Day Fourteen, and here is a paste of the prompt:

“Today’s optional prompt asks you, like Alice Notley, to think about your own inspirations and forebears (whether literary or otherwise). Specifically, I challenge you today to write a poem that deals with the poems, poets, and other people who inspired you to write poems. These could be poems/poets/people that you strive to be like, or even poems, poets, and people that you strive not to be like. There are as many ways to go with this prompt as there are ways to be inspired.”

So I thought of the poets, and there are too many. Then my inner acrosticist took three cards out of the Rolodex: Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Allan Poe, and Sylvia Plath. All left their mark. All were driven and bedeviled and haunted. And they haunt me. I know the opening lines of “The Raven” and “Daddy” and I know all of “IF-” And Kip, Poe and Syl uniquely identify them with three letters. So there may be an Acrostic in the future…but I’m not feeling Acrosticky right now. But let’s see what happens.

Kip Poe Syl

Rudyard and Edgar and Sylvia Plath
Let us be shaped by this odd Threefold Path.
Let us get Kip for the blood and the bone,
Firmly embed in Testosterone Zone.
Poe is for Passion so darkly uncomic,
Endlessly rhymed with a beat metronomic.
Syl’s so unsilly, such willies she gives,
Pouring her hope into such porous sieves.

Put them together, you get KipPoeSyl,
Mournful and frantic as Hank’s Whippoorwill.

“Hear the lonesome Whippoorwill.
He sounds too blue to fly.
The midnight train is whining low,
I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.”
Hiram “Hank” Williams, Sr.