Today marks the halfway point of this year’s NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo!
Our featured participant today is ivoryfishbone, where the dream poem for Day Fourteen takes a fantastic, yet sinister turn.
We have a new interview for you today, this time with Sarah Blake, whose second full-length book of poetry, Let’s Not Live on Earth, is newly out from Wesleyan University Press. Blake’s first book of poetry, Mr. West, was also published by Wesleyan, and her debut novel, Naamah, is forthcoming from Riverhead Books. You can read several of Blake’s poems here, and our interview with her here.
And now for our prompt (optional, as always). In her interview, Blake suggests writing a poem in which a villain faces an unfortunate situation, and is revealed to be human (but still evil). Perhaps this could mean the witch from Hansel & Gretel has lost her beloved cat, and is going about the neighborhood sticking up heart-wrenching “Lost Cat” signs, but still finds human children delicious. Maybe Blackbeard the Pirate is lost at sea in an open boat, remembering how much he loved his grandmother (although he will still kill the first person dumb enough to scoop him from the waves).
Happy writing!
Going to have some fun researching villains!
I started here with Stylist Magazine. I stopped on the 4th Villain, the White Witch, Jadis from the Chronicles of Narnia (which were books I loved reading as a child).
After some character research I started by pulling out a few sentences of interest, all the while trying to imagine her ‘unfortunate situation’.
I started writing in Haiku form and then elongated the lines. My final poem ‘Not of Eve’ reads well and is just 2 stanzas long.
I feel the crackle of shame ricochet through me.
The Poetry School Day 15
Day 15: Reflections
Today I’d like you to write a poem that features mirrors or reflections in some way. One option is a self-portrait — after Ashbery (and Parmigianino), tradition dictates these poems are called ‘Self-Portrait in an xMirror’, just like our first example poem today: ‘Self-portrait in front of a small mirror’ by Will Harris.
But you can also include mirrors (or other reflective surfaces) in plenty of other interesting ways, either overtly or subtly. Have a look at Matthew Sweeney’s prose-poem ‘Huge Mirrors’, which centres the mirror itself rather than the reflection, and Thylias Moss’s ‘Lessons from a Mirror’, which uses the mirror as a jumping off point for a dissection of a fairy tale.
awritersfountain 