NaPoWriMo Week 2 Review

 I certainly had less time for writing this week with a diary full of doing. This made it very important to carve out some time for NaPo Writing, often just before the day’s end (which is a good time for my creative thinking).

I enjoyed the resources, articles, example poems, interviews and ideas that came from this week’s NaPoWriMo prompts and they have enabled a range of completed poems and a few I need to spend more time with.

When I had time and the prompts appealed, I managed more than one poem, which is all in preparation of having to fit full-time work in, starting next week. It has been a couple of years since I last worked a full week and my poetry schedule has not diminished because of it. I have a Poetry Surgery to run, a special edition magazine to edit, reviews to write, sets to rehearse, I am performing at Cheltenham Poetry Festival and as 1 of 5 performers at Bohemian Voices this month too. There are also some book launches and event nights I hope to manage.

I started the week with 2 missing days (Day 6 & 7) from Week 1, so I had to catch up with those poems too, which I managed by Day 9.

Day 6 used ‘Poetic Lines’ (Alberto Ríos’s article on the Poetic Line), I wrote Picking Blackberries, which is a poem I have carried in my head since the end of March when I started my poetry/Art collaboration with Molly Bythell.  I enjoyed this experiment, I tend to write in short lines, so it was a challenge.

Day 7 explored different layers of identity, I had my powerful and vulnerable voices talk to each other, a contest between the former teacher and the poet, the poet wins of course! I played with anagrams to find the final title – Open at Detacher (which has several meanings to me).

• Cotton To 
• The Tiny Objects of a Vast Mind
• World Going
• White Matter Changes
• Apples
• The Difficult House – Poem Beginning with a line from Sean Nevin

Day 8 I wrote a dedication to Mr. G who puts up with the poetry me. Cotton To.

Day 9 A poem in which something big and something small come together. I spent a long while exploring the art of  Atlanta-based Desirée De León and not writing the first poem I had (learning from ’52’). I sat on it for a while before creating  The Tiny Objects of a Vast Mind.

Day 10 Saw another PoArtry/ Dementia Poems surface. One was an anagram rhyme which was fun to play around with World Going.

Day 11 used number sequencing and resulted in White Matter Changes.

Day 12 I used both the Naponet and Poetry School prompts. I wrote a haibun about where I live called Apples and a poem borrowing the first line from Sean Nevin The Difficult House. I enjoyed both techniques. I am happier with my 2nd poem.

This summer I will be travelling a lot and the history of the Haibun being used to almanac travel has given me an idea though!

Day 13: Keep the Light – a poem using syllabic pattern.

Day 14: Remover – A redux/Chain poem.

 

Week 1 Poetry 

1. Best Before
2. The Sea Jewel
3. The Home at Christmas
4. Apology
5. Bring Me The Shoes
6. Wordle Band Name
7. Pudding Protest
8. In the Park
9. Picking Blackberries
10. Note at Preached/ Preached to Neat / A Taped Coherent / Open at Detacher

Week 2 Poetry:

1. (11) Cotton To 
2. (12) The Tiny Objects of a Vast Mind
3. (13) World Going
4. (14) White Matter Changes
5. (15) Apples
6. (16) The Difficult House – Poem Beginning with a line from Sean Nevin
7. (17) Keep the Light 
8. (18) Remover

NaPoWriMo 2018 Day 14

We are two weeks in! Almost at the halfway mark. Unfortunately have not had time to put pen to paper today as I have spent hours working.

I start Week 3 a little behind, but I will catch up. I particularly like today’s prompt and I am sure a little poem will come.

Today, we are two weeks into Na/GloPoWriMo. I hope you feel that your writing is humming along. And if you’ve gotten behind, don’t worry – there’s plenty of time to catch up!

Today’s featured participant is erbiage, for whom the invert-a-familiar-phrase prompt for Day 13 produced very punny results!

Our craft resource for the day is a short piece by Robert Frost, called The Figure a Poem Makes. In it, Frost argues – albeit in somewhat lyrical language (poets don’t always make the clearest prose writers!) – for wildness in poetry – language and meanings that surprise not just the reader, but the writer.

And now for our prompt (optional, as always). Dream dictionaries have been around as long as people have had dreams. Interestingly, if you consult a few of them, they nearly always tend to have totally different things to say about specific objects or symbols. Dreams, unlike words themselves, don’t seem to be nicely definable! At any rate, today’s prompt is to write entries for an imaginary dream dictionary. Pick one (or more) of the following words, and write about what it means to dream of these things:

Teacup

Hammer

Seagull

Ballet slipper

Shark

Wobbly table

Dentist

Rowboat

Happy writing!

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The Poetry School Day 14

Day 14: The Chain (Redux)

Today’s task is a slight variation on my favourite prompt from last year: The Chain.

First, pick up a book – poetry or prose, it doesn’t matter – open it at random and pick a sentence you like the look of, then choose a word from that sentence. Your first line must include that word somewhere in it.

For your second line, you can write anything, but it must include one word from your first line (the one you’ve just written, not the one in the book). Your third line should include one word from your second line, your fourth line should include one word from your third line, and so on. In every line, you should pluck one word from the line above until your poem reaches its end. NB: the word can go anywhere in the line.

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I would like to come back to the Naponet dream prompt, back in my teens I wrote a sequence of poetry based on a dream journal I kept and definitions I found in a dream dictionary. I like the idea of making one up.

I opted for The Poetry School Chain prompt today, at first I wasn’t convinced – being of the school of thought that repetition slips in and often gets edited out but… depending on the word choices you make the frame becomes less obvious. I wrote a poem called Remover.

Obstacles found a special place in his life,

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