Whoa! We’re already one-third of the way through Na/GloPoWriMo 2022. I hope you’ve enjoyed the challenge so far.

Today’s featured participant is Wren Jones, who brings us a very spring-y response to the nonet prompt.

Our featured online journal for today is Sporklet. In their most recent, seventeenth issue, I’ll point you to Gina Myers’ “Two For the Future” and  Becca Klaver’s “Derecho Diary” poems.

Today’s (optional) prompt is pretty simple – a love poem! If you’re having trouble getting into the right mood for a love poem, maybe you’ll find inspiration in one of my favorites, June Jordan’s “Poem for Haruko.”

Happy writing!

Welcome back, all, for the second Saturday of Na/GloPoWriMo.

Our featured daily participant is Writing in North Norfolk, where you’ll find a very breezy (pun intended) interpretation of Day Eight’s alter-ego prompt.

Today’s featured online magazine is Pine Hills Review, which is run by students and faculty at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York. This magazine publishes not in discrete issues, but on a rolling basis. Among the poems that Pine Hills Review has recently published, I’ll point you to Grant Clauser’s “Addendum to the Note on John Keats’ Grave Marker.”

And now for our (optional) daily prompt! Because it’s a Saturday, I thought I’d try a prompt that asks you to write in a specific form – the nonet! A nonet has nine lines. The first line has nine syllables, the second has eight, and so on until you get to the last line, which has just one syllable.

Happy writing!

Happy Friday, everyone, and happy eighth day of Na/GloPoWriMo.

Today’s featured participant is An Embarrassment of Riches, where you’ll find a poem about doorways in repsonse to Day Seven’s “proverbial” prompt.

Our featured online journal for the day is The Tiny, which started out as a print journal before moving online in 2017. In their latest issue, I’ll point you to two poems by Dan Brady.

And last but not least, here is our daily prompt (optional, as always). Today’s prompt comes to us from this list of “all-time favorite writing prompts.” It asks you to name your alter-ego, and then describe him/her in detail. Then write in your alter-ego’s voice. Maybe your alter-ego is a streetwise detective, or a superhero, or a very small goldfinch. Whoever or whatever your alternate self may be, I hope this prompt lets you stretch both your writing skills and your self-knowledge.

Happy writing!

Wow, everybody! We’re already a whole week into Na/GloPoWriMo 2022! If you’ve kept up with writing a poem a day so far, pat yourself on the back. And if you have fallen behind, no worries – there’s plenty of time to catch up – or just cut yourself some slack! While Na/GloPoWriMo is supposed to be a challenge, it’s supposed to be a fun one, not a slog.

Our featured participant for the day is Words with Ruth, where you’ll find not one, but two, poems inspired by Day Six’s acrostic-variation prompt.

Today’s featured online journal is Thrush, which has been publishing six issues a year since 2011.  Each issue is fairly short, giving you plenty of opportunity to savor the poems. In their latest issue, I’ll point you to Tennessee Hill’s “WE BUY BROKEN GOLD” and Chisom Okafor’s “hymn to the bowstring.”

And now for our (optional) prompt! Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem that argues against, or somehow questions, a proverb or saying. They say that “all cats are black at midnight,” but really? Surely some of them remain striped. And maybe there is an ill wind that blows some good. Perhaps that wind just has some mild dyspepsia.  Whatever phrase you pick, I hope you have fun complicating its simplicity. Happy writing!

Welcome to Day Six of Na/GloPoWriMo, everyone!

We have two featured participants for today, because I just couldn’t choose between Salovie‘s tongue-in-cheek take on mother dragons, and Serendippity‘s equally ironic poem about Cyclops dating protocols.

Our featured online magazine today is Couplet. This is a relatively new journal, with just two issues so far. Couplet focuses on publishing pairs of poems that complement one another. From their most recent issue, I’ll point out Sarah Gridley’s poems “Aquatic” and “Anchor,” and W. Todd Kaneko’s “How to Stay Safe” and “When Our Twin Sons are Born.”

Finally, here’s our optional prompt for the day. Many of us had to write “acrostic” poems in school. These are poems in which the first letter of each line spells a word as you go down the poem. For example, the first line of an acrostic poem that spells the word “ghost” would start with a word beginning with “g”; the second line would start with a word beginning with an “h,” and so on.

Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a variation of an acrostic poem. But rather than spelling out a word with the first letters of each line, I’d like you to write a poem that reproduces a phrase with the first words of each line. Perhaps you could write a poem in which the first words of each line, read together, reproduce a treasured line of poetry? You could even try using a newspaper headline or something from a magazine article. Whatever you choose, I hope you enjoy this prompt.

Happy writing!

Hello, all, and happy fifth day of Na/GloPoWriMo.

