Day Twenty-Nine Click here for the full post
Today’s featured participants are Eunoia, where you’ll find a poem about dreams in response to Day 28’s question-based prompt, and My Author-itis, where you’ll find a short and witty response to the prompt.
Our featured daily reading is a pre-recorded one, which you can peruse whenever you like. It’s a video of Victoria Chang reading for Berry College in November of last year.
Prompt: this one is called “in the window.” Imagine a window looking into a place or onto a particular scene. What do you see? What’s going on?
Happy writing!
PROCESS NOTES:
Historically towards the end of Napo I get really sad this daily prompt/practise is coming to an end – but it’s unsustainable for any longer and as Maureen says in today’s post April will come again and so will NaPoWriMo – who knows maybe I will even start calling it GloMoWriMo by 2022…
As it is I have revelled in Napo this year as no paid work has come since the Easter break so I had a chance to lasso much needed dedicated writing time to make headway on projects and actually meet some deadlines. It was an impossible juggle earlier this Spring. So it has been a pleasure to immerse.
If you are feeling sad/withdrawal – may I suggest you plan/map out some writing time for May and continue. The resources Napo have provided this year are rich and you could easily spend 3-4 days sitting with one.
Last night I still hadn’t managed to get Prompt Day 28 completed but I had an approach in mind. So I started Day 29 finishing 28 – I have updated the post here with method and an extract.
I also (happily) managed to catch most of The Poetry Project in New York City with Arda Collins and Monica Youn, which was wonderful. There are several festivals online currently and Book Launches, yesterday I had a mammoth diary sheet – a couple of workshops and a handful of readings. I really thought I would be asleep, but was still working online when the event started so I joined and I am so glad I did. It was wonderful to discover these poets, I shall certainly be on the look out for Arda’s new book when it’s released (hopefully in time for my birthday list)!
I am however, relieved that today’s reading is a pre-recorded one especially as I have just half an hour of Napo time, this will be another chunked day approach.
I started with the featured poems. DO YOU HAVE DREAMS? was a great meditation on questions and I loved the invitation to answer one of the questions in the comment boxes below. Wow. Great idea. I had a great look about at Smitha V’s website. I love the bio:
A banker by profession, a blogger by choice, a poet by accident and an artist at heart.
I read and re-read the poem a few times. It’s hard to pick any part out – the questions need each other.
Do you have dreams?
What do you make of them?
Do you see them with your eyes open or closed?
The second featured poem was funny – it reminded me of this poem by Colin McNaughton.
I watched the Victoria Chang reading.
Berry College Creative Writing Reading Series
Nationally recognized poet Victoria Chang will read and discuss her poetry, offering context to each work. Sandra Meek will introduce the poet, establishing Chang’s importance in contemporary American poetry. A Q&A will follow the reading.
Victoria Chang’s poetry books include OBIT, Barbie Chang, The Boss, Salvinia Molesta, and Circle. Her children’s picture book, Is Mommy?, was named a New York Times Notable Book. Her middle grade novel, Love, Love was published by Sterling Publishing. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Fellowship, the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Lannan Residency Fellowship, and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. She lives in Los Angeles and is the Program Chair of Antioch’s Low-Residency MFA Program. She also serves on the National Book Critics Circle Board.
I knew some of Victoria Chang’s work, I have read her poetry before but not for a while. I love her quote in this article in The Stanford Daily ‘I’m just playing with clay’: Victoria Chang on poetry and language. OBIT is something else!
I loved Friendships –
Depression is a glove
over the heart. Depression is an image
of a glove over the image of a heart.
and My Mother’s Teeth –
I used to think that a dead person’s words die with them. Now I know that they scatter, looking for meaning to attach to like a scent. My mother used to collect orange blossoms in a small shallow bowl.
And Grief.
I was absorbed by the whole reading, make sure you give your ears and heart the experience today.
You can read a review of OBIT by Anne Graue here. Find out more, read and hear sample poems and extracts from many reviews and order your own copy from Copper Canyon Press.
Another one for my birthday list.
Then I set about the prompt, which is another well used one (although it tends to be look out of the window – to which every poet internally groans and looks about the room in case it was audible), but the twist here is the imagined window and it’s looking in – which set my newly refreshed mind off in several directions (less painful than it sounds).
I scribbled my initial reactions down, to filter something more or maybe to go back and write next month…
I let the prompt sit with me for a while.
I scared myself slightly with the resulting poem, a dark thriller and had a great time on image searches. I have a packet to be going on with now, but for today just one poem. Here’s an extract, a tiny bit of interior action for you:
I caught her smile
as she unpeeled the corner edge of foil.
I can’t wait to see what other’s have made of this prompt. I shall have a good nose around tomorrow, now I am in the spirit of peering into windows.
awritersfountain 