NaPoWriMo 2018 Day 30 The Final Poem

It is with a slightly heavy heart that we wave goodbye to NaPoWriMo for another year today. I have a bank of prompts to play with if I ever feel the need to dip into ideas, some great resources and a collection of sometimes strange, partly incomplete and astonishing, surprising poems to end the month with.

One has already been used in my PoARTry Ledbury project and another was suitable for the WPL Suffragettes anthology.

The time I have taken out to write has been wonderful, my year as WPL has been amazing but it has impacted on writing time and submissions. I am now working on the tail end projects and setting up those which will continue after my Laureateship.

I will use my Napo time now as editing & writing and get myself back in the saddle ready to take off at speed, or perhaps a canter!

So here we are people, at the end of a month of poetry.

Well, it had to happen, what with time being linear and all. We have finally arrived at the last day of Na/GloPoWriMo 2018! I hope you have had fun writing poetry over the course of the month, and that you’ll come back next year, when we will do it all over again, with new prompts, new featured participants, and a to-be-determined other kind of poetry feature.

Our final, featured participant for the year is NaNoPoRaWriMo, where the Plath-inspired poem for Day Twenty-Nine takes the form of a sonically-dense and lyrical recipe.

Our last craft resource for you is this online collection of recordings of Borges’ lectures on poetry and many other topics. Borges was, in addition to being a poet and writer of strange and compelling short stories, an inveterate professor who lectured widely in both Spanish and English. His lectures are seeded throughout with strange factoids, fascinating observations linking the poets and poetry of different ages and languages, and an overwhelmingly omnivorous approach to knowledge.

And for our final (optional) prompt, I’d like you to take your cue from Borges, and write a poem that engages with a strange and fascinating fact. It could be an odd piece of history, an unusual bit of art trivia, or something just plain weird. While I cannot vouch for the actual accuracy of any of the facts presented at the links above (or any other facts you might use as inspiration!), I can tell you that there are definitely some poetic ideas here, just waiting for someone to use them.

We’ll be back tomorrow with a last post bidding farewell to Na/GloPoWriMo 2018, but in the meantime . . .

Happy writing!

I really enjoyed listening to the Harvard Lectures on Poetry by Jorge Luis Borges.

I love the rediscovering of literature and knowing that I now spend my life writing, researching and learning too and it is wonderful, I will never tire of it.

Poetry is a passion and joy!

I started with the Historical trivia, I have written a sequence of poems based on historical fact/ people, so was interested in this as a starting point. I saved 6/25 facts into a word document and moved onto Art Trivia.

I loved discovering facts about some of my favourite artists, some I knew, having studied them aeons ago at university! I saved 7 facts from 25 on the word document, highlighting 2 that appealed the most.

The weird facts – some of which I knew lend themselves to humorous poetry and have been banked for future writing. I collected a few of the 75, but read them all! 17 out of 75 facts, my favourite piece of trivia:

It is estimated that millions of trees are planted by forgetful squirrels that buried their nuts.

Love it!

 

The result of using this Art fact:

Henri Matisse‘s work, Le Bateau, was put the right way up after hanging upside-down for 46 days without anyone noticing at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, America.

was a humorous poem where the guard ends up mopping water.

in the space

where sky

and water

meet.

I enjoyed playing with the form of this poem, I quite fancy seeing what happens if I reverse it and hang it upside down!

 The Poetry School Day 30

Final Day: Send it off

Well, here we are poets. Congratulations to everyone who joined in. It’s been a lot of fun.

As is tradition, your task for this last day of NaPoWriMo is to pick a poem from this month, clean it up, and send it off to a magazine or competition. Or share it with another person.

 

NaPoWriMo 2018 Day 29

Welcome back, everyone, for the penultimate day of Na/GloPoWriMo Day 29. I hope today you’ll be writing your 29th poem of the month! And even if it’s only your tenth, or even your first, well, that’s more poems than you started with, isn’t it?

Our featured participant today is What Rhymes with Stanza, where the postcard poem for Day Twenty-Eight is a pun-filled prose poem actually laid out as a postcard.