Our featured participant today is Narrative Paralysis, where the write-a-prompt prompt for Day Four produced an extremely zany adventure. I’m not sure if it’s a prompt, but it’s definitely a poem! Or a short story. Or, well, it’s something all right!

Today’s featured online magazine is Waxwing, which has been going strong since 2013, and is much admired for the high quality of the work found in its (web)pages. In their newest issue, I’ll point you to Alfredo Aguilar’s “Palomar Mountain” and Carly Joy Miller’s “Beloved Litany.”

And now for our prompt (optional, as always). Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem about a mythical person or creature doing something unusual – or at least something that seems unusual in relation to that person/creature. For example, what does Hercules do when he loses a sock in the dryer? If a mermaid wants to pick up rock-climbing as a hobby, how does she do that? What happens when a mountain troll makes pancakes?

Happy writing!

Happy first Monday of Na/GloPoWriMo, everyone. I hope you’ve enjoyed your first few days of this year’s challenge.

Today’s featured participant is Anna Enbom, who brings us a glosa full of bravado. I was so happy to see how many of you really took to the glosa prompt — it was a complex one, for sure!

Our daily featured online magazine is Diagram. This is one of the grand-daddies of online journals, as it’s been published for more than 20 years. In its most recent issue, I enjoyed particularly Lucy Schiller’s “Gentle Leader.”

Finally, here’s our optional prompt! Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem . . . in the form of a poetry prompt. If that sounds silly, well, maybe it is! But it’s not without precedent. The poet Mathias Svalina has been writing surrealist prompt-poems for quite a while, posting them to Instagram. You can find examples here, and here, and here.

Happy writing!

Welcome back, everyone, for the third day of Na/GloPoWriMo 2022.

Our featured participant for the day is this and other poems, which presents us with a poem based on the word “afterwinter” — a word that seems to have inspired many of you who are suffering through April cold snaps.

Today, our featured online magazine is Rust and Moth, which has been publishing quarterly since 2008. You can browse all of their past issues here.  From their newest issue, I’ll point out Leah Claire Kaminski’s lyrical “Flung Girl,” and Lucia Owen’s moving “The Gardener’s Prayer.”

And now for our (optional) prompt. This one is a bit complex, so I saved it for a Sunday. It’s a Spanish form called a “glosa” – literally a poem that glosses, or explains, or in some way responds to another poem. The idea is to take a quatrain from a poem that you like, and then write a four-stanza poem that explains or responds to each line of the quatrain, with each of the quatrain’s four lines in turn forming the last line of each stanza. Traditionally, each stanza has ten lines, but don’t feel obligated to hold yourself to that! Here’s a nice summary of the glosa form to help you get started.

Happy writing!

A very happy Saturday to you all! I hope the first day of Na/GloPoWriMo whetted your appetite for even more poetry.

Today’s featured participant is The Cat’s Pajam, which gives us a dreamy, sensual, and mysterious poem in response to Day One’s “story about the body” prompt.

Our daily featured online magazine is TYPO, which has published thirty-three issues, all of which you can browse. From their newest issue, I’ll point out Jasmine Dream Wagner’s “Fallen Angels,” a rumination on life in the internet age.

And now for our daily prompt (optional, as always). Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem based on a word featured in a tweet from Haggard Hawks, an account devoted to obscure and interesting English words. Will you choose a word like “aprosexia,” which means “an inability to concentrate”? Or maybe something like “greenout,” which is “the relief a person who has worked or lived in a snowy area for a long time feels on seeing something fresh and green for the first time”? Whatever you choose, happy writing!

Hello, everyone! The first day of Na/GloPoWriMo 2022 is finally here, and I hope you are feeling fresh and ready to versify!

Our featured participant for the day is M. Jay Dixit, whose response to our Dickinson-based early-bird prompt cannily works both a line of Dickinson’s and an echoing “forever” into each stanza.

Today, our featured online magazine is Sixth Finch. Founded in 2008, Sixth Finch publishes new issues quarterly. All of their past issues are easily browsable, and they publish a wide range of work. From their newest issue, I’ll point out Jose Hernandez Diaz’s poem “The Conformist,” which I found quietly funny, and Nicole Callihan’s poem “On the Second Day of the Third Decade in the 21^st Century,” which is a very down-to-earth and moving (and again a little funny – what can I say, I like funny poems!) meditation on time.

And last but not least, our optional prompt! I got this one from a workshop I did last year with Beatrix Gates, and I’ve found it really helpful. The prompt is based on Robert Hass’s remarkable prose poem, “A Story About the Body.” The idea is to write your own prose poem that, whatever title you choose to give it, is a story about the body. The poem should contain an encounter between two people, some spoken language, and at least one crisp visual image.

Happy writing!