by K.G. Strayer

What motivates you to write a poem? What helps your process, and what hinders it? What are some of the resources you use to nurture your work, but also to challenge it?

We opened POPcraft: Tarot for Poets up to submissions because we know that each person’s process and how they interact with poetry and poetry prompts is different. I love the Tarot because of its ability to help us confront our own narratives, but I also love its immense variability as a resource. Even if you have never seen a Tarot card in your life, you can use its visual language and long network of resonances to inspire your writing. 

This prompt is designed to help you create your very own POPcraft: Tarot for Poets prompt.

As you shuffle the deck, think about what inspires you to write something completely new. Where do you start? A line, a sound, an idea? Do you like restrictions, or do you need to feel freedom? What kind of restriction do you prefer, what gives you that sense of freedom? Consider how you might use the Tarot to create a prompt that allows them to follow a new path…yours!

Draw three cards. The first card correlates with how you direct us to begin writing. Which elements of your own preferred process does the card immediately bring to mind?

The second card should help you determine any structural elements of your prompt. What do you think of as the bones of a poem? How might another person build a poem with these bones?

The third card should bring one of the five senses into your prompt. How might you incorporate one of the five into your directions? Allow the card to help you narrow down the realm of possibilities.

When you’ve finished, don’t forget to send us your prompt! Remember that there is no one way to write a POPcraft prompt…we want to honor our differences and celebrate them by creating new work out of that richness.