Hello, everyone. We’re now two-thirds of the way through the month. I hope you’ve been having fun.

And we have two featured participants today, each of which took the landay prompt for Day 19 in a slightly different direction. Here’s Kiana Donae’s serious and furtive landay of love, and here’s Voiceless Fricative’s humorous and slightly nutty one.

Today’s poetry resource is the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, which – you guessed it – features a new poem each day. Featuring work by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends, it’s a nice mix of old and new.

And now for our prompt (optional, as always). Today, I challenge to write a poem that states the things you know. For example, “The sky is blue” or “Pizza is my favorite food” or “The world’s smallest squid is Parateuthis tunicata. Each line can be a separate statement, or you can run them together. The things you “know” of course, might be facts, or they might be a little bit more like beliefs. Hopefully, this prompt will let your poem be grounded in specific facts, while also providing room for more abstract themes and ideas.

Happy writing!

Hello, all, and welcome back for Day 19 of NaPoWriMo.

Our featured participant today is Camionneuse, where the multi-scene poem for Day 18’s “urgent journey/message” prompt really conveys, at once, a sense of rush and specific moments in time.

Today’s poetry resource is: THEthe Poetry Blog, a blog on poetics aimed at poets and non-poets alike. The blog regularly features new poetry, as well as essays, interviews, and reviews.

And for today’s prompt (optional, as always!), I’d like to challenge you to write a landay. Landays are 22-syllable couplets, generally rhyming. The form comes from Afghanistan, where women often use it in verses that range from the sly and humorous to the deeply sardonic and melancholy. Check out this long investigative article on landays for a fascinating look into a form of poetry often composed in secret, and rarely written down. You could try to write a single landay – a hard-hitting couplet that shares some secret (or unspoken) truth, or you could try to write a poem that strings multiple landays together like stanzas (maybe something akin to a syllabic ghazal?)

Happy Writing!

Happy Eighteenth Day of NaPoWriMo!

Our featured participant today is Shawn L. Bird, where the social media poem for Day 17 is a hilarious riot of mixed-up tweets. Really, it was hard to pick among yesterday’s poems — there were so many surprising and funny results. For anyone interested in learning more about poetry that mines internet search terms and other social detritus for lines and inspiration, you might enjoy reading up on flarf.

Our poetry resource for the day is The Electronic Poetry Center at the University of Buffalo, where you’ll find an extensive online library of resources devoted to electronic, digital, and formally innovative poetry. Including flarf!

And now for our (as always, optional) prompt, which takes us from 2015 back to the 1700s. After all, it’s the eighteenth of April, which means that today is the 240th anniversary of the midnight ride of Paul Revere! Today, in keeping with the theme of rush and warning, I challenge you to write a poem that involves an urgent journey and an important message. It could historical, mythical, entirely fictional, or memoir-ical.

Happy Writing (oh, and by the way, “THE BRITISH ARE COMING”)!

Hello, everyone, and welcome back for Day Seventeen of NaPoWriMo!

Our featured participant today is Translunary Things, whose terzanelle for Day 16 involves a topic that — having woken up many an evening because somebody’s tail was whisking back and forth over my face — I can sympathize with! It also gets extra points for working in a Shakespearean allusion. This poem also underscores one way to approach a technical and demanding form — which is to make your topic light and bubbly. It at least makes it seem like more of a game to keep up with the meter, rather than a chore. Once you’ve managed the form in “light verse,” you may feel more confident about tackling it in service of deeper themes.

Today’s poetry resource is the Poetry Map from the University of Toronto’s Representative Poetry Center. Among other things, the map lets you explore places mentioned in poems! It’s sort of a fun way to find new poems, and you can also see if your home town has been immortalized in verse.

And now for our prompt (optional, as always). Today, I want you to try to write a “social media”-style poem. Namecheck all of your friends. Quote from their texts, tweets, FB status updates, twitter accounts, and blogposts, and the back of the cereal box on your breakfast table. The poem is about you and you are about what you say, think, talk, eat. You might end up with a poem that seems bizarrely solipsistic (like the internet itself, maybe?), but there might also be a spark there of something live and fun and present (like the verbal equivalent of a really great animated cat .gif).

Happy writing!

Well, it’s official. We’re now on the “downward slope” of NaPoWriMo!

Our featured participant today is Eramosa River Journal, where the poetry-addressing poem for Day 15 is written using poetry refrigerator magnets! I love the resulting visual playfulness of the poem, as well as its rather clever use of refrigerator-based metaphors.