Today we have new interview (and our last for this year!), with the poet Chris Tonelli’s, whose second full-length poetry collection, Whatever Stasis, is just out from Barrelhouse Books. You can read some of Tonelli’s poetry here and here, and our interview with him here.

And now for our daily prompt (optional, as always). Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem based on the Plath Poetry Project’s calendar. Simply pick a poem from the calendar, and then write a poem that responds or engages with your chosen Plath poem in some way.

My WPL projects involved a lot of poetry written in response to those read. So I look forward to tackling this poem.

I actually found it harder than I expected. It was a chance to read a lot of Plath’s poems, I finally chose Edge – which may not be in the linked archive.

My response poem was a lot shorter, just 3 stanzas.

the silk growns Queenlike

 

 The Poetry School Day 29

Day 29: Amnesty Day

Today, the penultimate day of NaPoWriMo, is amnesty day. It’s a day to do any or all of the following things:

1) Go back and try some prompts you missed, or want another go at.

 

2) Edit or redraft a poem from a previous prompt.

NaPoWriMo 2018 Day 28

Hello, all! There are just three days left in our April poetry-writing adventure! I hope you’ve been enjoying it.

Our featured participant today is Thoughts of Words, where the Tarot poem for Day Twenty-Seven features a poetical hermit.

Today, we bring you a new craft resource, in the form of this history and exploration of the prose poem. This essay helpfully catalogs several different styles of prose poem, with examples, and possible strategies for writing.

And now for our prompt (optional, as always). Following the suggestion of our craft resource, we challenge you today to draft a prose poem in the form/style of a postcard. If you need some inspiration, why not check out some images of vintage postcards? I’m particularly fond of this one.

Happy writing!

I did a workshop several years ago with old postcards, so after looking at the NaPo link I started to research for postcard images from England, one came up with the letter writing side so from there I copied more postcard messages as a starting point.

 

The town is lopsided, one could easily feel drunk
looking at sloping rooftops.

 

 The Poetry School Day 28

Day 28: Music 

“Where words fail, music speaks.” ― Hans Christian Andersen

Before we move on, a note on yesterday’s prompt. If anyone wants to continue practising their iambic pentameter (ip), or any other metre they choose, a good habit to get into is to spend five minutes every day, or whenever you can, writing nonsense verse into your notebook in ip. Don’t worry about the sense — at all.

Anyway!

Today I would like you to write a poem while listening to music. For some this may be your regular practice; for some (like me) it will drive you up the wall. Try it either way. It can be the same song on repeat, or perhaps an album of songs all by the same artist, or an entire piece by a composer, but don’t try this with the radio, a mixed-artist playlist, or anything like that. I want you to sink into and feel the music, which can’t be done if it keeps changing.

Once your music is playing, begin to free-write, without stopping, until you can feel the poem emerge. At which point, it will probably be tempting to turn the music off, or mentally drown it out. Don’t. Try and let it in. Try and let the rhythm, the melody, the tone, and the mood affect the way you write.

I should say that your poem doesn’t need to be about the music. It may be preferable to write about something else, perhaps. For obvious reasons, no example poems today, but a nod in the general direction of two poets who I know write with music very much in mind: Bridget Minamore, whose pamphlet Titanic comes with recommended listening (!) and Rishi Dastidar, who, rumour has it, likes to blast music at his workshop students to stimulate emotions.

 

It is true! I was fortunate enough to do Rishi Dastidar’s Call & Response workshop at Swindon Poetry Festival last year and thoroughly enjoyed using music to wake muse up!

I have also used music several times to write poetry, Candy Royalle used music in her workshop I was in a few years ago too. I do not have the time to write more than one NaPo poem as I am on catch up and have writing deadlines to meet this evening, but what the heck… it only happens once a year, right?

 

 

NaPoWriMo 2018 Day 25

Hello, all! It’s the twenty-fifth day of Na/GloPoWriMo. We’re really in the home stretch now!

Today, our featured participant is Zouxzoux, where the elegy for Day Twenty-Four breathes life into a lost dancer.

