Happy New Year to The Waters, and to all of our fellow poets, and participants past and present!
We'd like to announce a new initiative here at The Waters -- which is partly a restatement of the original idea behind the founding of this workshop and partly the introduction of daily prompts.
IN A NUTSHELL: We will add a Daily Prompts feature to the main forum, The Waters Poetry. There's no obligation to use the prompts in order to post here. All the details follow.
The main forum, The Waters Poetry, is meant to be a place where you can post as often as you wish, as long as you comment on three poems for every poem you post. And we emphasize that this forum is a suitable place for posting daily drafts for anyone who would like to do so. In accordance with the original guidelines, anyone who really wants in-depth analysis should say so at the head of the post, but otherwise, we'll only provide light critique -- what's working really well, what might be causing confusion, etc.
We've found that our 7-in-7 challenges at the Beach have worked very well for some people. Also, the themed challenges at The Beach have been popular with some, but daunting to others. We want to offer lots of choices here and meet diverse needs.
WHAT'S NEW
Beginning on January 1st, we will provide, on a weekly basis, a set of 7 prompts that poets can use to spark poem drafts. Resulting poems can be posted in the main forum for light commentary.
We'll create an Exercise Basket to hold prompts, themes, contests, challenges, and exercises that might inspire poems. Think of these
as swim fins or floaties or beach toys. They're to help you move through the waters, stay afloat, and have fun. Some of the contests and themes will come
from journals (submission deadlines will be included). Others will come from books. Still others may be of our own devising. Anyone can contribute challenges
and exercises. Everyone is encouraged to do so. We'll need your input!! Each week, we'll pick 7 items from the Basket and post the set for the
week's inspiration. Once a prompt has been posted, we'll delete it from the Basket (though there may be some we want to recycle).
GUIDELINES
There's no obligation to use the posted prompts.
There's no obligation to post a poem a day.
Anyone can post a poem that doesn't make use of a prompt (as before).
If you'd like to do a set of 7 poems in 7 days, without using the weekly prompts, you can still do this at 77 Sunset Beach. (And by the way, anyone can pop over to the Beach to read and comment -- even if you're not actively posting poems there.)
We'll post the first set of prompts by the end of the day on January 1st. These will be prompts for the week of January 5-11 (that way you have a head start this time and our usual week will run from Monday through Sunday. We'll usually try to post prompts a couple of days in advance).
MECHANICS
The Exercise Basket will be a single sticky topic in the main forum. If you want to add an exercise idea, make it a separate post within that topic (i.e., "Add Reply").
The set of 7 prompts for the week will be posted in a single sticky topic. Do not post your poems in that topic. Start a new topic (thread) for each poem, so that comments can be made on that poem and don't get lost. You can indicate the prompt that you're responding to in your subject field or you can leave it for us to guess!
We're trying out this experiment as an alternative to creating a new forum for challenges. Let's see how it works for a while. We can always make
changes.
