Day One

Welcome, everyone, to the official first day of NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo 2020!

Let’s kick things off with our first featured participant, Honey Stew, where the early-bird poem is a paean to sanderlings and the ” many fast little birds who peep by the sea.”

As in past years, we’ll be featuring a different poetry-related resource daily. This year, instead of concentrating on a single kind of resource, we’ll be cycling through a potpourri of them, including online poetry chapbooks, poetry-related Twitter accounts, and more.

Today, we bring you what might seem like a rather silly resource, but one thing that poetry has taught me is that silly tricks are sometimes the best, at least for getting one’s creativity going. It’s an online metaphor generator https://www.wildstrawberrylodge.com/dressing-for-the-weather-fishing-with-the-elderly/ ! Plug in some parameters, and get a phrase that may strike you as interesting, arresting, or . . . just ridiculous. At any rate, I hope this generator is something you can return to when you find yourself staring at the page and thinking “ummmmmmmmm.”

And now for our (optional) prompt, which also deals with metaphors! Forrest Gump famously said that “life is like a box of chocolates.” And there are any number of poems out there that compare or equate the speaker’s life with a specific object. (For example, this poem of Emily Dickinson’s). Today, however, I’d like to challenge you to write a self-portrait poem in which you make a specific action a metaphor for your life – one that typically isn’t done all that often, or only in specific circumstances. For example, bowling, or shopping for socks, or shoveling snow, or teaching a child to tie its shoes.

Happy writing!