Unexpected Intersections

It's been great fun this month writing Inktober-inspired haiku, senryu and tanka poems. You can see my prompt list and the first week of poems here , the second week of poems here , and the third week here . I hope you've enjoyed these mostly spooky, sometimes nature-inspired, occasionally random ( baseball playoffs! ) poems.  So now, without further ado, here is the Spooktacular conclusion to my Spooktober project! Our host for Poetry Friday this week is Linda at Teacher Dance . Hop on over to her blog for links to this week's round of poetic goodness.

I'm continuing to have fun with my Spooktober project - writing poems for kids based on a series of Inktober illustrator prompts. You can see the prompt list and the first week of poems here , and the second batch of poems here .  The prompts were aimed at adult illustrators instead of kids, so it's been both challenging and fun to play with them and try to find ways to make words like poison work for a young audience. It's also been fun to play with the various meanings a word can have, and try to subvert preconceived ideas a reader might bring to a poem based on that prompt. So here are this week's poems - I hope you're having as much spooky fun reading them as I'm having writing them!               This week our host for Poetry Friday is Jama over at Jama's Alphabet Soup .  Hop on over to the Poetry Friday post for links to a virtual buffet of poetic goodness!

I'm writing a poem for every day of October, playing with poems inspired by a list of Inktober prompts written in senryu, haiku, and tanka poetic forms. You can read the first week's worth of my Spooktober poems, and see my prompt list, in this post .  I've had a lot of fun with the prompts this week!  I've got some publishing news to share today! I'm thrilled to have two poems included in the 10.10 Poetry Anthology: Celebrating 10 in 10 Different Ways , which includes poems from many Poetry Friday participants.  You can get a peek inside the anthology and order your own copy here .  The editor of the anthology, Bridget Magee , is our host for Poetry Friday this week. Hop on over to her blog to congratulate her on 10 years of blogging and the publication of this wonderful anthology, and to get links to the rest of today's Poetry Friday poems!

I've been immersed in poetry and verse in the past couple of weeks - first in a Novel in Verse virtual workshop led by the amazing Nikki Grimes and Padma Venkatraman, then in my own work as I dived in deep to apply all the insights and tips that I took away from that experience.  Poems arrived in my inbox this week, via the Academy of American Poets newsletter featuring a selection of poems for Indigenous Peoples' Day.  I particularly loved the poem by Rainy Dawn Ortiz that starts: Something Else. Some one else Some where else That place is here, In my home, We are here. You can read the rest of the poem and learn more about the poet here .  One of the things I love about being a part of Poetry Friday is the inspiration to play with different poetic forms. Thoughts about poetic forms were milling around in my mind when they bumped into Inktober, an annual event in which illustrators create a drawing each day during the month of October. Sparks flew and an idea was born. I...