Category writing prompts

new poem up at Split This Rock!

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

I’m excited to share that I have a new poem published! Check out “Every S In This Poem is Telling On Me” which is currently featured as part of Split This Rock‘s Poem of the Week series. It’s always meaningful to see my work find a home, and I’m grateful to everyone at Split This Rock for featuring this poem. This poem will also be included in The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database, which, for those unfamiliar, is an amazing resource for general readers and educators alike.

“Every S In This Poem is Telling On Me” is a poem that comes out of my history with speech therapy as a child. The first draft came from a writing exercise I did alongside my students in the poetry workshop I taught last year. The exercise in question is Rita Dove’s “Ten-Minute Spill” from The Practice of Poetry.

Here’s the prompt for those interested in such things 🙂

Guidelines: Write a ten-line poem. The poem must include a proverb, adage, or familiar phrase (examples: she’s a brick house, between the devil and the deep blue sea, one foot in the grave, a stitch in time saves nine, don’t count your chickens before they hatch, once in a blue moon, the whole nine yards, a needle in a haystack) that you have changed in some way, as well as 2-3 words from the ones listed here: cliff, blackberry, needle, cloud, voice, mother, whir, lick, tank, terms, note, blade, tap, inquiry, reconcile, reproduce.

Writing this poem had me looking up the elementary school where it happened and only then realizing that it was named with my father’s initials. Go figure.

Thank you for reading and for your support!

= José =

writing prompt: predictive text

José Angel Araguz 2 Comments

Back to teaching full time this week. Been exciting and inspiring, while at the same time very real. What I mean is that the more I teach, the more I feel myself be more myself. And it’s not a thing I can summon or call forth. The space held in shared open questioning and conversation calls it forth.

Tangentially connected, at one point this week I watched this interview and supplemental writing “exercise” clips between Trevor Noah and Amanda Gorman that are illuminating. In the interview, Gorman speaks of poetry as water, a way to “re-sanctify, re-purify, and reclaim” the world around us. Her inaugural poem, “The Hill We Climb,” and its consequent impact on our American conscience at this moment in time are a solid gesture and step in the direction of this work.

In the second clip, Noah and Gorman engage in a predictive text writing exercise. It’s the kind of thing I see on Twitter sometimes and can’t help but join in on. Engaging directly and purposefully with predictive text can at times feel like having an echo of your latest obsessions as well as the way you articulate yourself in daily life cast back at you. Sometimes the screens in our hands look back, yo.

Noah and Gorman’s parameters were to start with the word “Roses” and limit themselves to 15-20 words. I went ahead and tried a few of my own. Feel free to share in the comments should you try this out yourself 🙂

Photo of roses by Aleksandar Pasaric

exercises in predictive text

Roses and the other one of my friends that I nominated for an oppositional the same situation that is

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Roses are you doing well today so much going to congratulate someone to take care if you have a great weekend

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Roses and I have a few things I would do anything to make sure you got the most important part