Not have time to complete my writing for NaPo today but posting the prompts all the same.
Today’s featured participant is Jane Dougherty writes, where the alliterative/assonant poem for Day Twelve is wistful and lilting.
Our interview today is with Evie Shockley. Originally from Tennessee, Shockley is the author of two books of poetry, and is at home with both formal verse and more experimental lyrics. You can watch a video of Shockley giving a poetry reading here, and you can read some of her poems here.
And now for our (optional) prompt. Today’s is an oldie-but-a-goody: the ghazal. The form was originally developed in Arabic and Persian poetry, but has become increasingly used in English, after being popularized by poets including Agha Shahid Ali. A ghazal is formed of couplets, each of which is its own complete statement. Both lined of the first couplet end with the same phrase or end-word, and that end-word is also repeated at the end of each couplet. If you’re really feeling inspired, you can also attempt to incorporate internal rhymes and a reference to your own name in the final couplet. Here are a few examples – Evie Shockley’s “where you are planted,” Ali’s “Tonight,” and Patricia Smith’s “Hip Hop Ghazal.”
Carrie Etter’s prompt was
What are you feeling right now? What are the three abstract nouns that would best describe it?
While the narrative of events leading to those feelings would be mundane and probably uninteresting, is there another, more condensed narrative–something that could happen in, say, ten minutes–that might convey the same combination of feelings?
In a prose poem, write the narrative that helps to convey those feelings, and let the title clue the reader in to that general mood. (This was my approach with my poem ‘Melancholia’ in This Line Is Not for Turning: An Anthology of Contemporary British Prose Poetry.)
Jo Bell posted Event Horizon by Andrew Grieg
The Poetry School
Day 13: Ekphrastic Poem Challenge
Good morning everyone and congratulations on making it this far! Today’s challenge is a real treat: the ekphrastic poem.
John Keats’ ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’ sets the bar high for ekphrastic poetry, those verses which take another work of art as their ignition point. What piece of pottery / old master / Motown single / videogame will spark your ekphrastic poem? It helps if the poem can stand up on its own without the reader knowing the art-work!
Here’s Keats: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/44477
And here’s another example from Liu Xia: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/detail/57517
awritersfountain 