behindthestacks

Food, sex and poetry. Individually they inspire pleasure. When blended with creativity and attention to detail, each becomes all three.

A poem (story, novel) describing a spectacular feast, a particularly disastrous attempt at a new recipe for the boss, or Mama’s Frickadelli soup can evoke emotions equally as pleasant, sad or embarrassing as can one calling up the memory of one’s first, last, best or worst meal or sexual experience.

We all remember poems, in whole or part, that in some ...

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Did you know that poems take root in the found objects and slammed doors of everyday life? You can write one. Really! Honor Moore leads the way.

Let's say I'm sitting in that room with you now. Take out a pad and pen, your favorite pen—the one that just slides across the paper. Be sure you have an hour or so, so you can take your time with each prompt.

12 Ways to Write a Poem
1. Make a list of five things you did today, in the order you did them.
2. Quickly write down three colors.
3. Write...

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Poetry has been around since the beginning of time. I doubt that poets in primitive societies were overly concerned with whether their poems were considered academically accepted. They just versified. According to Judson Jerome in Poet’s Handbook, “Anyone can make poetry—and most people do, at least sometimes in their lives. They don’t even have to be able to read and write.”

That said there are certain trends in poetry that we tend to follow. When most Behind the Stacks participant...
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Poets bat around a lot of jargon about poetry: sonnet, ballad, free verse, alliteration, slant rhyme, iambic pentameter, metaphor, simile, and many other terms, including prose poetry. Prose poetry is a somewhat illusive term, and some people with the reputation for being experts say that if you want to write prose, don’t call it poetry. Some poets, however, claim to write “prose poetry” in contrast to free verse poetry. Is there a real difference?

The term “prose” comes from the Lat...

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Who is your muse?
We write many types of poetry and in many styles. Does our poetry brand us? Does it pigeonhole us into one particular kind of poetry? In ancient Greek mythology, poetry, and literature, the muses were believed to be goddesses who inspired the creation of literature and the arts.
According to Wikipedia, “In one myth King Pierus, once king of Macedon, had nine daughters he named after the nine muses, believing that their skills were a great match to the Muses (mousi). He thus...

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