Hello, all! Tomorrow is April 1, and the first day of NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo 2020! But since April 1 arrives a bit earlier in some parts of the globe than the east coast of the United States, we have an early-bird resource and prompt for you.

Today’s resource is The Slowdown, a daily poetry podcast hosted by former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith. Podcasts are a nice way to add some poetry to your life. They also give you a chance to hear the rhythm of poetry out loud. Sometimes it can be very surprising, if you’ve been reading a poet on the page for many years, to hear their voice out loud, and realize it’s much different than the voice you’ve been giving that same poet in your head.

And now, in the spirit of an early-bird prompt, I’d like to invite you to write a poem about your favorite bird. As this collection of snippets from longer poems suggests, birds have been inspiring poets for a very long time indeed!

If you don’t have a favorite bird, or are having trouble picking one, perhaps I might interest you in my favorite bird, the American Woodcock? These softball-sized guys are exactly the color of the leaves on the floor of a Maine forest, and they turn up each spring to make buzzy peent noises, fly up over meadows in elaborate courtship displays, and to do little rocking dances that YouTube jokesters delight in setting to music. They are also quite odd looking, as every part of their body appears to be totally out of proportion with the rest. For a poetic bonus, they also have many regional nicknames. In Maine, they’re often called “timberdoodles,” but other regionalisms for them include “night partridge,” “mudbat,” “prairie turtle,” Labrador twister,” “bogsucker,” “wafflebird,” “billdad,” and “hokumpoke.”

Tomorrow we’ll be back with another resource, prompt, and our first featured participant. In the meantime, happy writing!

Hello, everybody! In a mere two days, April will begin, and so will National/Global Poetry Writing Month.

We’ll be back tomorrow with an early-bird resource and a prompt for all of you that see April begin a bit sooner than it does on the east coast of the United States, where napowrimo.net makes its headquarters.

In the meantime, however, to whet your poetry appetite, why not check out noted thespian and space captain Sir Patrick Stewart’s twitter account, where he is posting a video of himself reading one of Shakespeare’s sonnets every day, under #sonnetaday?

Yes, it’s true! We’re just three days out from the beginning of National/Global Poetry Writing Month, when people all over the world take up the challenge of writing a poem every day for all of April.

We’ll be back tomorrow with a new poetry resource for you, and the next day we’ll follow up with another resource and an early-bird prompt. After that, it’s off to the races — each day we’ll be featuring a participant and a poetry-related resource, and providing a (totally optional!) prompt to help anyone who is having trouble coming up with lyrical inspiration on their own.

For now, why not grease your lyrical wheels with a silly test that aims to see if you can tell the difference between poems written by humans and those written by computers?

Hello, everyone! I hope you’re all staying safe and healthy out there, and that you are getting excited about April 1, and the beginning of National/Global Poetry Writing Month 2020.

We’re busily writing prompts and researching poetry resources, to make Na/GloPoWriMo as inspirational and educational as ever. And our “Submit Your Site” page is open and ready to receive any links to websites, blogs, or other internet-places where you’ll be posting work.

We’ll be back on March 29 with the first of three countdown posts (inclusive of an early-bird prompt on March 31). If you have any questions for us in the meantime, you can send them to napowrimonet-AT-gmail-DOT-com.

It’s hard to believe that it’s March 15, already, but here we are — just 16 days away from Na/GloPoWriMo 2020!

We’ll be back on March 25 (which marks the one-week-to-go point) with some pre-April posts, but in the meantime, for those of you who intend to post your poems to a blog or other webspace, we have a few “buttons” or “badges” below that you are welcome to use! And of course, please go ahead and submit the link to your site for inclusion on our list of participants’ sites, using the “Submit Your Site” form at the top of the page!

Come, all you poets and versifiers, all you line-crafters yearning to breathe free!

Today is March 1, and that means not only that spring is on its way, but that we just have 30 days to go until the start of National/Global Poetry Writing Month, otherwise known as Na/GloPoWriMo!

What is Na/GloPoWriMo? It’s simple — it’s just the month of April, but as experienced by people all over the world who commit to writing a poem every day for the whole month. That’s 30 poems apiece. They don’t have to be long, they don’t have to be “good” (whatever that means) — they just have to be written!

How does it work? That’s simple, too — just write a poem every day from April 1 to April 30. There’s no requirement that you publish or share them. You can write them in your own notebook; you can keep them all to yourself. But if you do decide to post your efforts to a blog or other internet space this year, you can submit the link using our “Submit Your Site” form, and your website will show up in our “Participants’ Sites” list.

As in prior years, we’ll be posting an optional daily prompt to help you get inspired, as well as featuring a different participant each day. We’ll also be featuring a daily poetry resource — a link to an interesting essay, video, recording, or article that we hope will help you to get — and stay — excited about poetry.

As April approaches, watch this space for further updates and of course, once April is here, you can come here for prompts and resources every day. And if you have questions in the meantime, please contact us at napowrimonet AT gmail DOT com.