Animating the Animal

#animatingtheanimal #poetry15 #poetryprompts

Hello, hello! I hope June is treating you well. I’m never able to write very much during National Poetry Month in April. All of the trumpeting of poetry doesn’t leave me much room for creativity, though I do squeeze some out when I can, like the juice worked out of an actual orange. Whether two fingers of loveliness or a pour of sour pulp, I’m glad for it. I might sit there and wonder, “Is that it?!” But I sip it happily, puckering my lips sometimes. I digress. My point is that June often ends up being more open-ended for me than April. Yes, there’s always a million things to do (school winding down for the kids while I’m still teaching!). But the longer sunlight and warmer days — and less commitments about poetry — led me to more moments to just write.

I hope this is the case for you, too. I hope that you feel moved to write this month. Here, the heat broke, and today the air is cool and lovely. Birds chatter away outside my window. The dogs seem happier on their walks.

I’ve been thinking a lot about animals in poems lately. How do you speak from the perspective of an animal without feeling silly? How do you do this without simply narrating facts about that animal—which an actual animal would never do, if it could write a poem (in my opinion). The whole persona-creating task for an animal is a bit tricky, though fun.

This month, I’m dipping into a prompt from my craft book, Poetry Studio: Prompts for Poets, but I’m re-writing it so that you’re invited to animate want from an animal’s perspective. (If you have the book, the prompt I’m re-writing is on page 107.) “Animating Want” from Poetry Studio invites you to animate how an inanimate object might want something. This month’s prompt, “Animating the Animal,” invites you to animate how an animal might do this wanting. What might enacting this feeling in a poem allow you to do with your own worries, fears, desires, and moments of grace?