We bring you a new interview today, with Rodney Gomez, whose book Citizens of the Mausoleum, is being put out by Sundress Publications. Gomez is the author of several chapbooks, and his poems have previously been published in journals including Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, Blackbird, Pleiades, Denver Quarterly, and Puerto del Sol, You can read some of Gomez’s poems here and here, and our interview with him here.

And now for our daily prompt (optional, as always). Today, we challenge you to write a poem that takes the form of a warning label . . . for yourself! (Mine definitely includes the statement: “Do Not Feed More Than Four Cookies Per Hour.”)

Happy writing!

I thoroughly enjoyed catching up with the reading. I loved Probability of the Sparrow by Rodney Gomez and liked discovering some of his work through the links provided, a new fan is born. I have also added a new blog to my reader list, about 10 so far this NaPoWriMo –  Zouxzoux’s Elegy poem was lovely, a good one to re-read.

I had a pleasant time writing today’s poem, a warning for my heart. I am fairly satisfied with the results.

It weighs less than a billiard ball,
and is a lot easier to crack.

 The Poetry School Day 25

Day 25: Poems for Children 

Good morning poets. A fun one for you today. I’d like you to write poems for children. It helps to have an age in mind when you write – a poem for a three year old being very different to young adult poetry – so please include your intended reading age when you post. It’ll help people give better feedback.

A couple of traps to avoid. Firstly, don’t, because you’re writing for children, suddenly decide to write like a Victorian. (I don’t know why people do this.) Secondly, try to avoid moralising.

Your first example poem is ‘From a Railway Carriage’, from Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic A Child’s Garden of Verses, which I’m sure many of you are familiar with.

The second example poem is ‘Falling Up’ by Shel Silverstein, which is number 6 in this list of his poems. 

Sometimes, of course, children write the best poetry themselves. This is ‘The Tiger’ by Nael, age 6.

At the time of reading this morning, I had lots of ideas for this – since then I have been preparing for the festival and many of my original thoughts have been forgotten, hoping they will come back when my mind is free-er.

I wrote about Evacuees as this is the new theme at work and I thought I may be able to use it in PE.

It needs some more work.

We all had labels attached to us,
as if we were parcels –

NaPoWriMo 2018 Day 24

Happy final Tuesday in Na/GloPoWriMo, everyone.
Our featured participant today is kavyastream, where the overheard/regional language prompt for Day 23 gives us more Texas sayings than you can shake a stick at.

Today’s craft resource is a long-ish essay by Hyejung Kook regarding how poetry can be created from absence, or in the wake of loss, and how awareness of mortality drives a desire to produce art, people, poems.

And now for our prompt (optional, as always). Today, we’d like to challenge you to write an elegy – a poem typically written in honor or memory of someone dead. But we’d like to challenge you to write an elegy that has a hopefulness to it. Need inspiration? You might look at W.H. Auden’s elegy for Yeats, which ends on a note suggesting that the great poet’s work will live on, inspiring others in years to come. Or perhaps this elegy by Mary Jo Bang, where the sadness is shot through with a sense of forgiveness on both sides.

Happy (or at least, hopeful) writing!

I loved the whiffletree from the participant poem. The practise of poetry mentioned in the craft resource is exactly what NaPoWriMo does for all of us. Puts fingers on those keys.

 The Poetry School Day 24

Day 24: The Gift 

There are so many brilliant ‘gift’ poems that it’s hard to restrain myself to just a handful. Off the top of my head, there’s Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Valentine’, Michael Donaghy’s ‘The Present’, Billy Collins’ ‘The Lanyard’, Robert Frost’s ‘The Gift Outright’….

But today’s example poems are by poets a little less well-known in the UK, though hugely admired in the US. Firstly, I present you ‘The Gift’ by Li-Young Lee, an American poet, born in Indonesia (whose great-grandfather was the first Republican president of China).

My second gift is Rita Dove’s ‘For Sophie Who’ll Be in First Grade in the Year 2000’. Dove is a former US Poet Laureate and is editor of the Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry (2011). Some of her classics inspired poems would also have been useful for yesterday’s prompt.

