Day Twenty-Eight Click here to read the full post.
Our featured participants for the day are Dispellings, which brings us a poem loosely inspired by the word “onism,” and My Fresh Pages, where the poem for Day 27 is based on the world “occhiolism.”
Today’s daily reading is a live event that will take place tomorrow, April 29 from 1:30 – 3:30 p.m. eastern time. Poets Dina Gatina, Polina Barskova, and Vlazhyna Mort will be reading from their work and discussing contemporary Russian women’s poetry with professor and translator Ainsley Morse.
Prompt: to write a poem that poses a series of questions. The questions could be a mix of the serious and humorous, the interruptive and the conversational. You can choose to answer them – or just let the questions keep building up, creating a poem that asks the reader to come up with their own answer(s).
Happy writing!
PROCESS NOTES:
Today’s prompt… hmmm, questions in poetry? Discuss.
In true NaPo spirit I will do it. Finding out what questions I’ll ask will be fun anyway!
Whilst I ponder that I read the featured poems starting with Dispellings – which I found very atmospheric/cinematic.
the night train spills its guts
4 a.m kunming station iron jaws
the sky a steel plate stained with dawn
such brutal, industrial, stark imagery.
my pockets fill with starch of soggy maps
……. misery
of clogged concrete arteries
and the ending. WOW.
As I read it I had forgotten about the prompt entirely. when I looked back to the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (such a fabulous resource), I remembered this definition as it was one of the words I’d glanced over, onism. This was certainly captured by/in this poem.
The second featured poem is posted along with a definition of the chosen word. Rachel’s poem Occhiolism explores our perceptions and the irrelevance of them, how we are, unchanged.
It’s a gift you can’t exchange.
Every detail of your script
Makes a unique play,
And even managed to get the word occhiolism into the poem!
I looked at the reading event but know I won’t go, today I am attending so much I need to keep tomorrow fixed as it is with screen gaps and time offline. Once again it clashes with an-already-in-the-diary. I looked up the participants and read some poetry by Vlazhyna Mort and listened to ‘crossword’. Funnily enough one of the events this evening was the Poetry Society Lecture with Terrance Hayes and I have just realised Vlazhyna Mort was the previous speaker – I wasn’t available to attend… but this isn’t the first time Napowrimo has delivered a poet or poem and then I have found them or it making its way back into my line of sight/life.
I still have to write today’s poem – I am currently wearing my editor head – so it’s hard but I can feel the space at the back of my mind filling up with conversations as questions talk to each other.
PROMPT: UPDATED 29th April
I started by typing question into a search engine, during 2020 online quizzes soared in popularity as a way people could connect online and so did the internet for base material. I started at the Radio Times because I imagined their researchers would definitely have found the right answers and my initial idea, (a riff off a drama game) was to mismatch the sequence of Q&A.
I was aware that although what a poem is has a wide perimeter, I didn’t feel like a list of questions or a conversation of questions would get us there. I had spent the day with the prompt in mind playing with questions, scribbling a note of ones which came to me. I let my sleeping head play and this morning embarked on writing it.
It was actually fun to write this poem this morning – a conversation between human and AI. Despite not being a fan of questions in poems, I managed a whole string of them.
Another one for the humour cannon maybe (surely I am up to 10).
Which operating system does a Google Pixel phone us?
Dark Rum & Ginger Beer.
awritersfountain 