Daily Prompt Love <3 Oh No Hell No
15 May 2019
Make art about fighting back.
Posts tagged ‘Poetry Month’
Daily Prompt Love <3 Fool
1 April 2019
Make art about the fool.
And visit the Better-Than-Black-Friday Writing Group on Facebook for 30 brand new prompts in celebration of National Poetry Month!
Prompts for Poetry Month! All in One Place!
Happy National Poetry Month!!! Let’s get that write on!
Wanta play Poem a Day? Or Flash? Or micromemoir?
Instead of the Daily Prompt Love, I’ve posted 15 Brand New Prompts all together for a Poetry Month celebration! Write whatever you want–poem a day, flash, microessays!
I’ll add 15 more in a couple of weeks to finish out the month’s celebration!
Join us over in the Better Than Black Friday Writing Group on Facebook for some poem a day, or whenever prompted action 
Party on, writers! 
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1512919158978356/
Daily Prompt Love <3 Cultural Landscape
Geographer Otto Schlüter is credited with having first formally used “cultural landscape” as an academic term in the early 20th century. He defined two forms of landscape: the Urlandschaft (transl. original landscape) or landscape that existed before major human induced changes and the Kulturlandschaft (transl. ‘cultural landscape’) a landscape created by human culture. The major task of geography was to trace the changes in these two landscapes.
It was Carl O. Sauer, a human geographer, who was probably the most influential in promoting and developing the idea of cultural landscapes. Sauer was determined to stress the agency of culture as a force in shaping the visible features of the Earth’s surface in delimited areas. Within his definition, the physical environment retains a central significance, as the medium with and through which human cultures act. His classic definition of a ‘cultural landscape’ reads as follows:
“The cultural landscape is fashioned from a natural landscape by a cultural group. Culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium, the cultural landscape is the result.”
A 2006 academic review of the combined efforts of the World Heritage Committee, multiple specialists around the world, and nations to update and apply the concept of ‘cultural landscapes’, observed and concluded that:
“Although the concept of landscape has been unhooked for some time from its original art associations … there is still a dominant view of landscapes as an inscribed surface, akin to a map or a text, from which cultural meaning and social forms can simply be read.”
Make art about a cultural landscape, on reading cultural meaning in the shaping of land.
Daily Prompt Love x 2
27 February 2018
Make art about telling or hearing from someone these so-important words.
28 February 2018
Yesterday I had a talk with my students, one I have with all of my classes at some point in the semester, a reminder that it’s okay to ask for help.
Make art about asking for help.
Happy National Poetry Month <3 What is Broken Is What God Blesses, Jimmy Santiago Baca
What is Broken Is What God Blesses
The lover’s footprint in the sand the ten-year-old kid’s bare feet in the mud picking chili for rich growers, not those seeking cultural or ethnic roots, but those whose roots have been exposed, hacked, dug up and burned and in those roots do animals burrow for warmth; what is broken is blessed, not the knowledge and empty-shelled wisdom paraphrased from textbooks, not the mimicking nor plaques of distinction nor the ribbons and medals but after the privileged carriage has passed the breeze blows traces of wheel ruts away and on the dust will again be the people’s broken footprints. What is broken God blesses, not the perfectly brick-on-brick prison but the shattered wall that announces freedom to the world, proclaims the irascible spirit of the human rebelling against lies, against betrayal, against taking what is not deserved; the human complaint is what God blesses, our impoverished dirt roads filled with cripples, what is broken is baptized, the irreverent disbeliever, the addict’s arm seamed with needle marks is a thread line of a blanket frayed and bare from keeping the man warm. We are all broken ornaments, glinting in our worn-out work gloves, foreclosed homes, ruined marriages, from which shimmer our lives in their deepest truths, blood from the wound, broken ornaments— when we lost our perfection and honored our imperfect sentiments, we were blessed. Broken are the ghettos, barrios, trailer parks where gangs duel to death, yet through the wretchedness a woman of sixty comes riding her rusty bicycle, we embrace we bury in our hearts, broken ornaments, accused, hunted, finding solace and refuge we work, we worry, we love but always with compassion reflecting our blessings— in our brokenness thrives life, thrives light, thrives the essence of our strength, each of us a warm fragment, broken off from the greater ornament of the unseen, then rejoined as dust, to all this is.
Happy National Poetry Month! What’s Broken, Dorianne Laux
What’s Broken
Dorianne Laux
The slate black sky. The middle step
of the back porch. And long ago
my mother’s necklace, the beads
rolling north and south. Broken
the rose stem, water into drops, glass
knobs on the bedroom door. Last summer’s
pot of parsley and mint, white roots
shooting like streamers through the cracks.
Years ago the cat’s tail, the bird bath,
the car hood’s rusted latch. Broken
little finger on my right hand at birth—
I was pulled out too fast. What hasn’t
been rent, divided, split? Broken
the days into nights, the night sky
into stars, the stars into patterns
I make up as I trace them
with a broken-off blade
of grass. Possible, unthinkable,
the cricket’s tiny back as I lie
on the lawn in the dark, my heart
a blue cup fallen from someone’s hands.
Happy National Poetry Month! The Meaning of the Shovel, Martin Espada
The Meaning of the Shovel
BY MARTÍN ESPADA
—Barrio René Cisneros
Managua, Nicaragua, June-July 1982
Managua, Nicaragua, June-July 1982
This was the dictator’s land
before the revolution.
Now the dictator is exiled to necropolis,
his army brooding in camps on the border,
and the congregation of the landless
stipples the earth with a thousand shacks,
every weatherbeaten carpenter
planting a fistful of nails.
Here I dig latrines. I dig because last week
I saw a funeral in the streets of Managua,
the coffin swaddled in a red and black flag,
hoisted by a procession so silent
that even their feet seemed
to leave no sound on the gravel.
He was eighteen, with the border patrol,
when a sharpshooter from the dictator’s army
took aim at the back of his head.
I dig because yesterday
I saw four walls of photographs:
the faces of volunteers
in high school uniforms
who taught campesinos to read,
bringing an alphabet
sandwiched in notebooks
to places where the mist never rises
from the trees. All dead,
by malaria or the greedy river
or the dictator’s army
swarming the illiterate villages
like a sky full of corn-plundering birds.
I dig because today, in this barrio
without plumbing, I saw a woman
wearing a yellow dress
climb into a barrel of water
to wash herself and the dress
at the same time,
her cupped hands spilling.
I dig because today I stopped digging
to drink an orange soda. In a country
with no glass, the boy kept the treasured bottle
and poured the liquid into a plastic bag
full of ice, then poked a hole with a straw.
I dig because today my shovel
struck a clay bowl centuries old,
the art of ancient fingers
moist with this same earth,
perfect but for one crack in the lip.
I dig because I have hauled garbage
and pumped gas and cut paper
and sold encyclopedias door to door.
I dig, digging until the passport
in my back pocket saturates with dirt,
because here I work for nothing
and for everything.
Check out Martin Espada’s website for more beautiful poems! http://www.martinespada.net/
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
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