This week's post was a call for submissions with the following prompt:
Pack your bags and set up your travel itinerary, because we are writing travel poems! But not in the way you'd have guessed.
This week, pick a place that you have never been to and write a poem envisioning your time there. What are your favorite parts of it? What are some things you might do and see? Will you meet anyone there? Is it as beautiful as you expected?
Take a look at some similarly prompted works by Elizabeth Bishop (“In Prison”), James Merrill (“Peru: The Landscape Game”), and John Ashbery (“The Instruction Manual”). These poems and others show that you don't need to go someplace to say something new or unique about it.
Write about the place and what you like most about it in two stanzas of five to seven lines each. The last line of both stanzas should be identical, or nearly so. Let the name of the place serve as your title, e.g. “Belgrade” or “Cruising the Caribbean.”
Or just play Bobby Darin’s recording of “Sunday in New York” and write whatever comes to mind.
Visit the American Scholar's page to enter your candidate!
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