NaPoWriMo 2021 Day 27 The OFFICIAL prompt

I was hoping it was a tech issue rather than a problem Maureen was experiencing and much to my relief, it was exactly that. So here is today’s official proper 2021 prompt for Day 27.

Day Twenty-Seven Click to read the full post.

Our featured participants today are A Writer Without Words – Some Motivation Required, who has re-written the lyrics to a song from Les Miserables to tell us the sad tale of a woman whose children demand all her chocolates, and Scrambled, Not Fried, where the lyrics to a patriotic song have been replaced with an homage to grammarians.

Today’s featured reading is a live event that will take place tomorrow, April 28, at 8 p.m. ET. Arda Collins and Monica Youn will be reading at The Poetry Project in New York City.

Prompt: I’d like to challenge you to write a poem inspired by an entry from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows….. perhaps one of the sorrows will strike a chord with you.

Happy (well . . . sort of ) writing!

PROCESS NOTES: My Napo time is usually first thing so it may be tricky fitting it in now. Plus I did an extra prompt in lieu of today’s technical difficulties on the main site. So have already penned, in addition I have put the hours in on a current writing project too – so I won’t feel guilty about this stop-start approach & now I have managed to FINISH this post!

I also love Les Mis and know the songs well so was delighted to read In My Room By Candace Shultz, the first featured poem. The opening is brilliant and made me smile:

In my room

Hiding from the children

I consume

A giant bar of chocolate

Without them

Candace manages to carry the emotion of the original, somehow…

The world is less delicious

I’m still hungry and the children

Have chocolate on their faces

Brilliant!

My life will keep on going

But a world without some chocolate

Is one I’ve never known

Next I read God Bless Grammarians, the second featured poem. Another perfect parody.

So they’re careful what they say
God Bless Grammarians
(it’s ‘we’ not ‘they’)

I check the live reading which is 1 AM BST, so unlikely. I looked up the poets involved.

Arda Collins is the author of It Is Daylight (2009), which was awarded the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. Her forthcoming collection of poems will be published in 2022 by The Song Cave. She is a recipient of the Sarton Award in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, A Public Space, Colorado Review, jubilat, and elsewhere. She teaches at Smith College.

Monica Youn is the author of Blackacre (Graywolf Press 2016), which won the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America. It was also shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Award, longlisted for the National Book Award, and named one of the best poetry books of 2016 by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and BuzzFeed. Her previous book Ignatz (Four Way Books 2010) was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has been awarded the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Witter Bytter Fellowship from the Library of Congress, and a Stegner Fellowship among other honors. A former lawyer and a member of the Racial Imaginary Institute, she teaches at Princeton and in the MFA programs at NYU and Columbia.

© Academy of American Poets

I love the dictionary resources Maureen Thorson offers us during NaPoWriMo, one I will be coming back to again.

I chose a word which matches my current project and wrote a poem which a version of which may appear in this project.

Opened my door on the world again.

Changed, but alive.

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

NaPoWriMo 2021 Day 26

Day Twenty-Six Click here to read the post in full.

Today’s featured participants are Barbara Turney Wieland, who has brought us a happy, snappy poem sprinkled with daisies, and Manja Mexi Mexcessive, whose poem about the not-so-normal process of trying to get back to normal!

Our featured daily reading is pre-recorded, Brenda Shaughnessy reading for the Chicago Humanities Festival back in 2013.

Prompt: Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a parody. Besides being fun, writing parodies can be a great way to hone your poetic skills – particularly your sense of rhyme and sound, as you try to mimic the form of an existing poem while changing the content.

If you’d like to get some inspiration, consider some poems that Lewis Carroll included in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which parody the moralistic verse of Isaac Watts. “The Crocodile” is a send-up of Watts’ “How Doth the Little Busy Bee,” while “Tis the Voice of the Lobster” is a parody of Watts’ poem “The Sluggard.” Or, for a briefer and more whimsical poem, consider “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Bat,” which is a parody of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”

Happy writing!

PROCESS NOTES:

I had a MAMMOTH NaPoWriMo catch up this morning. Penned a fair few poems and watched several readings. I thoroughly enjoyed today’s reading and discovering the poetry of Brenda Shaughnessy. A NEW FAN here!

I loved revisiting Barbara’s website today. it’s a daisy day!

…. each tiny central golden sun

will remind you, petal, you’ve only just begun

I appreciated the references to the daisy at the end. Particularly the old Celtic Legend:

God sprinkled daisies over the earth to cheer people from grief.

And the second featured poem Liberation Day which is one that will resonant with all of us:

I have a coloured spreadsheet 
with 30 pages and 1000 destinations. 



Today, to celebrate, 
we are going to the big supermarket by the lagoon. 
Crossing the border a day early.

And the photographs taken on the walk are sunshiny joy!

I have experienced Manja’s beautiful blog before *I think I may have discovered it on a previous NaPo year. This was a great way to start the day (even though I actually started today in Day 22 and worked through my gaps from there)!

Before I watched the reading today I read some of Brenda’s incredible poems on the Poetry Foundation website. As I already mentioned I loved today’s reading and discovering a new-to-me poet.

Chicago Humanities Festival

Ever since her debut collection “Interior with Sudden Joy” and follow-up “Human Dark With Sugar,” poet Brenda Shaughnessy’s taut and dazzling words have undone us. “Our Andromeda” is her latest volume. Invoking both constellation and Greek mythology, its poems center on a mother and poet. In language that is sharp and sly, wrenching and wry, she grapples with the gulf between expectations and reality in the worlds of motherhood, poetry, and art.

Join Shaughnessy, a professor of English at Rutgers University and the poetry editor-at-large of Tin House, for a reading and conversation about her work. This program was recorded on October 20, 2013 as part of the 24th annual Chicago Humanities Festival.

I particularly enjoyed At the Book Shrink and Vanity and the Q&A afterwards.

As for the prompt – I have only ever written one parody and I was at a loss as to where to go for base material. In the end I went to the Poetry Foundation and closed my eyes and randomly picked a poem. Still Life with Summer Sausage A Blade and No Blood by VIEVEE FRANCIS. It was an interesting exercise but I don’t feel I have chosen a poem a parody will add anything to here. I will look out for some perfect parody material and try again in the future.

……. She gave me some winter berries,

on a spoon. I pulled the raspberries

out first.