Free Inspiration, Part the First

I don’t like writing prompts. I understand that they help get lots of writers going, that they can be fun, that lots of great poems were prompted by someone else telling the poet to write “a poem in ten lines with these four words and this other random restriction,” but I find all that tiresome. I’m more interested in finding inspiration in the wild (or, you know, on Twitter).

There’s a folder on my desktop filled with links and images meant to be such inspiration, but sometimes it just doesn’t work out. I never find the poem hidden within. So in these installments I will offer this inspiration to you. Maybe you can make it work. All I ask is for a shout-out in your Pulitzer acceptance speech.

First, a moose drawing the poet Randall Mann found on a bathroom stall:

The poet Eduardo C. Corral‘s conflation of a skyscraper with a Star Trek villain’s ship:

This tweet from Lo-Ball Magazine: Pulled pork doesn’t need to come with prizes in it. It’s pulled pork.

This joke fiction writer Casey Hannan made: Question: How many men does it take to caramelize onions? Answer: That’s not how you caramelize onions.

And this creepy photograph of the Alcatraz library, instagrammed by essayist Ryan Van Meter:

Stay tuned for more things-I-can’t-make-work next month!