Writing Prompt by Lynne Thompson

One favorite prompt of mine frequently arrives unbidden when I am in a new or unfamiliar location.  The sights and smells of some place that is not “home” never fails to compel me to pick up a pen to write the words that will allow me to savor the extraordinary experience over and over again.  I wrote  Blur so that I could happily relive the week I spent in Italy’s Tuscany region; the first stanza of that poem is re-printed below:

Blur

—or so the sunflowers seemed
as we trekked mile after mile
in a Chevy tassí, from Sienna to
Montepulciano where everything
is humility and Mary, Mary and
genuflection; where air tastes olive
in our nostrils; mud’s improbably
silk on our hands and history is
the color of a cheap, true chianti—

I recommend that poets look—truly look—at their surroundings, be they familiar or new, in order to bring a fresh re-vision to their work.

Biography of Lynne Thompson: Lynne Thompson’s Beg No Pardon won the 2007 Perugia Press First Book Award (www.perugiapress.com) and the 2008 Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award.  Her work has appeared in the Indiana Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Margie . In 2009, her poem, Voice, was commissioned by Emory University.

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