So remember yesterday when I said there’d be more about my prose-poem that inspired the title of this blog?

Today I’m going to share a writing prompt. It can be for a poem or a prose-poem. The thing to do is to find a poem that someone else wrote and which you love, or a poet whose work in general you love. Locate a few of your favorite lines, either from a single poem or from the poet’s body of work. Use those lines as little anchors or moments within a new poem which you will write in response to those lines, built around those lines, embracing those lines as part of your own poem’s architecture. Italicize the lines you borrowed from the other poet so that it’s clear those lines weren’t yours in the first place. An acknowledgement of the other poet is important, too.

My prose-poem “Sappho’s Torque” was inspired by several fragments of Sappho’s work. You can read an earlier draft of that poem here, but know that a revised version will be published in my forthcoming collection Playing House.

What poems or poets inspire you? If you’ve written a poem like this before, I’d love to hear about it — or even read the poem itself — in the comments below.