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Our featured participant for the day is A Writer without Words, whose sad sonnet for Day Four packs a powerful story into fourteen short lines.
Today’s resource is this video of the poet Kyle Dargan reading “Call and Response,” a poem that he wrote by mixing and mingling the text of the Lord’s Prayer with “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash.
And now, for our daily prompt. Today’s prompt comes from another poem by Kyle Dargan, called “Diaspora: A Narcolepsy Hymn.” This poem, like “Call and Response,” is inspired by the work of others – in this case, the poet Morgan Parker, and lyrics from songs by Beyoncé and The Notorious B.I.G. The poem also partakes of one of the most difficult poetic forms, the villanelle.
The classic villanelle has five three-line stanzas followed by a final, four-line stanza. The first and third lines of the first stanza alternately repeat as the last lines of the following three-line stanzas, before being used as the last two lines of the final quatrain. And to make it an even more virtuoso performance, Dargan’s alternating lines, besides being taken from songs, express “opposing” ideas, with one being about sleeping, and the other waking.
Following Dargan’s lead, today we’d like to challenge you to write a poem that incorporates at least one of the following: (1) the villanelle form, (2) lines taken from an outside text, and/or (3) phrases that oppose each other in some way. If you can use two elements, great – and if you can do all three, wow!
Napo Process Notes
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After reading Candace’s poem from Day 4 – one packed with narrative – I watched the resource video. Then found myself watching a stream of other videos – RESIST doing the same. Then I read diaspora: a narcolepsy hymn by Kyle Dargan. Then I started thinking about the prompt and outside texts I may use.
On Writing
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After searching online, I decided to peruse today’s Metro issue brought home by Mr. G. I scanned the whole issue and although I earmarked two interesting articles, I didn’t actually find the text I needed. So I turned back to poems.
After a search starting with ‘place’ I ended up on an educational poetry site and chose the poem Let No One Steal Your Dreams by Paul Cookson.
Writing to form always takes a while, I am still constructing. This Villanelle took 3 sessions over 2 days to complete. It is not a form I favour, I find it hard to make the rhymes work without seeming fixed.
In the end I did not use Paul Cookson’s poem as much as the dual text examples from Kyle Dargan and it is definitely a poem I could/should re-write/edit. I managed the traditional 3 parts and it does make sense considering I constructed lines backwards from the end rhyme word.
It is called Learning, here are a few lines.
Words will fill your veins
in silent recompose
Let no one tear apart.
The last line is Paul Cookson’s.
awritersfountain 