Today’s featured resource is the Open House poetry radio program. On each program, hosts Cornelius Eady and Patricia Spears Jones interview poets about their new and recent work. You can listen online, or live every Friday on NYC’s WBAI.

Today’s prompt (optional, as always, and taken from our archives) is a variation on a teaching exercise that the poet Anne Boyer uses with students studying the work of Emily Dickinson. As you may know, although Dickinson is now considered one of the most original and finest poets the United States has produced, she was not recognized in her own time. One reason her poems took a while to gain a favorable reception is their slippery, dash-filled lines. Those dashes baffled her readers so much that the 1924 edition of her complete poems replaced some with commas, and did away with others completely. Today’s exercise asks you to do something similar, but in the interests of creativity, rather than ill-conceived “correction.” Find an Emily Dickinson poem – preferably one you’ve never previously read – and take out all the dashes and line breaks. Make it just one big block of prose. Now, rebreak the lines. Add words where you want. Take out some words. Make your own poem out of it! (Not sure where to find some Dickinson poems? You’ll find oodles at the bottom of this page).

I’ve been meaning to write a bird poem for a long time but hadn’t been able to for the prompts so far. This prompt gave me the opportunity to do it. I used the poem ‘A bird came down, the Walk’ for this exercise. I hadn’t read the poem before. I enjoyed this exercise, but I hope Emily forgives me for changing her beautiful poem.

A Bird came down
The worm did not know
He bit it in halves
 I saw it.

He ate it, raw, 
And slurped the dew 
From the closest blade of grass 
I saw it. 

Then he hopped sidewise 
Let a beetle pass and glanced
Furtively, for other hurrying creatures.  
I saw it.

He stirred 
his velvet head,
cautious
I saw it.

I offered him a crumb, 
He unrolled his feathers, 
And came closer.
He saw me.

As if he'd been drawn
by a string softly Home 
Like oars dividing the ocean
bringing a boat to shore.

Too velvety, his breast hairs shone
Like butterfly wings, at noon, 
shimmering. Bending his head, 
he pecked at the crumbs.