Recently I re-read Bob Hicok’s poem “In Michael Robin’s class minus one” (please click HERE to read it)

and wondered what it is that I find so fascinating about it.

And there are quite Some things that fascinate me in that poem – how specific he gets, the creativity and sensitivity…

But what impressed me most was how he’s using the poetic tool of conversation to tackle a difficult subject – the death of a boy

I started thinking about conversation in poetry and realized that I use it quite frequently in my own poetry without thinking too much about the Why.

But there are some good reasons – for example…

• I find that conversation always feels natural
• it gives the poem an in-the-moment feel
• it adds multiple dimensions in the dialgoue’s back and forth //instead of one-dimensional you go three- or even more-dimensional
• It puts the poem into present tense
• It can connect different parts in a natural way
• It pulls the reader into the poem cause usually we tend to listen to convos or even want to engage in them
• It’s a cool way to embed different points of views
• It feels personal
• It can be used to make a thinking process transparent instead of providing a fix “solution”
• people “listen” to the conversation and while it goes bring in their own thoughts as well

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So for today, I want us to write conversation poems

If you have a difficult subject, you may wanna try to combine metaphor AND conversation
It can be a convo between different people or like in Bob’s poem with a river or some other object or fantasy being
The whole poem can be a conversation or you can just place some conversation lines into an otherwise non-conversational poem

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If you are new, here is how this works:

• Write a poem based on the prompt and put it on your webpage or blog.
• Click the Mr. Linky button below and enter your name and direct web address (URL) to your poem.
• There you will find the list of others playing along, read them, tell them what you thought of their poem.
• If you use social media to promote your works, include the tag #dversepoets or @dversepoets so we can find and promote you as well.

Have fun – and looking forward to seeing you out on the trail!

–Claudia