One final thing: don’t forget you can write poems about receiving a gift as well as giving one.

I struggled with this one, my most famous poem is ‘Your Gift’ and I find it hard to even read the word gift without thinking of that poem.

However, I have written an Elegy and didn’t fancy that prompt and then after the day I have had, well I thought I needed to write about potential gifts that will help me, having gone back into a full time role (for the 1st time in 5 years) I think I may print it out and keep it in my cupboard!

 

A recipe book
for energy, late nights and
early lark mornings,

NaPoWriMo 2018 Day 23

One week to go!

Hello, everyone! It’s hard to believe, but there’s just one week left to go in this year’s Na/GloPoWriMo.

Our featured participant for the day is Eat All the Words, where the impossible prompt for Day Twenty-Two has been transformed into a study guide!

We have a new interview for you today, with Kate Greenstreet, whose fourth book of poetry, The End of Something, is just out from Ahsahta Press. You can read some of Greenstreet’s poetry here and here, and our interview with her here.

And now for today’s (optional) prompt! Kate Greenstreet’s poetry is spare, but gives a very palpable sense of being spoken aloud – it reads like spoken language sounds. In our interview with her, she underscores this, stating that “when you hear it, you write it down.” Today, we challenge you to honor this idea with a poem based in sound. The poem, for example, could incorporate overheard language. Perhaps it could incorporate a song lyric in some way, or language from something often heard spoken aloud (a prayer, a pledge, the Girl Scout motto). Or you could use a regional or local phrase from your hometown that you don’t hear elsewhere, e.g. “that boy won’t amount to a pinch.”

Happy writing!

I found a wonderful archive of language from the region I grew up in and plan to use this sometime in the future. For now I played with a prayer and wrote a very honest poem.

… be done blue line,
as it is in films.

 The Poetry School Day 23

Day 23: Classics 

Salve and Χαίρετε, poets. Today I’d like you to look to the myths of ancient Greece and Rome for inspiration. You may have to do some research to find a story that works for you. If possible, try to avoid a simple retelling of a well-known legend in its entirety; make it new by doing something different. One way to do this is to explore a small, perhaps overlooked moment, in a larger legend, as Michael Longley does in his poem ‘Laertes‘, which is about the return of Odysseus to his father Laertes. Another is to switch perspectives, as Carol Ann Duffy does in her poem ‘Mrs Midas‘. Yet another is use a snippet of myth as inspiration for a poem about modern life and death, as Jack Gilbert does in ‘Failing and Flying‘, and Danez Smith does in their poem ‘not an elegy for Mike Brown‘.

NaPoWriMo 2018 Day 22

Happy fourth Sunday of Na/GloPoWriMo, all.

Today’s featured participant is ARHtistic License, where the Narcissus/narcissism poem for Day 21 treats the myth from Echo’s point of view.

Our craft resource for the day is a series of reflections by Wesley McNair on “indirect entry” into a poem. McNair writes of inviting mystery and uncertainty into our poems, both with respect to the writing process and the finished work.

And now for our daily prompt (optional as always). I’ve found this one rather useful in trying to ‘surprise’ myself into writing something I wouldn’t have come up with otherwise. Today, I’d like you to take one of the following statements of something impossible, and then write a poem in which the impossible thing happens:

The sun can’t rise in the west.

A circle can’t have corners.

Pigs can’t fly.

The clock can’t strike thirteen.

The stars cannot rearrange themselves in the sky.

A mouse can’t eat an elephant.

Happy writing!

I found the process of poems, the craft article/reflections by Wesley McNair a good read.

I look forward to writing my impossible poem! I enjoyed writing this poem. I wrote a thin poem based on an answer in a mathematical forum. I am fairly pleased with the resulting poem and may have found a suitable poem for my final Poet Laureate Collection on Mathematical/Scientific poems in memory of Stephen Hawking.

thoughts about
tiny angles
can wait.

