NaPoWriMo 2018 Day 23

One week to go!

Hello, everyone! It’s hard to believe, but there’s just one week left to go in this year’s Na/GloPoWriMo.

Our featured participant for the day is Eat All the Words, where the impossible prompt for Day Twenty-Two has been transformed into a study guide!

We have a new interview for you today, with Kate Greenstreet, whose fourth book of poetry, The End of Something, is just out from Ahsahta Press. You can read some of Greenstreet’s poetry here and here, and our interview with her here.

And now for today’s (optional) prompt! Kate Greenstreet’s poetry is spare, but gives a very palpable sense of being spoken aloud – it reads like spoken language sounds. In our interview with her, she underscores this, stating that “when you hear it, you write it down.” Today, we challenge you to honor this idea with a poem based in sound. The poem, for example, could incorporate overheard language. Perhaps it could incorporate a song lyric in some way, or language from something often heard spoken aloud (a prayer, a pledge, the Girl Scout motto). Or you could use a regional or local phrase from your hometown that you don’t hear elsewhere, e.g. “that boy won’t amount to a pinch.”

Happy writing!

I found a wonderful archive of language from the region I grew up in and plan to use this sometime in the future. For now I played with a prayer and wrote a very honest poem.

… be done blue line,
as it is in films.

 The Poetry School Day 23

Day 23: Classics 

Salve and Χαίρετε, poets. Today I’d like you to look to the myths of ancient Greece and Rome for inspiration. You may have to do some research to find a story that works for you. If possible, try to avoid a simple retelling of a well-known legend in its entirety; make it new by doing something different. One way to do this is to explore a small, perhaps overlooked moment, in a larger legend, as Michael Longley does in his poem ‘Laertes‘, which is about the return of Odysseus to his father Laertes. Another is to switch perspectives, as Carol Ann Duffy does in her poem ‘Mrs Midas‘. Yet another is use a snippet of myth as inspiration for a poem about modern life and death, as Jack Gilbert does in ‘Failing and Flying‘, and Danez Smith does in their poem ‘not an elegy for Mike Brown‘.

NaPoWriMo 2018 A Review of a Week of Poetry 3

This was my first week back at work and a week that saw 3 performance events, all of which I missed (due to lack of energy and work). I held it together just enough to manage a poem a day. I found my time with NaPo prompts therapeutic, a small part of the day carved out just for me.

Week 3: 

1. (19) Not of Eve (Written about the White Witch)
2. (20) Rules of the Game (A poem based on the rules of Badminton)
3. (21) Wið færstice – For a Sudden Stitch (A Poetry Spell)
4. (22) On Display (Reverse text)
5. (23) Contrast (Erasure)
6. (24) A State of Disobedience
7. (25) Narcissus Flower

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

• 11. Cotton To 
• 12. The Tiny Objects of a Vast Mind
• 13. World Going
• 14. White Matter Change
• 15. Apple
• 16. The Difficult House – Poem Beginning with a line from Sean Nevin
• 17. Keep the Light
• 18. Remover

NaPoWriMo 2018 Day 22

Happy fourth Sunday of Na/GloPoWriMo, all.

Today’s featured participant is ARHtistic License, where the Narcissus/narcissism poem for Day 21 treats the myth from Echo’s point of view.

Our craft resource for the day is a series of reflections by Wesley McNair on “indirect entry” into a poem. McNair writes of inviting mystery and uncertainty into our poems, both with respect to the writing process and the finished work.

And now for our daily prompt (optional as always). I’ve found this one rather useful in trying to ‘surprise’ myself into writing something I wouldn’t have come up with otherwise. Today, I’d like you to take one of the following statements of something impossible, and then write a poem in which the impossible thing happens:

The sun can’t rise in the west.

A circle can’t have corners.

Pigs can’t fly.

The clock can’t strike thirteen.

The stars cannot rearrange themselves in the sky.

A mouse can’t eat an elephant.

Happy writing!

