Day Eight

Welcome back, everyone, for the second week of Na/GloPoWriMo! Congratulations to everyone who has made it so far and, if you’ve fallen off the poetry wagon, there’s plenty of time to clamber back aboard.

Our featured participant for the day is barbaraturneywielandpoetess, where the identity prompt for Day 7 resulted in a long-limbed prose poem full of sharp twists, turns, and myriad identities, all shining like fragments of a broken mirror.

Today’s craft resource is an oldie – Percy Bysshe Shelley’s essay A Defence of Poetry. Shelley basically thought poetry was magic and poets were wizards. While the language of the essay is a bit antiquated, it’s hard not to be infected by Shelley’s ecstatic enthusiasm about all things poetic.

And now for our prompt (optional, as always). Let’s take a leaf from Shelley’s book, and write poems in which mysterious and magical things occur. Your poem could take the form of a spell, for example, or simply describe an event that can’t be understood literally. Feel free to incorporate crystal balls, fauns, lightning storms, or whatever seems fierce and free and strange. Poetry is like that (at least when you’ve been reading Shelley!) If you’re in search of inspiration, maybe you’ll find it in this poem by Louis Untermeyer, or this one by Kathleen Graber.

Happy writing!