Inspiration

The theme Places of Landing encourages you to honor the poetry of our daily lives.

Places of Landing embraces the poetry of our daily lives and honors the movements, places, and feelings that tell the stories of our days.

Each day we touch down in spaces that create memories, forge emotional connections, and inspire creativity. Individuals and communities gather around these places of landing as we travel to and from our homes, schools, workspaces, and other destinations, moving through the varied paths of our days. Over time, these places hold the recollections of the land we live on.

Places of Landing, the theme for this edition of Poetry in Public, embraces the poetry of our daily lives and the details and feelings that tell the stories of our days. The theme was created by the current Poet Planner, Laura Da’, and we hope you will join us in an approach to public poetry that embraces the importance of landing spaces in the contemporary context of community, transportation, and home.

Poetry Prompts

Throughout the year we will offer writing and thinking prompts created by Poet Planner Laura Da’ to engage with place, water, and season and designed to connect literacy and land with a sense of balance, agency, and regard of place. Each prompt encourages you to look to land, landforms, plants, and elemental forces to think visually and creatively about writing a poem.

Get inspired to write with Path Becomes Poem! Poet Planner Laura Da’ has composed a series of prompts to guide your writing as you move through the world. Pick up a Path Becomes Poem booklet at an upcoming Poetry in Public event and the 4Culture office or download a black-and-white PDF version here.

Emotional Landings

This prompt works by identifying and emotion and inviting air into the process of developing new ideas and prompting observations to create a poem.

To begin: Start with an emotion or feeling that you are processing right now.
Next: Feel the air around you and notice your breathing. You are going to find and add a kind of air to move the word, idea, or emotion. Pick any kind of air or breath and describe it. Let the air move your emotion across the page. A quiet air like beathing in could make slow, small movements and lines of poetry, but a fierce air like a tornado could move a word, idea, or emotion very quickly. Add the details of your air and emotion to your poem.
Finally: Allow thoughts and ideas that move across the space in the form of your selected air become your final poem. Feel free to see what images, sounds, and ideas appear. Notice if your emotion has stayed the same or changed. If you like, keep adding different kinds of air to see how your ideas develop and change.

(Land)Forms

In this prompt, you will make a poem inspired by a landform. This prompt works by observing a landform that can inspire the shape and content of a poem.

To begin: Look around your surroundings and find a landform that you notice or take a moment to remember a landform form childhood or any other time in your life. Examples of landforms could include rivers, mountains, deserts, coastlines. Landforms can be large or small.
Next: Observe the landform and note its shape. Describe the landform in your poem and feel free to write about your memories or thoughts about the landform. You can even mimic the shape of the landform in your poem.
Finally: Finalize your poem by adding any details or memories you would like and reflecting on how the landform interacts with your life.