Prompt: Ghost

I still remember reading when I was very young, the poem "Antigonish" by William Hughes Mearns. It was printed in some anthology, and it scared me.

Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
I wish, I wish he'd go away...

When I came home last night at three
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall
I couldn't see him there at all!
Go away, go away, don't you come back any more!
Go away, go away, and please don't slam the door...

That was an early encounter with a poetry ghost. Ghosts scared but also fascinated me, as they do for most kids, and many adults. They have also interested some poets. I found a group of poems about ghosts at poets.org. I wrote a ghost poem that grew into a piece of flash fiction.

"The Poor Ghost" by Christina Georgina Rossetti is a poem that depicts a dialogue between a man and the ghost of his lover. "The Haunted Oak" by Paul Laurence Dunbar has a tree that bears witness to and is haunted by the lynching of an innocent man.

Our model poem this month is "Unbidden" by Rae Armantrout which explores the idea of ghosts swarming and speaking as one, each leaving something undone.

Do you need to believe in ghosts to write about them? Emily Berry's ghost poem begins with this epigraph: "A statistician would say: of all the millions of ghost stories ever told, what percentage would have to be true for ghosts to exist? The answer is that only one story would have to be true."

Henrik Ibsen wrote in his play Ghosts: "I almost think we're all of us Ghosts ... It's not only what we have invited from our father and mother that walks in us. It's all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we can't get rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper, I seem to see Ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be Ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sand of the sea. And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light."

But before you start your own ghost poem, consider that not all ghosts are spectral visions. Some are not even nouns. It can be a trace or suggestion of something: "The ghost of a smile played on her lips". The ghost can be a persistent, unsettling presence or memory in the mind: "His past mistakes still ghosted him". Someone living can be a shadow or semblance of something -"He's just a ghost of his former self" now diminished in health, strength, or spirit. "He doesn't have a ghost of a chance" means only a faint chance or possibility: 

And our newest usage is ghost as a verb, where it typically means to suddenly cut off all communication with someone without warning or explanation. For example, if you're texting someone and they abruptly stop responding, they might be said to have "ghosted" you. It's often used in the context of dating or friendships, but it can apply to any situation where someone unexpectedly disappears, like a ghost.

Our May issue will be full of ghosts in various forms and visions. 

Submission Deadline: April 30, 2025

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

National Poetry Month 2025

April is National Poetry Month. Launched by the Academy of American Poets in April 1996, National Poetry Month is a special occasion that celebrates poets’ integral role in our culture and that poetry matters. Over the years, it has become the largest literary celebration in the world, with tens of millions of readers, students, K–12 teachers, librarians, booksellers, literary events curators, publishers, families, and—of course—poets, marking poetry’s important place in our lives.

 You might want to celebrate this month by getting a Poem-a-Day, curated in April by Willie Perdomo, and reading a free daily poem in your inbox. 

You can follow the thousands of celebrations on social media with the official hashtag #NationalPoetryMonth. Follow the Academy of American Poets (@POETSorg) on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and X for free poetry resources and poems to share throughout April

Since the beginning of this National Poetry Month, I have ordered a free copy of the poster (or download a pdf version on their website) to display in my classrooms and at readings. The 2025 poster features an excerpt from “Gate A-4”, a poem by former Young People’s Poet Laureate and Academy Chancellor Naomi Shihab Nye  - “This / is the world I want to live in. The shared world." and artwork by New York Times-bestselling author and illustrator Christy Mandin who was selected by Scholastic—the global children’s publishing, education, and media company—to create the artwork for this year’s poster as part of a National Poetry Month collaboration with the Academy of American Poets.

A lesson plan featuring Nye’s poem is also available through the Academy’s Teach This Poem series to bring the poster to life for National Poetry Month.

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

Finding the Angel Within: An Interview with Ken Ronkowitz

I was interviewed for the National Poetry Month episode of the podcast L-Town Radio. The host, Joe O'Brien, is a multi-hyphenate librarian-poet-musicmaker at the Livingston Public Library in New Jersey, which is the town where I spent several decades as an English teacher. 

We had a long conversation, and I talked about my experiences as an English teacher, teaching poetry and writing poetry. We got into my invented form, the "Ronka," and how writing a poem is like "finding the angel within." 

The interview is broken into parts and mixed with library staff reading favorite poems, and news of the library. 

If you are curious to hear the voice of and know a bit more about the person behind Poets Online, you can listen on their website  or on Apple Podcasts, or on Spotify 

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

Concerning Submissions

 

As we approach the deadline for submissions to Poets Online each month, the final days always bring in the most submissions.

Last year, we had 575 submissions. That's an average of about 50 per the monthly call. That is small compared to the big journals, but it's fine because we are small with a few volunteer staff and a one-man production team. There are no fees to submit and that does attract poets. 

We don't have a number that we plan to use use each issue, but it generally whittles its way done to 10-20 poems currently. 

It is important that you follow our rather simple submission guidelines, but that is true for any magazine, journal or book publisher. And yet, we always receive poems that have nothing to do with that month's prompt.That is an immediate rejection. We also receive poems that are not correctly formatted, which moves them down in the acceptance list. Then, there are the most difficult ones to decide on. If all the readers give it a thumbs up, it's included. Then we work our way down the list.

On Poets Online, we ask for email submissions in plain text, with the subject line being submission so that our mail filter puts it in a folder for readers. Even using submission_ or submit or prompt will push it elsewhere where it may not be read at all.

I am also a reader for a manuscript competition and a print poetry magazine. The submission guidelines for those are more complicated but the process is very similar: last minute submissions, poems that do not match the call, ones that are incorrectly formatted.

MORAL OF THE POST: Read and follow submission guidelines.

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org