Think of a group of people with specialized knowledge, like cooks or chemists. Think of what advice they might give us about life, and how their knowledge might influence what they say. Write a poem in the voice of the people you have chosen, and allow their knowledge to extend past what you’d usually consider their domain to be. Title the poem What the ___ Know, filling in the blank with your group of people. For inspiration, read Robert Polito’s What the Dead Know. 

While the left side of the brain is typically considered to be the language center, some scientific research claims that understanding simile and metaphor, the building blocks of poetry, is done primarily in the right side of the brain. Let’s use some randomly generated similes to write poems today, to challenge our right brains (see the simile generator). For further reading on poetry and the brain, read Julie Kane’s Poetry as Right-Hemispheric Language, and Poetry Magazine’s conversation between Ange Mlinko and Iain McGilchrist This is Your Brain on Poetry. Also read the fun poem An Exercise For Limbering Up the Right Brain, by David Henson.

How do you envision the future of our world? Whether you have children or not, I want you to write a letter to our children, to the future of the species. What wisdom do you have to share? For inspiration, read Good Bones by Maggie Smith.Pay attention to the techniques she uses, such as anaphora (repetition). Of particular interest is the metaphor of a realtor trying to “sell the world” to the children. Does this metaphor ring true to you? Can you come up with a metaphor of your own about what you want to communicate to our children?

Can you allow another voice other than the speaker’s to enter the poem and influence it? Study the poem of Emilia Phillips, Reading Ovid at the Plastic Surgeon’s, with a quotation from Ovid, and the voice of another character named David. How do these quotations interact with what is happening in the poem? In your poem today, allow one quote of literature and one voice of another character to enter the poem and steer it in new directions.