Patti points out Wislawa Szymborska‘s A few words on the soul which remarks comically on what an unreliable lag-about the thing is,

It usually steps out
whenever meat needs chopping
or forms have to be filled.
For every thousand conversations
it participates in one,
if even that,
since it prefers silence.

Yay, for humour and self-deprecating sort of observations, all the kinds of others within each of us.
Elsewhere, Joshua Beckman has a new book this year from Wave Books called Take it. The page gives 2 sample poems including this I excerpt further,

[Cracked drags the callous enchantment of thought]
[…]Even the most fascinating, dynamic and
wonderful people and things are, with distressing
regularity (near complete), mishandled and forgotten.
I feel now like I am saying sorry for something when

what I am saying here is[… ]

(Teaser.) Something arms-length about the diction but like the clip it moves along at and he’s going for a truth which is nice to see sometimes.
In the other sample, [I don’t long, I don’t die, I don’t await]

No more great songs of satisfaction,
no more wailing upon the hill to the hillside.
Be kind, for trust is not addition and addition
is not acceptance and acceptance is not humility.
Simply put, we are a failed and ruined people
incapable of even silence.

It’s a bit harsh perhaps. Bluntly put but c’mon let’s move away from the blah-de-blather romanticism is rather a refreshing sentiment to hear.
Lorri Neilsen was the poem of the day at the League of Canadian Poets with Prairie storm,

Bargaining faith for sleep, you see light stir at the window, white
hissing above the crow-knuckled elms, exposing the wet furrows
–
of the seeded fields cooling after the longest day of the year.
The turning. Air thickening electric, forks bulging with spark. Imagine

What a killer opening phrase. The sounds of the poem sound like rain and enclosed in storm. Crow-knuckled elms, birds as tree knuckles I expect to stay with me. It’s got a nice energy to it.
I came across the chapbook of the top 3 finalists for the The RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, announced a couple weeks ago. (How odd that gloaming should be used 3 times by 2 of the poets.) Untouched nature poem and poet in were heavy parts of selections from two of the poets. Hm. There is a time and a mood which isn’t me currently. Still, Emily McGiffin has some lovely slowed control of pacing and showed reveals at turns, such as after a long time standing in Wokkpash (p. 2-3)

Dusk. On all sides
mountains.
[…] From the folding summer, night
draws its old breadth,
restless. This shifty light and silence
gnaw at your hands
with that old wish
to have done better. And the dying
asters, the fireweed
blazing seed, the grey and fossil-scarred scree,
it all sould have
tried harder. Maybe

Lovely play on expectation of breath. And the extending self-blame out to the rocks, divesting anger to flowers so it is appropriate hyperbole of how absurd the clenched frustration is. Then the poem veers back to solid ground of poeterly expansive.
Jeff Latosik, however, finds poetry in the everyday urban of Toronto Island, Summer, (an excerpt from page 20) and dares to integrate that which gets cropped out of poetry, the refuse we are often remiss in mentioning.

We were scared to swim because of what was down there.
We were down there.
                         Or, we counted everything that could be dumped
from our vast reservoirs of taste: magazines, subway ads, Hollywood
movies that bobbed like buoys in our conversation.
                                     We listed our favourite natural disasters.
We heard some kids has swum out past the roped-in shallows
so we booked it over, expectations dog-paddling their way
             through reasons against, even hate.

Like the sharper energy and the mix of expected and unexpected. Something is communicated. And thru his turns thru more of the poem, he has opinions rather than just attempting to be neutral observer. Also nice to see in this communicative genre.

Telling Stories is the call for the next issue of Magma. (Submissions due by July 15.) According to the guest editor of the issue, Clare Pollard,

Finally, I’ve also chosen the theme because I feel too much contemporary poetry is self-indulgent – concentrating on self-expression to the point where it forgets it has an audience. I feel strongly that, even if our subject matter is deeply personal, we should always be aware we have responsibilities to our reader – to give them everything they need to understand the poem; to entertain; to tell them something new.
Great storytellers know how to keep us engaged, leaving space for the reader to make their own interpretations – as my favourite philosopher, Hannah Arendt, said: “Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.”
So the search begins for sparkling anecdotes and tall tales… Only remember the sign pinned above Anne Sexton’s desk: WHATEVER YOU DO, DON’T BE BORING.

