One Week Down!

Hello, everyone, and welcome back. Today marks the one-week mark for Na/GloPoWriMo 2019! We hope you feel like you’re hitting your stride with this whole write-a-poem-every-day thing.

Our featured participant today is Garten der Gedichte, where the poem of the possible for Day 6 shows that poetry can happen even amidst distractions.

Today’s poetry resource is another TED talk, this one from Rachel McKibbens, on “Poetry as Therapy.” Now, if you’ve ever been in a creative writing class, you might have been told that poetry isn’t therapy, and shouldn’t be written as such. But one of the reasons people don’t just make art, but actively seek it out, is that by hearing or seeing other people express feelings similar to our own, we feel more human and less alone.

Our prompt for the day (optional, as always) is also inspired by McKibbens, who posted these thoughts on her Twitter account a few months back:

What do you deserve? Name it. All of it. What are you ready to let go of? Name that too. Then name the most gentle gift for yourself. Name the brightest song your body’s ever held. Summon joy like you would a child; call it home. It wanders, yes. But it’s still yours.

Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem of gifts and joy. What would you give yourself, if you could have anything? What would you give someone else?

Happy writing!