Pen & Page Prompt No. 2

This week: Considering how the life you didn't choose is still speaking

Jun 26, 2025

#Pen & Page: A Gentle Prodding

Week 4 is here, which means it’s time for another Pen & Page prompt. As always, it’s multilayered and designed to startle your subconscious into motion. Let it lead you beneath surface awareness, where insight often begins. Consider nudging yourself toward “flow”, a productive and highly creative in-between state of consciousness. I wrote more about “flow” in my “Secret Life of Notebooks” newsletter.

Prompt No.2 “The Echo Self Speaks Up”

Write a poem from the voice of your alternate self — the version of you who made a different choice. Let this other self narrate the life you didn’t live: the one who stayed, who left, who said yes, who never looked back.

This is not ghost, not fantasy. This is the fully-realized you-that-might-have-been. Give them agency, memory, desire. Maybe they resent you. Maybe they pity you. Maybe they want to trade places.

Let tone lead the poem: is it accusatory? Tender? Boastful? Envious? Surreal?

You can write this as: direct address (use “you” and “I”), a mirror scene (you see them across a distance), a found artifact (obituary from the other life), or other perspective.

For inspiration read Terrance Hayes American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin [“I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison”]. In this poem, Hayes engages in identity play and alternate self. Or, for a look at the complexities of self, there is Jericho Brown’s book The Tradition.

Optional
Use a formal constraint (sonnet or duplex) to show the tension between you and this alternate self.

The modern sonnet retains core elements of the traditional sonnet, but allows for variations. Increasingly used by contemporary poets, it fits well in today’s culture because it balances constraint and freedom within pressures, systems, and fragmentation yet always reaching for authenticity, voice, and form. The duplex, created by Jericho Brown, is a form of modern sonnet.

#Stage Notes

Upcoming Zoom reading with Jed Myers, author of Learning to Hold, winner of the Wandering Aengus Press Editors’ Award:

Thursday, July 10 live on Zoom at 7PM ET/4PM PT
Free with required registration
Also reading will be L. Annette Binder
Hosted by Wandering Aengus Press and Trail to Table Press

Jed Myers’ poetry collection, Learning to Hold, offers welcome to human troubles in need of empathy’s refuge. These poems are written in the practice of opening the heart’s arms, by the powers of memory, intuition, and imagination, inviting us across borders of difference and distance in the spirit of our essential oneness. Learning to Hold is available by visiting Wandering Aengus Press.

If this is your first visit to 10 poetry notebooks, welcome. I’d love for you to hang around a bit. Welcome back to repeat readers! Keep those comments, snippets, and notes coming.

In next Thursday’s newsletter, we’ll follow the poem into the wild. No map, just instinct. Grab your notebook and follow me as we rewild the poem!

In order to explore the next newsletter fully, consider becoming a paid subscriber. You will receive subscriber only content including our layered image prompts and more.

Write and thrive,

Robbin