Now that the 2025 Poetry Postcard Fest is finished, we still have some writing exercises for postcard poets to continue developing your poetic practice. Whether your preparing for the 2026 Poetry Postcard Fest or would just like to continue the poetry writing momentum you got from PPF, this exercise is great to continue developing spontaneous composition!

Today, we have another prompt inspired by Robert Duncan and Organic Poetry. The term “Organic” is taken from correspondence between Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov from 1963, in which Robert Duncan described the difference between Conventional, Free Verse and Organic poets. For the organic poet, the universe and man are members of a form. Freedom lies in the apprehension of this underlying form, towards which invention and free thought in sciences alike work. All experience is formal — We feel things in so far as we awake to the form. The form of the poem is the feeling (and where form fails, feeling fails.)

So start by feeling. What was the last experience you can remember in which you felt intensely? Perhaps it was the sight of the sky through a dusty window, birds and clouds and bits of paper flying through the sky. Perhaps it was the sound of music from your radio, or feelings of anger and love and amusement roused by an email you received.

Contemplate and meditate those feelings and regard those feelings. Muse upon them and take inspiration from them. What words first come to mind to describe those feelings? What bursts from you as you regard that experience?

It is faithful attention to the experience from the first moment of crystallization that allows those first or those forerunning words to rise to the surface: and with that same fidelity of attention let the experience lead you through the world of the rest of your poem, its unique inscape revealing itself as you go.

Do not try to supervise the process. Write the words as they come to you. Then look at the relationship between them- how would you shift these words to match the form of the experience? Organic form attends first to the shape and rhythm of the entire poem, and individual lines may be shifted in accordance with that poem’s movement and shape as a whole.

And if you’d like to dive deeper into Robert Duncan’s work, Hilda “H.D.” Doolittle, and the broader context of American Modernism, consider joining our upcoming workshop: Robert Duncan’s H.D. Book: The Roots of Modernism with Michael Boughn. Over five weeks, you’ll explore the H.D. Book alongside its editor, Michael Boughn. Guided by Duncan’s words, you’ll be invited into a journey with H.D. and a deepening of your understanding of poetic form. Scholarships for this workshop are available to those that registered for PPF 2025 and 2026! Contact us HERE to learn about workshop discounts for postcard poets.