(I’m a day late, apologies!)

Think about high school – ah, the emotional time. Are you currently a student? Was it years ago? What is your favorite memory? What was your most horrible memory? If you could tell your high-school self something, what would it be?

This whole prompt was triggered when I started thinking about my son’s senior photo and his feelings about it — thinking about my senior photo – what was that hairdo? that goofy smile?

If you want to write to this prompt, get out a year book and look carefully at the photos — let the emotions from those years fill you up. Then write something using all five of your senses — what did your locker smell like, remember the voice of you secret crush sound like? Even if those images don’t make it into the final poem, they will ground your imagination in details.

A. E. Stallings’s poem, “Written on the eve of my 20th high school reunion, which I was not able to attend,” does this wonderfully, evoking both the terror of high school dreams and the shame that still haunts us years later. Especially these lines:

Poetry prompt for 11/14/13. I’ve been thinking about how to write a poem in response to Typhoon Haiyan, and I came upon Michelle Boisseau’s poem “The Fury That Breaks” in my May 2013 issue of Poetry. (See link for the poem online). The poem discusses fury, both as something that a group of people might have, but also personifies fury somehow, in a surrealistic way, as a being that can break people and trees apart into many pieces.

Try writing a poem about fury. If you like, just write about fury in your life or the life of someone else. Or, try personification: what does fury look like? Man or woman? Child or adult? What does fury wear, eat, say, think? Where does fury go and what happens next? What would you like to say to fury?

Enjoy the process and don’t be afraid of the feelings that might come out in words.

See my poem, poem draft images, and post your poem in response to the PAD blog, http://laneofyellow.tumblr.com/.