Today’s poetry resource is Jacket2, an online compendium of reviews, critical essays, podcasts, interviews, and more. Smart people saying smart things about smart poems and poets. If you’re feeling a bit half-hearted and down, spend some time with Jacket2, and you will emerge refreshed and reinvigorated. People do care about poetry!

And now for our (as always, optional) prompt! Today, I challenge you to write in the form known as the terzanelle. A hybrid of the villanelle and terza rima, terzanelles consist of five three-line stanzas and a concluding quatrain. Lines and rhymes are chained throughout the poem, so that the middle line of each triplet is repeated as the last line of the following triplet (or, for the last triplet, in the concluding quatrain). The pattern goes like this:
ABA
bCB
cDC
dED
eFE
fAFA or fFAA.

You can use any meter or line length, though you may want to try to have all of your lines in the same meter! (And you can always fall back on that old favorite, iambic pentameter). Here are two example terzanelles to give you a sense of what the form looks like in action:

Terzanelle: Manzanar Riot

This is a poem with missing details,
of ground gouging each barrack’s windowpane,
sand crystals falling with powder and shale,

where silence and shame make adults insane.
This is about a midnight of searchlights,
of ground gouging each barrack’s windowpane,

of syrup on rice and a cook’s big fight.
This is the night of Manzanar’s riot.
This is about a midnight of searchlights,

a swift moon and a voice shouting, Quiet!
where the revolving searchlight is the moon.
This is the night of Manzanar’s riot,

windstorm of people, rifle powder fumes,
children wiping their eyes clean of debris,
where the revolving searchlight is the moon,

and children line still to use the latrines.
This is a poem with missing details,
children wiping their eyes clean of debris—
sand crystals falling with powder and shale.

— Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan

Terzanelle in Thunderweather

This is the moment when shadows gather
under the elms, the cornices and eaves.
This is the center of thunderweather.

The birds are quiet among these white leaves
where wind stutters, starts, then moves steadily
under the elms, the cornices, and eaves–

these are our voices speaking guardedly
about the sky, of the sheets of lightning
where wind stutters, starts, then moves steadily

into our lungs, across our lips, tightening
our throats. Our eyes are speaking in the dark
about the sky, of the sheets of lightening

that illuminate moments. In the stark
shades we inhibit, there are no words for
our throats. Our eyes are speaking in the dark

of things we cannot say, cannot ignore.
This is the moment when shadows gather,
shades we inhibit. There are no words, for
this is the center of thunderweather.

— Lewis Turco

Hello, everyone! We’re halfway through NaPoWriMo. Congratulations to all who have made it this far.

Our featured participant today is Inktuition, where the dialogue poem for Day 14 retraces a conversation every writer has with him or herself probably about twenty times a day. Hopefully, NaPoWriMo is helping you all to overcome the “fear” part of your internal writing dialogue!

Today’s poetry resource answers the question you may not have known you had: What is a Chapbook? I’ll let you read more at the link, but in brief, a chapbook is a collection of poems – but one that is much shorter than the typical 48-60 pages of a full-length collection. 15-25 pages is typical. There are many small presses that specialize in publishing them, often in handmade editions. They can be a great way to get your poetry in front of your audience before you’ve built up the reputation and credibility that would lead a publisher to take a chance on a full-length collection. Plus, they’re fun to trade and collect! (Think of them as the Pokemon of poetry — “Chapbook, I choose you!”)

And now for our prompt (optional, as always). Today, I challenge you to write a poem that addresses itself or some aspect of its self (i.e. “Dear Poem,” or “what are my quatrains up to?”; “Couplet, come with me . . .”) This might seem a little meta at first, or even kind of cheesy. But it can be a great way of interrogating (or at least, asking polite questions) of your own writing process and the motivations you have for writing, and the motivations you ascribe to your readers.

Happy writing!

Two weeks down, two weeks and a bit to go!

Today, our featured participant is Grace Black Writes, where the riddle for Day 13 is full of wordplay.

Our featured resource today is Twitter Poetry Club. What’s that? Well, it’s a sort of loose project in which, on selected days, people take photos of poems (from books or printouts or what-have-you) and post them to twitter with the hashtag #twitterpoetryclub. There was a meeting last night, so if you search twitter for the #twitterpoetryclub tag, you’ll find oodles of new poems. To keep on top of when “meetings” are, check out the club’s online archive or follow the club’s organizer here. The club’s next meeting is currently scheduled for April 27.

