Day Two

on APRIL 2, 2023

Today’s featured participant is What Rhymes with Stanza?, where the book-cover poem for Day 1 takes us through all of recorded history and into the future, through the lens of the moon.

Our poetry resource for the day is Jacket2. This online magazine features a wealth of podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and other uncategorizable writings about contemporary poetry.

PROMPT:

owl
generator
fog
river
clove
miracle
cyclops
oyster
mercurial
seaweed
gutter
artillery
salt
elusive
thunder
ghost
acorn
cheese
longing
cowbird
truffle
quahog
song

Process Notes

I started (as always) with reading yesterday’s featured poem – To the Moon. Before moving on to the poetry resource Jacket 2.

Jacket 2 is another resource I could spend weeks exploring! I scrolled the page and lingered on and looked into the following:

Poetry and Art working together is an area I love working in. My poems have been displayed in an art installation (2014) and I have numerous projects where artists work from poems and vice versa – including many DAN (Droitwich Arts Network) Hanbury Hall events, Rick Sanders PoARTry projects, Ekphrastic Poetry Projects in general/ many workshops including many with Ledbury Poetry Festival and Sara-Jane Arbury and the current ‘Enough to See’ project with Yew Tree Studios.

I read the review –

Poetry/painting/history/hermeneutics

On ‘Cy Twombly: Making Past Present’

DEAN RADER

I then spotted:

Star Shavings was a beautiful read.

Then I listened to a Poetry Talk Podcast.

There are so many episodes that I won’t ever have time to listen to all the archives but I plan to cherry pick a few podcasts over the next few weeks as I am on a break from work. I’m already fearing the 2nd 2 weeks of NaPo when I am balancing work-life into this equation again.

I chose this one mainly because I had read the Q&A notion of the prompt – so The Short Answer – seemed apt.

I always find it interesting which poems are left out of live readings. In my own humble collections I have poems I rarely read out loud. The Poem Talk episode was an engaging listen. Although deep dives into poems remind me too much of academia often (flashback).

An amazing resource – another one pinned to the website document.

I really liked the sound of today’s prompt – again, often engaging with surrealists – which started in my late teens – and I love the results of this type of exercise. However, I am aware today that I am pushed for time and have to get on with writing.

I read up on Paul Celan.

I started with copying the list and deleting all the words which didn’t chime with me – this left 8 words.

I think this activity works best when you don’t know the next part of the task – I stopped my initial thought several times knowing the answers had to fit a poem. Of course there’s always the option of leaving some out.

So finally I have my 8 answers and I am off to create a NaPo poem.

I looked at my answers and picked the one which most caught me as a starting point (my 3rd answer). I liked parts of the initial write (the ending of the poem fell together well). I know I will work on this one next month. Added to the editing pile. It has some glow about it.

It definitely has a surrealistic quality.