Today is a Bank Holiday and in true Bank Holiday style Mr G and I have run the gauntlet between leisure time and working. I popped online earlier to take a look at today’s prompts and am posting them here before going to do my NaPo write.
Today’s featured participant is Yesterday and today: Merril’s historical musings, where the correspondence poem for Day 16 is a bittersweet meditation on a letter never written.
Our featured interview for the day is with Hoa Nguyen, whose work is marked by a sense of immediate address and a pop-culture sensibility. You can learn more about Nguyen here, and you can find examples of her poetry here and here and here.
And now for our (optional) prompt. Today, I challenge you to write a nocturne. In music, a nocturne is a composition meant to be played at night, usually for piano, and with a tender and melancholy sort of sound. Your nocturne should aim to translate this sensibility into poetic form! Need more inspiration? Why not listen to one of history’s most famous nocturnes, Chopin’s Op. 9 No. 2?
I wrote my poem whilst listening to this video. It is a piece I know well.
A moment of stillness, in the dark.
The silent prayer, ‘Do not wake child’,
settles like a crown on the mother’s head.
Carrie Etter’s prompt was about a news item. I am currently researching an article and choosing 5 phrases to sum up different points involved.
These will be used in the poem and the work will be written between them.
We have had two female Prime Ministers,
but out on the green, nine men reign.
I wrote about a piece of Cultural news reported by The Guardian. Gillian Wearing (Sculptor) is going to be creating a statue of Millicent Fawcett, a suffragist. Wearing created the ‘Ordinary Family’ bronze statue, which was unveiled in Centenary Square, Birmingham in 2014.
Centenary Square is appearing as my NaPo poem place fairly often.
My shocking discovery during researching this poem was that only 2.7% of British statues are named after women, mostly Royals. Considering most Towns/Cities have statues this is a shocking statistic.
Jo Bell suggests we read http://www.jobell.org.uk/ to become better writers. You won’t find many who disagree with this statement, you will find some who do not follow the advice.
Today we have Darling, Would You Please Pick Up Those Books? By Kathryn Maris.
Followed by a great discussion about subject, form and poetry. Opening our eyes to things we could easily miss.
Over at The Poetry School 
Ali Lewis offers
Day 17: Aphorism and Fragment.
The aphorism is a difficult form: you have to be smart, terse, self-knowing, and incredibly confident. On the other hand, how many of us have lines, half-lines and phrases we’ve always wanted to use? Well, now’s the time to dust them off, as aphorisms and fragments work best in groups. In fact, Don Paterson has a whole book of them, The Book of the Shadows, from which the below are excerpts.
My work is the deferral of work, which exhausts me; the actual work I barely notice.
Good ideas prompted, bad ideas willed.
awritersfountain 