And now for our optional prompt! Today, I challenge you to write a poem that takes the form of a dialogue. Your conversant could be real people, or be personifications, as in Andrew Marvell’s A Dialogue Between the Soul and the Body, or Yeats’ A Dialogue of Self and Soul. Like Marvell, and Yeats, you could alternate stanzas between your two speakers, or perhaps you could give them alternating lines. Your speakers could be personifications, like those in Marvell and Yeats’ poems, or they could be two real people. Hopefully, this prompt will give you a chance to represent different points of view in the same poem, or possibly to create a dramatic sense of movement and tension within the poem.

Happy writing!

Hello, everyone, and welcome back for what I hope will be a lucky thirteenth day of NaPoWriMo.

Our featured participant today is Somewhere In-Between, where the poem for Day 13 takes us deep inside the vocabulary of cars. I have to admit, whenever anyone points out a particularly interesting car to me, my reaction is “Oh, yes, I see that one seems to have wheels, and um, yes, it drives on roads.” But as this poem shows, even though cars aren’t my thing, other people’s enthusiasm for them is genuine, and has a language of its own.

And today’s featured poetry resource is an “oldie but a goodie” – Poetry Daily. The site features a new poem each day, largely drawn from newly published books and issues of journals. It’s a great way to find new poems and poets and books!

And now for our prompt (as always, it’s optional!). In keeping with the mysterious quality of the number 13, today I challenge you to write a riddle poem. This poem should describe something without ever naming it. Perhaps each line could be a different metaphor for the same object? Maybe the title of the poem can be the “answer” to the riddle. The result could be a bit like our Day One poems of negation, but the lines don’t need to be expressed in negatives. To get you thinking, here’s one of my favorite examples of a “riddle” poem – Sylvia Plath’s “Metaphors”:

I’m a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising.
Money’s new-minted in this fat purse.
I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I’ve eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there’s no getting off.

Happy writing!

Hello, everyone, and happy Sunday!

Our featured participant today is Colonialist’s Blog, where the poem for Day Eleven rather gently chides the whole idea of the Sapphics prompt, which unfortunately seems to have had more people knocking their heads against their desks than writing!

Today’s featured resource is Poetry Magazine’s National Poetry Month special download – a free digital copy of the April issue of Poetry Magazine, along with a playlist and video to accompany the issue.

And now for our prompt! Yesterday’s was a doozy, so today’s is much more laid-back (and optional, as always). It comes to us from Dr. Cynthia A. Cochran of Illinois College:
Here is a great prompt for anyone who likes to write descriptive prose but shudders at writing poetry–and it really works:

Describe in great detail your favorite room, place, meal, day, or person. You can do this in paragraph form.

Now cut unnecessary words like articles and determiners (a, the, that) and anything that isn’t really necessary for content; leave mainly nouns, verbs, a few adjectives.

Cut the lines where you see fit and, VOILA! A poem!

Welcome back, all, for the second Saturday of NaPoWriMo!

Today’s featured participant is Brittany’s Blog of Random Things, where the abecedarian poem for Day Ten has visual elements. Swoop it goes!

You’ve heard that clothes make the man? Well, it may be that they make the poet, too — our featured resources for the day seem to think so, at any rate! Here’s a bit of sartorial Saturday silliness, in the form of a tumblr dedicated to poets and shoes. To round things out, here’s a project dedicated to poets and their jeans. Maybe you’ll be inspired to write an ode to denim yourself?

Our (optional) prompt for today departs from such concerns, however. Today, rather than being casual, I challenge you to get rather classically formal, and compose a poem in Sapphics. These are quatrains whose first three lines have eleven syllables, and the fourth, just five. There is also a very strict meter that alternates trochees (a two-syllable foot, with the first syllable stressed, and the second unstressed) and dactyls (a three-syllable foot, with the first syllable stressed and the remainder unstressed). The first three lines consist of two trochees, a dactyl, and two more trochees. The fourth line is a dactyl, followed by a trochee.

It may be easier to hear the meter than to think about it – try reading this poem in Sapphics aloud to yourself, and you’ll see what an oracular tone it produces – the stressed beginnings of the lines produce a feeling of importance, while the unstressed syllables of the trochees keep the pace measured. Rhyming is optional, and if you begin to bridle at the strict meter, feel free to loosen it up!

Happy writing!