Poetry Fishbowl on My Blog Today

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Starting now, the Poetry Fishbowl is open in my blog. I will be checking the page periodically throughout the day. When people make suggestions, I'll pick some and weave them together into a poem ... and then another ... and so on. I'm hoping to get a lot of ideas and a lot of poems.

Writing is usually considered a solitary pursuit. One exception to this is a fascinating exercise called a "fishbowl." This has various forms, but all of them basically involve some kind of writing in public, usually with interaction between author and audience. A famous example is Harlan Ellison's series of "stories under glass" in which he sits in a bookstore window and writes a new story based on an idea that someone gives him. Writing classes sometimes include a version where students watch each other write, often with students calling out suggestions which are chalked up on the blackboard for those writing to use as inspiration.

In this online version of a Poetry Fishbowl, I begin by setting a theme. I invite people to suggest characters, settings, and other things relating to that theme. Then I use those prompts as inspiration for writing poems. For today's "cultures of the world" theme, I am especially looking for: culture heroes, historic figures, ancient or modern societies, objects linked to a certain culture, winter holidays around the world, cultural practices, culture clashes, historic evolution of cultures, places associated with a given culture, and poetic forms linked to a culture in particular.

But anything is welcome, really. If you manage to recommend a form that I don't recognize, I will probably pounce on it and ask you for its rules. I do have the first edition of Lewis Turco's The Book of Forms which covers most common and many obscure forms.

I'll post at least one of the fishbowl poems on my blog for everyone to enjoy. The rest will go into my archive for magazine submission.