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.
© Academy of American Poets
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.
awritersfountain 