2021 April PAD Challenge Countdown: T-minus 5
Poem along with the second ever April PAD Challenge Countdown, in which Robert Lee Brewer shares a prompt and a poem (to get things started) in the 10 days leading up to the 2021 April Poem-A-Day Challenge. For today’s prompt, write a MacGuffin poem.
For today’s prompt, write a MacGuffin poem. I have an entire post about what a MacGuffin is here, but the basic definition is that a MacGuffin is an object (living or nonliving) that is necessary for the plot but has no greater value to the story. A good example is The Maltese Falcon in which everyone is searching for the falcon, but it has no greater purpose than to drive everyone else into action searching for it. You can write a poem about a MacGuffin that already exists in literature (like the maltese falcon or one of the objects from the Harry Potter novels), or you can invent your own.
Remember: These prompts are springboards to creativity. Use them to expand your possibilities, not limit them.
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Poem your days away with Robert Lee Brewer's Smash Poetry Journal. This fun poetic guide is loaded with 125 poetry prompts, space to place your poems, and plenty of fun poetic asides.
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Here’s my attempt at a MacGuffin Poem:
"the golden shovel"
ask any poet, we
all run and hide and wear
our lines awkward as the
fear we conceal, a mask
protecting us from that
false attention that grins
and feigns interest and
that which we know are lies
(Getting a little meta, but my MacGuffin is a poetic form invented by Terrance Hayes called the golden shovel after his poem "The Golden Shovel"; find guidelines for writing the golden shovel and more than 160 other poetic forms here.)
Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Editor of Writer's Digest, which includes managing the content on WritersDigest.com and programming virtual conferences. He's the author of 40 Plot Twist Prompts for Writers: Writing Ideas for Bending Stories in New Directions, The Complete Guide of Poetic Forms: 100+ Poetic Form Definitions and Examples for Poets, Poem-a-Day: 365 Poetry Writing Prompts for a Year of Poeming, and more. Also, he's the editor of Writer's Market, Poet's Market, and Guide to Literary Agents. Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.
