And I don’t do dishes; I throw them —

As you, Dear Reader, may remember from my last posting, I have recently been flipping through a wide variety of books about poetry ISO writing prompts that are remotely useful to me. I did this for quite some time today. I am aware that I wasted precious poemwriting time doing so. Near the end of my frantic flipping, I turned to a book that I’ve used time and time again: The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises from Poets Who Teach. Instead of following one of the many exercises in the book, however, I decided to appropriate some of the book’s sentences, phrases, and words into my poem for today.

(The work of art I’ve used in today’s poemlogue was created by Ellen Burgin and is entitled The Poet in Me Licks the Poet in You.)

The Poet Alone May Find

Pretend you’ve never been told anything.

[and pretend you've never read this poem!]

Because I’m a Pirate

Gentle readers, I begin by excusing this poemlogue’s brevity by telling you that the time is drawing nigh. And by nigh, I mean that Top Chef is coming on in twenty minutes, and, well, I’ve been bribing myself to endure inane task after inane task with the possibility of Top Chef viewing all day long. And so, gentle readers, I ask, in poemlogue, for you to consider one of the biggest industries in the United States: the self-help book industry. Particularly, self-help books for singles. Particularly, self-help books for single women. One of which is In the Meantime, from which the title of this poem is taken. Though Ms. Vanzant does offer some excellent tips about psychological housecleaning, she has not, as of yet, offered tips about a more pressing question, which is this: “So, Ms. Vanzant, while I’m cleaning my psychological house in the meantime so that I may stop hating myself, as you urge, and open myself up to love’s open doors, what the hell am I supposed to say about the billion friends and relatives and television shows and notary publics and door-to-door vacuum salesmen and bug men who fumigate my apartment who all, all, ALL urge me on a nearly hourly basis to take the damn gloves off already, throw out the Pledge, and marry whomever I can find to marry so that I can make some babies already?”

In case you doubt that this pressure exists in this modern day and age, I offer you two of Google image’s first offerings for the term “single women.” Yes, that is a woman holding up a sperm bank. Clever. Clever. I beg of you, however, not to Google this term, as you will find some unexpected images, including, shockingly, Brit Brit’s non-fuzzy mimosa.

Love’s Got Everything to Do with the Meantime

[Arrggh.]

Fashion Poem Prompt / Poem Prompt of Fashion — Prompt One

As this Dread Month of April drones on, and on, and on, Zelda has begun to look everywhere around her for poetic inspiration. She has flipped through many a writing guide, she has looked at many a web page, and she has come to the conclusion that she cannot work with poem prompts — no matter how fabulous they may be — that instruct the poet to write about a) the first time s/he was stung by a bee; b) a time s/he was in the kitchen with a grandparent; c) the first time s/he sat behind the wheel of a car; or d) the first day of elementary school.

Zelda requires more. . . fashionable prompts. So Zelda has come up with her very own poem prompts for this Dread Month of April, and she has decided to post them here.

Now, you, Gentle Reader, may be wondering how Zelda is coming up with these prompts. And since Zelda is in a good and semi-stable mood today, Zelda will reveal her secrets.

Zelda misses Project Runway. Zelda really misses Project Runway. And so, Zelda decided to create poem prompts based on each episode of the fourth season of Project Runway, partly because she felt it would be fashionable, and partly because it will allow her to relive Season Four of Project Runway, and partly because it will allow her to procrastinate in regards to writing actual poems.

So, Gentle Reader, the very first Project Runway Poem Prompt — which is based on episode 401 of Project Runway — can be found below.

Prompt One — “Stitch Witchery,” based on Episode 401 of ProRun, in which the designers are instructed to run to tents set up in the middle of Bryant Park and then grab as many bolts of the wide array of delectably expensive and highly fashionable fabrics found in aforementioned tents as they possibly can, and in which the designers are then instructed to create a garment from the luxurious fabrics they grabbed from aforementioned tents

One should stitch together approximately four sentences from a famous and/or glamorous work of prose with four lines or so from a glamorous poem (for, really, all good poetry is glamorous, is it not?). One could, for example, choose four sentences from The Great Gatsby and four lines from “The Waste Land.” Smooth the rough edges, add your own words/sentences/lines. For instance, one could focus on normalizing the points of view, or adding colors, sensory images, or verbs. But remember: don’t. bore. Nina.