Day Fifteen

Wow, everyone! It’s April 15 already? It’s hard to believe, but we’re halfway through Na/GloPoWriMo.

Our featured participant today is like mercury colliding, where the homophone/homonym/homograph prompt resulted in a rollicking adventure in doubled spellings, meanings and sounds. You really do have to read it out loud to make sense of it! And the play between the sound and the spelling means that many of the phrases seem to say one thing while undermining or complicating that meaning at the same time.

Today’s video poetry resource is this tutorial on how to read a poem out loud – really, how to perform it, as if it were a monologue in a play. Lots of people have bad memories of being forced to memorize and recite poems in school. Me? I was the nerd who volunteered to do it for extra credit. Alas, my subsequent dramatic recitation of “Paul Revere’s Ride” to my fellow seventh graders did nothing to improve my social standing. Seventh graders are a tough crowd!

Our prompt for today (optional, as always), takes its inspiration from the idea of a poem as a sort of tiny play, which can be performed dramatically. In the 1800s, there was quite a fad for monologue-style poems that lend themselves extremely well to dramatic interpretations (this kind of work was basically Robert Browning’s jam). And Shakespeare’s plays are chock-a-block with them. Today, I’d like to challenge you to write your own dramatic monologue. It doesn’t have to be quite as serious as Browning or Shakespeare, of course, but try to create a sort of specific voice or character that can act as the “speaker” of your poem, and that could be acted by someone reciting the poem.

Happy writing!