I found the process of poems, the craft article/reflections by Wesley McNair a good read.

I look forward to writing my impossible poem! I enjoyed writing this poem. I wrote a thin poem based on an answer in a mathematical forum. I am fairly pleased with the resulting poem and may have found a suitable poem for my final Poet Laureate Collection on Mathematical/Scientific poems in memory of Stephen Hawking.

thoughts about
tiny angles
can wait.

 The Poetry School Day 22

Day 22: Pantoum 

Morning poets. Today I’d like you write a pantoum. The pantoum is an anglophone variation on the Malay ‘pantun’. It uses quatrains with repeated lines, much like a villanelle. Each stanza takes the second line of the stanza above as its first line, and the last line of the stanza above as its third line. Your poem can be any number of quatrains — four is the most common. It looks like this, where letters represent lines (not rhymes):

Stanza 1

A
B
C
D

B
E
D
F

E
G
F
H

and so on. Your example poem is ‘Zadie Smith’s first novel is‘  by the brilliant Bridget Minamore.

I love a Pantoum, I learnt to write this form a couple of years ago and have had one or two published. I look forward to coming back to this prompt.

NaPoWriMo 2018 Day 21

The inevitable landslide of working, preparing for festivals, editing, experiencing some sunshine and falling days behind with NaPo… but it is week 3 and up until now I was following the plan well. I have learnt over the years to forgive myself as I think this naturally happens to everyone who is balancing elements of life. If you do not forgive yourself, you end up using writing energy as negative self-sabotage and that gets you nowhere.

Onward. Or backwards (technically)!

Day 21:

Today marks three full weeks of Na/GloPoWriMo!

Our featured participant for the day is Unassorted Stories, where the rebellious poem for Day 19 shows how repetition, used well, can drive a poem along, giving it momentum and heft. It also provides a really interesting window into the poet’s “rules,” which she broke in writing the poem.

Today, we have a new interview for you, with Antoinette Brim, whose newest book of poetry, These Women You Gave Me, has been published by Indolent Books. Brim is a Cave Canem Foundation fellow, a recipient of the Walker Foundation Scholarship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. You can read some of her poems here and here, and you can check out our interview with her here.

And now for our (optional) prompt. In her interview, Brim provides us with several suggestions for generative writing exercises, and we’d like to challenge to today to tackle her third one, which is based in the myth of Narcissus. After reading the myth, try writing a poem that plays with the myth in some way. For example, you could imagine that imagine the water is speaking to you, the narcissus flower. Or you could write a poem in which the narcissus berates the Kardashians for stealing their neurosis. Or a poem that comments on the narcissism of our time, i.e. beauty and body obsession, etc.

Happy writing!

I enjoyed getting to know the poetry of Antoinette Brim today. I was interested by the prompt of a myth I know well, what I didn’t know was that the narcissus flower is the daffodil. I have always been amazed at how these flowers spread and whole puddles of them appear where they were never planted.

Due to being several days behind, I would call it a stanza rather than a poem. I planned to work in short form, but it is free verse.

I hope to work on this one later in the year. A post summer revisit!

 

the bulb, a house of toxins.

 The Poetry School Day 21

Day 21: Word Association (Redux)

Morning poets. Another slight reinterpretation of a prompt from last year. Below is a list of ten words. I would like you – quickly, without thinking about it – to scribble down a word you associate with each one of them.

Wood
Protection
Magazine
Float
Shed
Inner
Capable
Clash
Wax
Daughter

Now use your ten new words in your poem, one per line. If you’re up for a challenge, use the words in the order you have them; if you’d like a bit more flexibility, use them in any order.

NB: Don’t use the above words in your poem – use the words you associated with them, e.g. not ‘Wax’, but ‘Candle’ or ‘Drip’. If you don’t want to start with the words we’ve given you, open the closest book to you and pick the last word on every page from 30 to 39 and associate from that.

 

I made my word association list and plan to work on it later.