 The Poetry School Day 22

Day 22: Pantoum 

Morning poets. Today I’d like you write a pantoum. The pantoum is an anglophone variation on the Malay ‘pantun’. It uses quatrains with repeated lines, much like a villanelle. Each stanza takes the second line of the stanza above as its first line, and the last line of the stanza above as its third line. Your poem can be any number of quatrains — four is the most common. It looks like this, where letters represent lines (not rhymes):

Stanza 1

A
B
C
D

B
E
D
F

E
G
F
H

and so on. Your example poem is ‘Zadie Smith’s first novel is‘  by the brilliant Bridget Minamore.

I love a Pantoum, I learnt to write this form a couple of years ago and have had one or two published. I look forward to coming back to this prompt.

NaPoWriMo 2018 Day 21

The inevitable landslide of working, preparing for festivals, editing, experiencing some sunshine and falling days behind with NaPo… but it is week 3 and up until now I was following the plan well. I have learnt over the years to forgive myself as I think this naturally happens to everyone who is balancing elements of life. If you do not forgive yourself, you end up using writing energy as negative self-sabotage and that gets you nowhere.

Onward. Or backwards (technically)!

Day 21:

Today marks three full weeks of Na/GloPoWriMo!

Our featured participant for the day is Unassorted Stories, where the rebellious poem for Day 19 shows how repetition, used well, can drive a poem along, giving it momentum and heft. It also provides a really interesting window into the poet’s “rules,” which she broke in writing the poem.

Today, we have a new interview for you, with Antoinette Brim, whose newest book of poetry, These Women You Gave Me, has been published by Indolent Books. Brim is a Cave Canem Foundation fellow, a recipient of the Walker Foundation Scholarship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. You can read some of her poems here and here, and you can check out our interview with her here.

And now for our (optional) prompt. In her interview, Brim provides us with several suggestions for generative writing exercises, and we’d like to challenge to today to tackle her third one, which is based in the myth of Narcissus. After reading the myth, try writing a poem that plays with the myth in some way. For example, you could imagine that imagine the water is speaking to you, the narcissus flower. Or you could write a poem in which the narcissus berates the Kardashians for stealing their neurosis. Or a poem that comments on the narcissism of our time, i.e. beauty and body obsession, etc.

Happy writing!

I enjoyed getting to know the poetry of Antoinette Brim today. I was interested by the prompt of a myth I know well, what I didn’t know was that the narcissus flower is the daffodil. I have always been amazed at how these flowers spread and whole puddles of them appear where they were never planted.

Due to being several days behind, I would call it a stanza rather than a poem. I planned to work in short form, but it is free verse.

I hope to work on this one later in the year. A post summer revisit!

 

the bulb, a house of toxins.

 The Poetry School Day 21

Day 21: Word Association (Redux)

Morning poets. Another slight reinterpretation of a prompt from last year. Below is a list of ten words. I would like you – quickly, without thinking about it – to scribble down a word you associate with each one of them.

Wood
Protection
Magazine
Float
Shed
Inner
Capable
Clash
Wax
Daughter

Now use your ten new words in your poem, one per line. If you’re up for a challenge, use the words in the order you have them; if you’d like a bit more flexibility, use them in any order.

NB: Don’t use the above words in your poem – use the words you associated with them, e.g. not ‘Wax’, but ‘Candle’ or ‘Drip’. If you don’t want to start with the words we’ve given you, open the closest book to you and pick the last word on every page from 30 to 39 and associate from that.

 

I made my word association list and plan to work on it later.

NaPoWriMo 2018 Day 20

Today is April 20th, and that means we are now two-thirds of the way through Na/GloPoWriMo, 2018. Time flies when you’re writing poems!

Today’s featured participant is Summer Blues, where the simple language of the poem written for Day 19’s structured erasure prompt eases you into a subtle but satisfying resolution.

Our craft resource for the day is Alice Notley’s essay, The Poetics of Disobedience. In it, Notley advocates for a poet to “maintain a state of disobedience against…everything.” By this she means remaining open to all forms, all subjects, and not becoming beholden to “usual” methods for writing. Whenever we are sure that there is one “right” way to write, or some specific set of topics that are the “right” ones to discuss, we should ask ourselves, what part of experience are we leaving out? And why?

