I have been looking into writing challenges and contests, to get my creative juices flowing and keep up the habit of writing daily, and I came across a contest on Vocal.media to write a Tautogram. I had never heard of that, so I had to learn more. It’s a poem where every word starts with the same letter or sound. In this contest it had to be the same letter.
That sounds ridiculously impossible, but baby ideas began to sprout and by midnight were rolling around my brain, unstoppable. Most ideas came up short and I had to resort to my thesaurus only to meet a dead end because I couldn’t find words that fit or sounded good with the letter I chose.
Here’s a small example:
Passionately powerful
Pain purveyor past
Perfidious persecutor, privately
Public- people pleasing poise
This one was off to a good start, though dark and I wasn’t in the mood to reflect on past pain. I thought of happy themes, there are so many food words that start with “P”: pizza, pretzel, potato, pasta, party platter… but that wasn’t exactly the direction I wanted to go and I’d need words to stick those together as well. I tried many combinations beginning with different letters and finally wrote a poem I love about my daughter. An image of her came to mind of when she was a small girl, full of joy, always singing and dancing. After obsessing over it until I was satisfied, I posted it on Vocal.media and entered it in the Tautagram Challenge . You can view it here: Dancing Daughter.
I also submitted three poems to The Rising Poet 2023 on Palette Poetry. I can’t share those until after that contest ends, but I hope at least one of them get’s chosen.