Welcome to Poetics! My name is Brian Miller and I am co hosting today with the outstanding poet Gretchen Leary. Today is all about interactions and what better way to talk about interactions that to have the two of us each providing a prompt of sorts.

My prompt came to me a few weeks back when I wrote a poem about Mad Libs. I got this crazy idea that maybe we could create them in poetry. If you have no idea what Mad Libs are, it is a word game you play, usually with kids. You create a story by filling in the blanks, asking them to supply a verb or noun or adjective. They have no idea what the story is about so once the blanks are filled in you read it back…often with rather hilarious results.

Here is what I would like you to do today, and it is going to take some interaction. I want you to ask someone to give you 2 nouns, 3 verbs, 3 adjectives and 2 random words. Using that list, I them want you to write a poem.

Be sure to let us know the words you started with and maybe even the person you asked to give them to you.

And now for another kind of interaction, I will turn it over to Gretchen.

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Sometimes I truly believe music makes the world go ’round. It affects our lives in so many ways and it is woven into so many of our memories. Sometimes just hearing that song again can spark so many emotions and set our muse to overdrive. Sometimes it’s the just the beat itself.

My name is Gretchen Leary, and I feel humbled to to be able to offer the prompt here. I’m not your typical pub tender. I’m not exactly sure how to make the glasses glow when polished or how to juggle the bottles, but I am here just the same.

My idea for a prompt is part of how I do most of my writing. What I ask is that you think really hard of a song that has inspired you in some way, think of the moment it locked inside of you forever, and write about that moment. Or, listen to that same song with a new mindset and see if it inspires something else inside of you.

Please be sure to give the artist themselves credit and link their website or video into your blog post to give them the respect we all want as artists.

So whether you bring classical, jazz, pop, funk, or… (You get the idea) to the pub tonight- I’m sure we’ll have a great poetic karaoke of sorts here at DVerse tonight.

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Whichever prompt you choose, or even if you choose to do both, have fun interacting with others or with the music, then come on back and interact with us. If you are new, here is what you do:

• Write a poem to one of the two prompts and post it on your webpage
• Include a link to dverse so that people can follow you back here
• Click the Mr. Linky button below and enter your name and direct URL
• Here is where you will also see others that have linked in their work. Visit others, interact with them, let them know what worked, what you liked.
• Enjoy

On behalf of Gretchen and myself, we look forward to seeing you out on the trail.