From the prompt of 1. haiku 2. poem about haiku, I got distracted into zips. Have you heard of zips? Addictive little form. A caesura like an open zipper between the parts. I like them best when they can read left to right or a column at a time.

found the red book         on the shelf
I’ve been looking for       that’s yellow

1.
double vision
arthritic fingers pinch
where sunglasses aren’t

—

2.
a kigo
observe then pivot
present contrast

I had a few ideas going into the workshop about what to do to get past inner obstacles to make a spark. They are below. At the other blog is what the brainstorming and wisdom of crowds came up with for strategies to encourage writing.
So can’t write, what to do?
Nothing to Say, Visualize…
Immerse and float. Write “into inspiration” instead of “out of inspiration”. Do visualizations: Picture a word and a scene where you felt the word. For example, safety, disinterested, eager. Use all senses, get into yourself…

• Close your eyes mentally and discover what you smell, hear, taste?
• What is the size of the space? Humidity? Temperature?
• How do your muscles feel? How does your skin feel?
• Is there cold or tension isolated in one part of you?
• Finally look, what is straight ahead, to the sides, peripheries, behind you?

Scrap any comparisons. Write direct. Be present there. No future nor past.
~ writer’s block from my own site in 2002 imagine the setting in detail
Set aside the correct and significant
….Try direct seeing of the smallest possible thing in the smallest possible detail. Think of the undergrad Robert Pirsig described who has inflexible filtering that let in too much. She was a contracted listener. She was committed to a large important canvas. She chose a broad topic and then got stumped. “She was blocked because she was trying to repeat, in her writing, things she had already heard.” Don’t avoid what has been said. Don’t seek to reference what has. Don’t plan where it is going or pace it. Just describe.

“She wasn’t bluffing him, she really couldn’t think of anything to say, and was upset by her inability to do as she was told. […] Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick. Her eyes, behind the thick-lensed glasses, opened wide. – p. 170-171, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Disconnect culpability and identity
…it’s not you. Write in a character as different from what “you” would write or say as possible. Your evil twin. Your saintly twin. You if you were stupid. If Stuffy. If rude. If impossibly polite. If you were born as your irritating neighbour. Appropriate any voice and run it as long as you can. And/or swap about consistency when you tire of one, even if within phrase. Channel flip until something clicks. What would your pseudonym say?
No Time

• Speed write, push as much thru as possible for 5 minutes then cull
• Write short: twitter-length
• 5 word bio of this moment
• do a Fibonacci (1, 2, 2, 3, 5, 8 syllable lines)
• Decompress, make time to make very few words but the right ones

Can’t Make Nothing Out of Nothing

• Use 5 prompt words to spark ideas and a time limit of 10 or 20 minutes to produce something. Sometimes it will have a few lines of use or keeper phrase.
• Add constraints, limit options. Start to list words with or without certain letter(s) to force assonance (same vowel sound) or consonance. (see online tools list). See what words end up near each other and how the word play into ideas.

Flip your usual habit
Do you have a plotter or pantster style?
…normally free write then edit? Make a mind map or pile on the constraints use a strict form and fill in the slots by meter and rhyme pattern or word lengths.
…normally do a brainstorm and outline before writing, do automatic writing and don’t let pen leave page. No pauses allowed. Sense optional. Sentences fragments. Phrases. Can’t think of a word leave a blank line or sketch something but keep moving.
Read what you don’t like
Until you can’t help but throw the book, retort, or get where the person is coming from. (Preferably all 3.) Expose yourself to what is against your bias or outside your reach. If you only reinforce what you know, you aren’t challenges. Irritate yourself into growing.
Other Things to Do with other people’s books

• tear all the words of the right margin. Rearrange those into a line or few.
• plunder the one you love. Take a poem you like and use some of the words in it in the order it appeared in that poem. Make your new setting for them.
• tell another version of what that poem said, keep its subject but change the point of view
• retell in formal language, slang language or using another form of poetry (from free verse reduced to limerick, or from pantoum to sonnet, for example)
• substitute your words slotted into their grammar and rhyme. Or use their meter but your ideas and sounds into the slots.
• copy the first 4 lines or your favorite 2 and then take it your own direction

use a system for getting a random choice of starter batch lines. Throw dice twice to get a page number and the words to use as material by counting in.