Our prompt for the day (optional as always) takes its cue from Notley’s rebelliousness, and asks you to write a poem that involves rebellion in some way. The speaker or subject of the poem could defy a rule or stricture that’s been placed on them, or the poem could begin by obeying a rule and then proceed to break it (for example, a poem that starts out in iambic pentameter, and then breaks into sprawling, unmetered lines). Or if you tend to write funny poems, you could rebel against yourself, and write something serious (or vice versa). Whatever approach you take, your poem hopefully will open a path beyond the standard, hum-drum ruts that every poet sometimes falls into.

From the essay I grabbed ‘a state of disobedience’ and wrote from there. I often think that the Government advice which is anything from alcohol consumption/health to weaning babies is unnecessary and a bit ‘1984’ (Orwell), so I ran with the idea of a woman who was rebelling against every legislation.

The poem itself is nonsense really but it was fun to write.

She used the low risk drinking guidelines leaflet as a beer mat,

 The Poetry School Day 20

Day 20: Personism 

Today I’d like you to write a poem that speaks directly to another person. It should be written so that you “could use the telephone instead of writing the poem” — or so says Frank O’Hara in his manifesto, Personism.

But what is Personism? Back to Frank:

“Personism, a movement which I recently founded and which nobody knows about… was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone (not Roi, by the way, a blond). I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. It’s a very exciting movement which will undoubtedly have lots of adherents. It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified. The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages.”

We know because O’Hara dated his work, that the poem he references here, the one he wrote ‘for this person’, was ‘Personal Poem’, and that is today’s example poem.

Note how the poem speaks directly to the addressee (casually, as if on the phone) but doesn’t mention them or discuss their relationship with the speaker. It can be tempting with this prompt to write to someone about something important in your relationship with them – a declaration of love, a long-withheld confession, an apology – and this is a perfectly valid way to go about it, but is that really what you always talk about when you get them on the phone?

NaPoWriMo 2018 Day 19

I sat in my garden after work, enjoying the last of the sun and wrote my second NaPo poem by hand. I didn’t manage to get any desk time to upload the post though.

Our featured participant for the day is clay and branches, where the “work-your-way-up-from-the-bottom” poem for Day Eighteen is an unsettling, intensive narrative.

Today, we have a new interview for you, with the poet Dan Brady, whose first book of poems, Strange Children, is newly out from Publishing Genius. Brady is the poetry editor for Barrelhouse Magazine, and the author of the chapbooks Cabin Fever / Fossil Record (Flying Guillotine Press, 2014) and Leroy Sequences (Horse Less Press, 2014). You can read some of Brady’s poems here and check out our interview with him here.

Our (optional) prompt for the day takes it cue from Brady’s suggestion that erasure/word banks can allow for compelling repetitive effects. Today we challenge you to write a paragraph that briefly recounts a story, describes the scene outside your window, or even gives directions from your house to the grocery store. Now try erasing words from this paragraph to create a poem or, alternatively, use the words of your paragraph to build a new poem.

Much as I enjoy erasure poems, I found this prompt lacked the interest of a good paragraph to begin with. I would like to use the idea in the future when the subject of the initial paragraph results in something more than a view from the window. I wrote a paragraph detailing the things I pass on my journey to work and reworked 2 erasure poems, one which only yielded one line of any worth and the 2nd poem that was just okay.

A little disappointing but some interesting phrases from the erasure side of the task.

where last summer, only a tumbledown graffitied barn stood.

 The Poetry School Day 19

Day 19: Coming of Age Poem 

Morning poets. Cast your minds back to that strange period at the end of childhood and the beginning of adulthood. Perhaps this transition happened for you or your speaker in a single epiphanic moment or maybe it happened imperceptibly over time. This coming of age may be marked formally in a traditional or non-traditional ceremony, it might be private or public, it could be mortifying or liberating, or both, or neither, but it should ideally be formative.

Your example bildungsgedicht today are Kayo Chingonyi’s ‘Kumukanda’ and Dom Bury’s recent National Poetry Competition winner ‘The Opened Field’.