Look at this miracle, Day 26 ON Day 26 – cue flying pig!
Today’s featured participant is fresh poetry, where the “poetics of space” prompt for Day 25 takes back in time to a very particular classroom, while also launching us out onto the sea.
Our interview for the day is another two-fer – the poet Melissa Range interviewed by the poet Stephen Burt about her book, Scriptorium, sonnets, and incorporating colloquialisms and slang into poetry. You can learn more about interview-er and interview-ee here and here. And you can read three of Range’s poems here, and at this link, you’ll find a lyrical essay by Burt.
And now for our (optional) prompt! Have you ever heard someone wonder what future archaeologists, whether human or from alien civilization, will make of us? Today, I’d like to challenge you to answer that question in poetic form, exploring a particular object or place from the point of view of some far-off, future scientist? The object or site of study could be anything from a “World’s Best Grandpa” coffee mug to a Pizza Hut, from a Pokemon poster to a cellphone.
I had great fun with this prompt and went with my initial object that was on my desk as I read the prompt. It got a bit sticky when thinking about futurisms and how much of our language would have been used and when I have more time I would like to invent a half language and translate.
Writing this poem sparked a few new ideas and I have made some science based notes on the sun and the moon too. More to play with later… looks like I may need to take next year off.
The Sea of Showers looks brown,
this leads some of the Scientists to predict
our archaeological response wrong.
Carrie Etter offers – in a place where you have lived before (or where you live now), list some specific names of the flora and fauna of that environment:
the names of one or two birds;
other animals;
one or two kinds of trees, plants and wildflowers.
Next she asked us to imagine ourselves as a character in this environment, one with a specific worry. Give a strong impression of place through intermingling the concerns with details of the environment.
Poetry that uses senses and a sense of place.
I have lived in so many places, but for the ease/speed of writing several poems in a day, I chose my current abode. My Great Aunty has always wowed me with her ability to name every tree, plant and bird, this gift/talent/knowledge is not something I possess, so I knew there would be some research before I could launch into poetry.
The list was fairly easy to compile – but at the start of the poem, I very much felt it like a writing exercise, a slightly forced one at that. I relaxed into it and halfway through the tone became more natural and the words started to flow. I have a poem I can work with now and a future idea for more.
you can never be sure when rain will come.
Jo Bell offered tonight by Charles Bukowski
A great discussion on Bukowski, King, expressing the truth and down to earth wit.
The Poetry School 
Day 26: Acrostics
We’d like to see your acrostic poems, ones where the first (or last – or first and last) letters of each line spell out a word.
A lot of people think acrostics are childish, but they needn’t be. Kathleen Ossip’s sequence of acrostic elegies elevates the form to art.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/detail/56631
awritersfountain 