In the months since writing my response to this interview question, I’ve seen several references to extremely similar writing prompts – a typically synchronistic example of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. In the Kenyon Review (from 3/2021), Michael Montlack speaks of Dorianne Laux & Joe Millar’s method of “making a list of words, throwing in a quote or fact or phrase, and taking an hour to write a draft.” And in the Ottawa Poetry Newsletter (from 10/2020), Valerie Coulton describes Edward Smallfield’s process that “consists of a personalized postcard with four words and a quote.

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The third series didn’t last. After an extremely promising first few days, I discovered the source text was problematic; I kept landing on passages that needed way too much massaging to render them usable.

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I started my third chance operation series yesterday. As with the first two, I’m drawing five words at random from a predetermined list, then I’m using a source text to choose a line at random. The first series ran for about forty days and the second for a bit over fifty days, which felt right for each of them. But I plan on running this series for at least three months, to generate as many as ninety or a hundred poems, from which I can select and winnow.

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Writer’s block is the unwillingness to crawl. — Eve L. Ewing (1) I wasn’t always an early riser, but at some point in the first year or so after college, I had a temp job that started at about six in the morning. For two months, in the darkest stretch of winter, I woke at four, stunned and blasted like an atomic atoll. I clung to my little kitchen table, stared blankly out at the silence.

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Now that shoures soote the droghte of March hath perced to the roote, it’s time once again to breed lilacs out of the dead land, mix memory and desire, and generally stir dull roots with spring rain. Yes, that’s right: it’s NaPoWriMo. This year I’m returning to an old practice I did in 2004, ’05, and ’06. Each day this month, I’m doing an exercise from Rita Dove called the 10-Minute Spill, which I found in the delightful Practice of Poetry.

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