Day Three

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Day Three of NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo! It’s our first Monday this month, but I hope that won’t let that keep you from your writing.

Today’s featured participant is notes from a binbag, where the recipe poem for Day 2 has the spine-tingling feel of a dark fairy tale.

Today’s interview is with Monica de la Torre. Born in Mexico, de la Torre has lived in the U.S. since 1993 and has published four books of poetry. Her work is sly, witty, and playful, and often display narrative or essayistic characteristics. You can read some good examples here, here and here .

And now for our (optional) prompt! Today I’d like to challenge you to write an elegy – a poem that mourns or honors someone dead or something gone by. And I’d like to ask you to center the elegy on an unusual fact about the person or thing being mourned. For example, if you are writing an elegy about your grandfather, perhaps the poem could be centered around a signature phrase of his. (My own grandfather used to justify whatever he was doing by saying, “well, I can’t sing or dance, and it’s too wet to plow,” which baffled me considerably as a child). Or perhaps your Aunt Lily always unconsciously whistled between her teeth while engaged in her daily battle with the crossword puzzle. These types of details paradoxically breathe life into an elegy, making the mourned person real for the reader.

I suppose with a challenge like that, it’s a little odd to sign off for the day with “Happy writing!,” but let me wish you good writing, at least.