that's not working, keep only what is. Re-imagine the form the poem should take on the page. It might be lineated in stanzas, or not. It could even become a prose poem. Follow your intuition and reflect on the feedback you've received/given yourself.

In your heightened poetic state, keep an ear out for words, snippets of conversation, or phrases that consternate you. Anything that upsets you or sparks a response. Save them: Create a list of "potential poem titles" in your notebook, and return to any one of them when you're grappling with a blank page. You might also add vague ideas you have after waking up from a dream, there, too. If you're not sure what to do with the title, try one of the following prompts:

1) Loose (list) association: What memories do you have personally with this idea/object? Run through them in short lines, speeding up the reading, and see where they take you.

2) What's Bothering You: Ask yourself a series of questions about the title, and let your answers start your poem. 

3) Translate the Scene: If the title came from someone else's conversation, imagine what the context for that snippet might have been.  

In this very liberally interpreted version of the haiku, you should try to encapsulate an experience of watching tv during the lockdown using only 17 syllables (yes, 5/7/5). Put pressure on yourself to make every syllable count, and try to give some brief insight into your experience of your toughest stage of the pandemic. A traditional Japanese form, haikus tend to use "provocative, colorful images," can generally be said in one breath, and were first developed as the opening of a much longer poem/story. 

1. Choose a textbook or some assigned reading that interests you (if you're not in a class, simply choose a text that teaches you something). It doesn’t matter if the language is poetic, it just needs to be in some way “authoritative” and spark your imagination. 

2. Consider how Tymoteusz Karpowicz corresponds with Ecclesiastes in his poem of the same title; how Paul Celan engages with the biblical text in “Corona”; how Yehuda Amichai does so in “A Man in his Life.” Ilya Kaminsky uses the following language to talk about their varying approaches:

[this poet…]

• Transforms the text (by offering his own metaphysics)

• Echoes the text

• Updates the text

• Confronts the text

3. Choose one of the above strategies and correspond with the textbook chapter, scholarly article, informative worksheet, or whatever text you have chosen, in a new poem.

In his attempt to define the lyric genre (good luck there!), Jonathan Culler refers to a typical kind of address in poetry-- what he calls a “‘triangulated address." Try to do this consciously: write a poem in which you address an "audience of readers by addressing or pretending to address someone or something else, a lover, a god, natural forces, or personified abstractions” (8).

Inspired by Arthur Sze's deep imagery/translation work/his poem "Stilling to North," this exercise asks you to find a poem that foregrounds imagery. You should select a poem that you are drawn to for ineffable reasons. Confusion is welcome, here. Do the slow hard work of transposing the poem into a universe you are more familiar with. In other words: transfer the images into a different place or context-- that of your own consciousness. Do not quote directly from the poem; instead, find your own language. 

Your new poem need not take the same form as the poem you're transposing. As with the Against Exphrasis prompt, you should note your poetic inspiration, but the note needn't unfold within the poem itself.