Are you ready?

I certainly wasn’t – late to submit AWF as a participants site, missed the Early Bird prompts and basically felt very unaware that today is the start of APRIL?! Where has this year gone already??

I am working full time so have limited time to slip on the poetry skin and write and seem to be surrounded by deadlines both at the desk, at work and in life generally.

So I am calmly entering the waters for my annual April splash about and as per will bring you the official NaPo prompts and posts about my process with a few teaser lines/words – as I rarely publish a full Napo poem on AWF. Every year my Napo poems find some success and many are published in anthologies, magazines and several in my own publications: Fragile Houses & Patience.

Catch up:

All information from napowrimo.net

Well… I wish I’d seen this one!

20 Years of Na/GloPoWriMo

on FEBRUARY 1, 2023

Hello, all! We’re getting ready to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Na/GloPoWriMo this April. Wow!

As usual, we’ll have a prompt every day for you, a featured participant, and this year, we’re also hoping to feature a book or chapbook every day that contains poems written during previous Na/GloPoWriMos. And to do that, we need your help! If you have a published book or chapbook containing poems that were initially drafted as part of Na/GloPoWriMo, please let us know about them by sending an email to napowrimonet-AT-gmail-DOT-com! We hope to show off a good cross-section of participants’ work this way.

We’ll be back on March 1 with some buttons and other information. In the meantime, please do send us links to your books and we hope you will start getting ready to flex your poem-writing-muscles this April.

NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo Is On The Way!

on MARCH 15, 2023

… why not check out some online prompt generators, like the one here, and the one here? Or if you’re looking for something a bit more strange to inspire you, maybe feed the URL for a random Wikipedia entry into The Eater of Meaning (an online program that “nonsensifies” the words of individual webpages. Some of the resulting phrases may give you inspiration for a poem!).

We’ll have some other poetry resources to share with you as March winds down, and we start gearing up for April in earnest. In the meantime, please remember that you can follow our prompts and other posts on Facebook and on Twitter (@napowrimo2023).

Just Three Days to Go!

on MARCH 29, 2023

… why not browse the Poetry Foundation’s online collection?

So Close You Can Almost Taste It

on MARCH 30, 2023

What does a poem taste like, we wonder? There’s a prompt for you right there!

With just two days to go, we are indeed on the brink, the precipice, the teetering edge of Na/GloPoWriMo. Luckily, if you fall over and in, all that happens is you wind up writing some poems. If you have to take a plunge, that’s really not so bad.

…

If you’re hungry for prompts in the meantime, Poets and Writers has a huge collection, which you can find here.

Click the next post links for the Early Bird Special and the start of NaPoWriMo 2023.

Happy Writing! x

computer connection earphone electronics

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Over on the official NaPoWriMo site posts start at the beginning of March to get us ready for the epic task of writing a poem a day throughout April. This year I was not online much during March, my post op recovery has been slow (and painful) and I had a manuscript waiting to be edited that the publishers sent shortly before I was in hospital (October), so when my mind was finally back to being creative and medication was minimised, my first port of call was getting the edits back to the publishers.

Now I am still mainly offline and working through edits and preparing for a Festival in the summer – but apart from NaPoWriMo and LitWorld 2 Journal commitments I am not at the desk much, still recovering and still off work. My body needs a chance to heal and get stronger and that takes time. I have 5 physio activities to repeat several times a day, plus lots of medical appointments. I need to manage energy levels after the past 6 months so I missed the countdown/ lead up to NaPo 2019.

Here are the pre-NaPo nuggets all in one place.

Have fun!

To read these posts in full head over to the official site http://www.napowrimo.net/

March 1st

Hello, poetry lovers!

It’s March 1, and that means that just one month separates us from the beginning of National/Global Poetry Writing Month!

To get us started, here’s a poetry-related movie scene you might recognize! Take that, stilted approaches to the value of poems!

March 15th

Today is March 15, and that means there’s only half a month to go until the beginning of National/Global Poetry Writing Month!

… while we’re counting down to April, we’ll be giving you occasional bouts of poetry and poetry-related content, as taken from popular films and television!

Today, why not check out this scene from the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral, a romantic comedy starring, alongside Hugh Grant and Andie MacDowell , a recitation of W.H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues.”

March 25th

Hello, all! As of today, we have just one week to go until the start of National/Global Poetry Writing Month!

We hope you’re getting your pencils sharpened, your laptops charged, and all your finest glittery pens prepared for a full month of writing verse.

Finally, as we’ll be featuring poetry-related video resources throughout April, we’ll leave you for the time being with this oldie-but-goodie – Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven,” as interpreted by The Simpsons. Fair warning – they may have taken some, er, minor liberties with the text.

The 3 Day COUNTDOWN

March 29th

Hello, all. There’s just three days left in March, and that means that there are only three days to go until NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo 2019.

To help you countdown, we’ll be posting a poetry-related move/tv clip each day until April 1 (at which point our video links will become a bit more “substantive”), and on March 31, we’ll have a special early-bird prompt for those of you for whom April begins a few hours before it does here at Na/GloPoWriMo headquarters.

The poet William Blake was a visionary, a religious mystic, and pretty much all-around weirdo. He also seems to exert a strange pull on scriptwriters, as you will find him being quoted in both Bull Durham (a pretty good movie about minor league baseball)

and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (a pretty awful movie about . . . raiding tombs),

as well as being paraphrased in the dystopian sci-fi classic Blade Runner.

March 30th

Hello, all! There’s just two days until we start Na/GloPoWriMo 2019, otherwise known as “that month in which you write a poem a day for 30 days.”

Each day during the month, we’ll be bringing you a featured participant, a video resource, and an optional prompt.

We’ll be back tomorrow with an early-bird prompt and another fun instance of poetry in the movies, but for today, we’ll leave you with this clip from Memphis Belle, a WWII movie in which an airman passes off the work of Y.B. Yeats for his own.

March 31st

Hello, everybody! Na/GloPoWriMo officially begins tomorrow!

We have an early-bird prompt for those of you located in time zones where April 1 starts a few hours earlier than it does on the east coast of the United States, but first, let’s round out our pre-April set of movie/tv clips involving poetry.

Today, we bring you a clip from that classic Bill Murray comedy, Groundhog’s Day, wherein our hapless hero, who is kind of a self-centered jerk, is forced to repeat a day over and over again until he gets it “right.” In this clip, he mocks his love interest’s college study of French poetry. Bill, that’s no way to get a girl! After a few rounds, though, he’s actually reciting French poetry at her – now, that’s more like it.

Early-bird prompt

Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poetic self-portrait. And specifically, we’d like you to write a poem in which you portray yourself in the guise of a historical or mythical figure. Does that sound a bit strange? Well, take a look at this poem by Mary-Kim Arnold, “Self Portrait as Semiramis,” or Tarfia Farzullah’s, “Self-Portrait as Artemis,” and perhaps you’ll get a sense of the possibilities.