HAPPY EASTER!
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Our featured participant for the day is Poem Dive, a poem responding to our curtal sonnet prompt.
Today’s featured online journal is Plume, which has published more than 120 issues since 2011! Archives are available, too, making Plume’s website a great place to discover new-to-you poets and poems. From their latest issue, I’ll point you toward David Wojahn’s “Threnody: December 2020” and Alan Shapiro’s “Sweet Nothings.”
A prompt developed by the comic artist Lynda Barry, and it asks you to think about dogs you have known, seen, or heard about, and then use them as a springboard into wherever they take you.
What your lens saw is a beautiful curtal sonnet, which explores through gorgeously sensory images, a relationship with a father. There is a lot said here, which is unspoken. Beautiful.
I read several poems published in the latest issue of Plume:
The Wars Between the Wars Between the Borders that Were Not There by Cecilia Woloch, Lilies in Proust, Y & Master by Tomaž Šalamun,
I listened to MEMOIR by Rigoberto Paredes before heading to the poems we were pointed towards.
Threnody: December 2020 by David Wojahn I also read Sylvia Plath’s Tarot Deck Sold at Auction to Anonymous Bidder for 200K by David Wojahn because I couldn’t resist such a title! And finally Sweet Nothings by Alan Shapiro.
Process Notes
I still have yesterday’s Curtal Sonnet to tackle, but now my brain is full of dogs I have known. I looked at the prompt and as it suggests timings have decided to tackle it later this evening when I have more time and hopefully, a mind which will focus better!
I finally managed to catch up with yesterday – the curtal sonnet.
And now I am sitting with today’s doggy prompt: 10 mins to list as many dogs as you can. Now wonderful things happen with a prompt like this one if you stay in the time. (I set a countdown timer) and four minutes in my internal gremlin suggested I couldn’t possibly think of enough dogs to fill the next 6 mins, but I ignored it and carried on and before I knew, I had listed at least 10 dogs I’d completely forgotten about! I managed to list over 40! And that’s without a memory which has just flooded back to me after a stay in Scotland on Easdale Island, where at the time there were 33 human inhabitants and the population was far outweighed by dogs!
Of course our family dog, Mir, was first on the list and subsequently got underlined my penultimate memory was a huge dog which belonged to a very tall family! I am unsure whether I will ever do anything with this poem, due to the personal nature of the content. I may edit/censor and release… who knows.
It is my longest Napo poem so far. Which isn’t a surprise when you have set the counter to 15 minutes! I have played around a little with form (as in presentation). I will continue. Here is a stanza:
Whether it ever Houdini-ed, like ours,
or if it was well trained and obedient
with little aspiration for escapology.
awritersfountain 