Today’s optional prompt asks you, like Alice Notley, to think about your own inspirations and forebears (whether literary or otherwise). Specifically, I challenge you today to write a poem that deals with the poems, poets, and other people who inspired you to write poems. These could be poems/poets/poepl that you strive to be like, or even poems, poets, and people that you strive not to be like. There are as many ways to go with this prompt as there are ways to be inspired.
I’ve Howled Your Name
14 April 20 0838
I look to my right
And your words have been there for over 30 years
My oldest friend
Dead for 50 years
The unlikely one who triggered my imagination
I’ve railed against the academic pillars you helped construct
I’ve removed the esoteric references that others told me confuse my reader, where you spew Greek and Roman mythology
If I’d not been bored that day we met, I’m not sure I’d have been switched on
I’d probably put poetry in a corner and languished in the screw capital, the Forrest city, the town of my birth and originator of my nightmares
