NaPoWriMo 2019 Round Up Week 4

What a week it has been. Let’s get growing – for sure!

This week NaPoWriMo has helped me discover new artists, poets and forms. I have written poems, created poetry film animations and read widely. This is when NaPo works best, I feel inspired and fulfilled.

I always enjoy research and many of my poems call for a lot of it. This week has been no exception to that, I spent the first part of it almost glued to the National Geographic. It was quite an animal filled week.

This week I discovered the incredible art of body painter Gesine Marwedel and the intriguing manipulation of artist Laura Christensen. I researched Seahorses, Whooping Cranes and the Smalltooth Swordfish. I discovered the latter was an endangered species and only 5 species of Swordfish still exist! I created a poetry film animation called Looking for Swordfish in Costa Rica, which I showed over the weekend at our Worcester Film Poetry Collective meeting.  There may be a series of Eco Animations created on the back of this and none of it would have happened without NaPoWriMo.

I revisited the wonderful work of Marie Craven in Dictionary Illustrations, one of my favourite pieces to be shared at the Worcester Film Poetry Collective. I wrote a poem involving both a Whooping Crane and a Buick Engine Manual.

I wrote about spring and discovered the work of Jericho Brown, tried a new form of poetry, the Duplex, tore my hair out over Shakespearean sonnets and read lots of poems, articles and interviews. I feel like I have completed a study week!

This week’s poems:

Seahorse
After German artist Gesine Marwedel

Looking for Swordfish in Costa Rica

Buick Bird

North of the Equator – which I edited and then took to Stanza.

Remains – my first Duplex

Grounded Flight

Vertical 

Ars Poetica

There are only 2 days of NaPo left, which I cannot believe! This month of writing has passed quickly. It has been a joy to write again, my 6 months of illness has resulted in very little creativity. I am becoming again, which is good and fills me with relief.

And the two remaining days of April brought riches, on Day 29 I indulged in the referenced Meditation poetry and wrote another poem about illness.

Unresolved

On the final day of NaPo I had great fun with wordplay and minimalist poetry.

Stifle 

Cultivated

*Celery (which is the same poem as Cultivated with different Typography)

Too Substantial

ButTor

 

It has been a good year!

I have thoroughly enjoyed most days and have managed to write 40 poems, created two animated poetry films, added several blogs to my Reader and discovered lots of new-to-me poets, artists and resources.

NaPoWriMo 2019 Day 28

The end of the last weekend of NaPo 2019.

The glory of a Sunday, a day that stretches before me filled with the possibility of new words. It feels good.

I wanted to start with a tip on frustration. Which is the opposite of how I feel today but was very much how I felt last night after attempting the Shakespearean Sonnet prompt. Sometimes Art is frustrating, it is part of the creative path and something we learn to overcome/live with/abide.

I know that my forte is not rhyme, which is one reason I find writing sonnets hard. I know that I have a blinker when it comes to sonnets, if you said Wankel rotary engine, my reaction would be the same, although I could probably explain the engine more efficiently! Despite all this I tried to open my mind to the prompt and although I had the freedom to dismiss it, I wanted to give it a go. This is my attitude to NaPo and Poetry, always learning, staying open. But it hurts a bit when you fall flat on your face and that is how I felt by the end of my creation. I liked the story behind it and when I read it over next week, maybe I will like the poem… what I didn’t want was the residue of negative feeling, especially before bed. (A bed that was still covered in props from earlier animation making.)

So I set off to find another prompt and that is what you can do. So in actual fact last night I had practice with rhyme, meter, structure, metaphor, and argument and attempted one of the oldest traditions in English poetry and also wrote an extra poem about illness called Vertical. Looking back at yesterday’s prompt I could have done a number of things other than try to write my own sonnet, I may revisit it.

TOP TIP

Frustration – accept it, deal with it, do not break things – write more poems!

With this in mind, let’s get stuck into Day 28! Can you believe you have written 4 weeks of poems?

As always, for the full prompt. click the day.

Day Twenty-Eight

There are only three days left now in Na/GloPoWriMo 2019. I hope you’ve been enjoying the month so far, and are ready for the home stretch.

Our featured participant for the day is paeansunpluggedblog, where the Shakesepeare-inspired prompt for Day Twenty-Seven gave rise to a bard-inspired cento.

Our video resource today was suggested by Elizabeth Boquet, she and a fellow group of poets in Lausanne, Switzerland, have been engaging with the concept of meta-poems – which are poems about poems! In this video, the poets Al Fireis, Lily Applebaum, Dave Poplar, and Camara Brown discuss Emily Dickinson’s “We learned the Whole of Love.” Find additional background and video discussions of other meta-poems here.

As you may have guessed, today I’d like to challenge you to try your hand at a meta-poem of your own. You might check out the Wallace Stevens and Harryette Mullens poems featured in the article about metapoetry linked above, or perhaps Archibald MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica” or Kendel Hippolyte’s “Advice to a Young Poet.”

Happy writing!

NaPo Process Notes 

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I read the prompt earlier this morning and worked through the resources. Punam’s poem Doffing my hat to the Bard was well constructed using lines from Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Today felt a bit like a study day. I checked out https://elizabethboquet.com/ then watched the video.

I am a fan of Emily Dickinson.

I looked at the mini course on meta poems. I read Large Red Man Reading by Wallace Stevens and Sleeping with the Dictionary by Harryette Mullen.  Then read Ars Poetica by Archibald Macleish and Advice to a Young Poet by Kendel Hippolyte.

I also turned to another of my favourite poets, Pablo Neruda. Read his Ars Poetica here.

I have written Ars Poetica before.

 

On Writing 

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I then starting thinking of writing, but perhaps the best way of writing an Ars Poetica – is not to think at all.

What surprised me most about this freewrite approach is I wrote a prose poem. Almost unheard of. I called it Ars Poetica.

It is the slow dawn that creeps light between the gap in bedroom curtains,
the easy steam of the morning kettle, the grey sky ink blotting to blue,