Welcome to my National Poetry Month project for 2026, where I am playing with poetry by generating poems in playful ways. Today's poem was inspired by MadLibs.
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To "MadLib" a poem you take an existing poem and swap out the nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs with your own words, while saving its syntax and punctuation, to create a new poem.
The poem I used was Black Marsh Eclogue by Sam Hamill. My reinvention is a poem about stamp collecting.
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Stamp Collecting Dream
Although it’s rare, this canceled stamp
holds faintest history in its careful margins,
those ink-fading-into-brown impressions
spreading across it like rain soaking into dry ground.
It rests in a leather album
more relic than paper, a seasoned traveler
returned from a vanished circulation.
It remembers the paths of letters
and does not shift or speak. But when
at last it’s traded, its fine edges
cross the widening page, and slowly,
as though drifting, slides, almost weightless,
as it draws the collector near.
Poem ©Tricia Stohr-Hunt, 2026. All rights reserved.
1930 Graf Zeppelins Image from Mystic Stamp Company.
Today, a used set will cost you a pretty penny. My mom always did say I had "champagne taste on a beer budget."
I hope you come back tomorrow to read the new poem I have to share. To see what others are offering up this month, check out Jama Rattigan's 2026 National Poetry Month Kidlitosphere Events Roundup.
You can check out previous poems in the links below.
Oh, my gosh, that is a pretty penny for those zeppelin stamps. What a fascinating process to create a new poem with the skeleton of an old one. I'm definitely going to try this!
ReplyDeleteI saw this on Instagram and looked up those stamps on a collector site. GIRL. Champagne taste indeed.
ReplyDeleteMadlibbing a poem might be something we try sometime??? Also, those stamps. WHOA.
ReplyDelete