1.
From Venezuelan poet Natasha Tiniacos: "What is the body in the digital world...there is touching the screen of the computer to grasp the other one, the loved one, the missing one.... Is our online presence making us feel less or differently? Write about that.... Is a selfie autobiographical? Why don't you try to write a poem instead of taking a selfie, or take your selfie and make a translation in poetry? Ask yourself this: Is a selfie a projection of a person we want to be?"
2.
From Bob Hicok’s note for Best American Poetry 2010: "....there's a bacteria that eats plutonium. This amazes me, but I've never recovered from either the pinwheel or the whirligig. How they spin. How I spin. How every atom spins." A self-portrait with a particular bacteria. Or a portrait of the self as a particular bacteria with details about that bacteria’s existential dilemmas.
3.
A secret word, a favorite. And then a poem which dances around this word without ever disclosing it so that formally, for example, any end rhymes would rhyme with the word you can’t write. The withheld word poem.
4.
I remember that weightless summer after 1989 spent wandering around Europe with feta-cheese sandwiches and Romanian-speaking parents. I remember the first time I realized I could choose whether to present myself as an American or a Romanian to strangers in Paris. Identity could be renounced or re-programmed at will, hence the kindness of strangers who agree to play along with the presentation.
A poem about a part of your identity that feels slippery, that lacks roots in belonging, and maybe set this in childhood or a moment when you realized this. For example, being a Braves fan when visiting family in Georgia. Poem from the innocence rather than the fury that came later, the fury of never being anyone, of always being insufficient or half.
5.
From D.H. Lawrence’s Women In Love: “And woman is the same as horses: two wills act in opposition inside her. With one will she wants to subject herself utterly. With the other she wants to bolt, and pitch her rider to perdition.”
An epistolary poem to Lawrence that flips the metaphor and makes him the horse. Ride that metaphor into the ground.
6.
From Dan Beach-Quick: “Two types of poems (among many others): those whose lines build one on top of another as if to build into a tower (Kafka: the Tower of Babel would have been allowed if one did not need to ascend it in order to build it), and those that in every line dig down (Thoreau: My head is an organ for burrowing). No poem simply flat in the page; there are dimensions, expansions, progressions.”
Pick a subject, anything, a local gas station, a bench at the park, a favorite yogurt, and write a poem about it, a sketch. Make two versions: one a tower and the other a tunnel. Then read other draft poems and see if they are moving in the wrong direction or dimension. Run a little dimensionality check on drafts.
7.
From C.D. Wright’s personal instructional on compound words: “Although I take a special pleasure in compounds, whether or not they have been duly authorized: silverback, deepstep, lovegreen, pothead, eyestring, closeburn, shirttail, boneman, wristwatch, no words please me so much as the one or two-syllable noun. It appears at its best left unaccompanied by an article. At its best, shed of adjective.
A poem titled after an unduly authorized compound word that you want to explore. You can pull a Celanian twist and hyphenate the word (see “breath-turn”) to thicken it’s resonance in a way that refuses to be unpacked, or you can unpack the created compound in the poem itself.
8.
The subject of a scientific case study is unique and therefore not replicable. The study must include enough detail to document observations that enable other researchers to draw conclusions. A poem in the form of a case study.
9.
Joan Didion’s essay on notebooks alternates a passage from her notebook with explanation of her original motives for noting it. In this sense, she annotates herself. Annotations consist of explanatory notes. To annotate one's self is a dialogue, or an intimacy, when part of a poem. A poem or lyric essay in two columns where the right margin annotates the left.
10.
A poem addressed to an exterminator.
11.
An ode to a goat that is not inhabited by anthropomorphism, or by the need to humanize the goat in order to value its existence. An ode to a goat that celebrates what is goat-ness.