• OR spell your first name as numbers. That’s the page # to pillage. So Pearl = 7 + 5 + 1 + 9 = 22. Spell your last name as #. (That’s the line # and # of words to take as your starter batch.)
  (A=1, B=2, C=3, D=4, E=5, F=6, G=7, H=8, I=9, J=1, K=2, L=3, M=4, N=5,
  O=6, P=7, Q=8, R=9, S=1, T=2, U=3, V=4, W=5, X=6, Y=7, Z=8)
  If your name is a bigger # than the # of lines or pages, sum your name as in numerology. For example Pirie = 7 + 9 + 9 + 5 = 45 → 4 + 5 = 9 So I would start on page 22, line 9 and take 9 words there. (You could just point at a random part of the book but working for a number makes it seem predestined or that you’ve made an investment that you want to pay off through poetry.)

The thing is not to get a starting point but a departure point. Any first draft might have legs or not. It’s what comes after. You need something to winnow down from.

Online Prompts and Workshops
It isn’t the idea but how much you bring to it, explore and develop and polish…but if you’re looking for somewhere to start, some grain to form your snowflake around…here are some starts.
Poets Online
Has monthly prompts of a subject or form with an example poems by expert
for example: poems by Robert Hass and, having read those, write about the conversations of couples in your own way
Friday Fives
set of words to spur or stir story, memory, flash fiction, poems.
for example: freckle, evade, peck, scoot, dash
One Word
60 second to expand or spin-off word in whatever way comes to mind from the prompt word. it cuts you off after a minute.
for example: tarnish, noose, or symbol
Language is a Virus
A prompt list. you can only see 1 at a time (can’t be so overwhelmed by options)
for example: compose an index. Of anything.
Guardian’s poetry workshop
with one prompt per month from the likes of Annie Finch or Mark Doty
for example: a close study of another species or elegies
Charles Berntein’s list of 88 experiments
for example, pick 20 words and write three different poems using only these words, homophonic translation from a language you don’t know, lines collaged from media
Sunday Stealing
Meme questions that might not occur to you from which to springboard
for example: Back in the day: Been caught sneaking out? What happened the last time you played sports? Ever licked someone’s cheek?
NaPoWriMo 2009
for example: follow a word trail to see what starts, from synonym to synonym or its perfect rhymes or pseudo-rhymes and see where they take you. “Papal” becomes “apple,” which becomes “grapple.” If you add “dabble” or “baffle,” what an interesting story you may have!
One form a day for April
for example: A French rondelet. One stanza. Only 2 rhymes with a strict pattern, repeated refrain. Line 4 must rhyme with the refrain.
                      _dog days_
Line 1 :: A — four syllables             wilted flowers

Line 2 :: b — eight syllables           at the window smell like swamp gas

Line 3 :: A — repeat of line one      wilted flowers

Line 4 :: a — eight syllables
         from you who are gone torque powers,
Line 5 :: b — eight syllables          stink, to prod me to sun and grass.

Line 6 :: b — eight syllables         rubber stems safe in wet, harass

Line 7 :: A — repeat of line one      wilted flowers
30 in 30
Another set of Napowrimo prompts
for example: So today I want you to pay more attention to the Shape of your poem.
Play with the spacing of l e t t e r s.
Feeeeeeeeel how your man ip u lation of the English language is when you add a visual element.
Poetic Asides
Writer’s Market April Challenge (over 10,000 responses to 15 prompts so far)
for example: Two for Tuesday: write a love poem and /or an anti-love poem
Messing in Meter
Messing about with rough text, then metered it into dialogue, then for interestingness. It’s not the material or idea but what you do to it.
for example: Patrick Gillespie took the purple prose by Thomas North converted from prose to blank verse to more oomph/personal style added

hard by her, on either hand pretty fair boys appareled as painters
do set forth god Cupid, with little fans
in their hands, with which they fanned wind upon her.
On ei|ther hand |were pret|ty boys | ap-par-eled
As if |they each |were Cu|pid, fan|ning her

To keep |the wind |up-on | her.
On either side stood sweating boys
Like Cupidons with multi-colored wings
They teased the air with fans
That almost robbed the swooning breeze…

Weekly exercise prompts
for example: In 400 words or less, create a story that might explain the origin of an idiom.
Online Wordly Tools
Do erasure
use a black marker, keep a few words from a whole page
Wildcard dictionary
look for part of a word or sound such as (stats with a bl, ends with a rd) bl*rd (also a reverse dictionary at the site)
Anagrams search
Rhymes and slant rhyme Dictionary
Scrabble Helper
search for certain sounds such as you need all voiced and harsh tpkgbd???eea