27 | April | 2021 | awritersfountain

I was hoping it was a tech issue rather than a problem Maureen was experiencing and much to my relief, it was exactly that. So here is today’s official proper 2021 prompt for Day 27.

Day Twenty-Seven Click to read the full post.

Our featured participants today are A Writer Without Words – Some Motivation Required, who has re-written the lyrics to a song from Les Miserables to tell us the sad tale of a woman whose children demand all her chocolates, and Scrambled, Not Fried, where the lyrics to a patriotic song have been replaced with an homage to grammarians.

Today’s featured reading is a live event that will take place tomorrow, April 28, at 8 p.m. ET. Arda Collins and Monica Youn will be reading at The Poetry Project in New York City.

Prompt: I’d like to challenge you to write a poem inspired by an entry from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows….. perhaps one of the sorrows will strike a chord with you.

Happy (well . . . sort of ) writing!

PROCESS NOTES: My Napo time is usually first thing so it may be tricky fitting it in now. Plus I did an extra prompt in lieu of today’s technical difficulties on the main site. So have already penned, in addition I have put the hours in on a current writing project too – so I won’t feel guilty about this stop-start approach & now I have managed to FINISH this post!

I also love Les Mis and know the songs well so was delighted to read In My Room By Candace Shultz, the first featured poem. The opening is brilliant and made me smile:

In my room

Hiding from the children

I consume

A giant bar of chocolate

Without them

Candace manages to carry the emotion of the original, somehow…

The world is less delicious

I’m still hungry and the children

Have chocolate on their faces

Brilliant!

My life will keep on going

But a world without some chocolate

Is one I’ve never known

Next I read God Bless Grammarians, the second featured poem. Another perfect parody.

So they’re careful what they say
God Bless Grammarians
(it’s ‘we’ not ‘they’)

I check the live reading which is 1 AM BST, so unlikely. I looked up the poets involved.

Arda Collins is the author of It Is Daylight (2009), which was awarded the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. Her forthcoming collection of poems will be published in 2022 by The Song Cave. She is a recipient of the Sarton Award in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, A Public Space, Colorado Review, jubilat, and elsewhere. She teaches at Smith College.

Monica Youn is the author of Blackacre (Graywolf Press 2016), which won the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America. It was also shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Award, longlisted for the National Book Award, and named one of the best poetry books of 2016 by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and BuzzFeed. Her previous book Ignatz (Four Way Books 2010) was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has been awarded the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Witter Bytter Fellowship from the Library of Congress, and a Stegner Fellowship among other honors. A former lawyer and a member of the Racial Imaginary Institute, she teaches at Princeton and in the MFA programs at NYU and Columbia.

I love the dictionary resources Maureen Thorson offers us during NaPoWriMo, one I will be coming back to again.

I chose a word which matches my current project and wrote a poem which a version of which may appear in this project.

Opened my door on the world again.

Changed, but alive.

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

I keep checking but there doesn’t seem to be a prompt today. I hope Maureen is okay. I have chosen to use Day 27 from 2013 NaPoWriMo instead (as I started a year later). I checked the links, they are still active. Enjoy!

Day 27 Click here for the full post (April 27th 2013)

Our poetry-related link today is to the Lit Pub, which publishes book “recommendations,” rather than book “reviews.”

Our participant’s link for the day is grapeling, where all of the poems are joined by one quality — similes and metaphors that really sing.

Prompt: Today, I challenge you to use the wondrous powers of the Internet to help you write. Think of a common proverb or phrase — something like “All that glitters is not gold,” or “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” Plug the first three words of the phrase into a search engine. Skim through the first few pages of results, collecting (rather like a poetic magpie) words and phrases that interest you.

Use those words and phrases as the inspirations for a new poem.

Happy writing!

Even though the official prompt has now been posted I thought I should rattle on with this substitute one I posted for today (from 2013). I spent some time looking through Lit Pub and read one review:

Jan 21 The Body Remembers: A Review of Jeannine Ouellette’s The Part That Burns
Bianca Cockrell.

I then read the featured poem and this link will take you to their poem for today.

The first thing I had to do was choose a phrase. I went for ‘a blessing in disguise’ – which didn’t actually have enough words to randomly choose 3.

Next step hit the search engine with blessing in disguise.

‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it’ gives a few more key search words but most are only 2-4/5 words long. I went with the 1st search knowing it would throw back a list of definitions, my poem would make use of. So I started to gather. I collected some images as well and created a little document/mood board. I was also taken back to Anthony Wilson’s website and a John Ashbury’s poem from Rivers and Mountains – A Blessing in Disguise (Ashbury was featured a day or so ago in NaPoWriMo). I unearthed a quotation from 18th Century poet -James Hervey and found that this idiom originated in the 1700s! So even before I set to write a poem for this prompt I felt full, satisfied and happy.

I have a short time slot before my next online event so I am going to use a lot of copy & paste in the construction of this poem. A Found poem.

^^ So I thought – poetry has a mind of its own. As I was compiling my subconscious was ordering and the result was a list poem extracted from examples and reasons from jpegs and dictionary definitions. So not Found poetry or erasure but a brand new build!

Poetry Lego! <That should be a thing! I am fairly happy with the result:

Temporary defeat feeds flowers,