Happy final Friday of Na/GloPoWriMo, all.

Today’s featured participant is:

Our daily resource is the online galleries of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, one of India’s foremost museums. It’s a pleasure to browse through the images here. I particularly liked these anklets that aren’t just jewelry but a sort of personal piggy bank, this portrait of the fabulously mustachioed J.M. Cursetjee, and this highly decorative flask, originally meant to hold gunpowder!

Finally, here is our optional prompt for the day. In her poem, senzo, Evie Shockley recounts the experience of being at a live concert, relating it the act of writing poetry. Today we’d like to challenge you to write a poem that recounts an experience of your own in hearing live music, and tells how it moves you. It could be a Rolling Stones concert, your little sister’s middle school musical, or just someone whistling – it just needs to be something meaningful to you.

Happy writing!

Welcome back, everyone, for Day Twenty-Four of our annual poetry-writing challenge!

Our featured participant for the day is haphazard, whose birdsong poem for Day Twenty-Three places primacy on the “gaps in the music.”

Today’s daily resource is the Art Institute of Chicago, where just searching the collection for the word “stars,” I found this amazing quilt, a very fancy-looking Soviet plate, and an illustration of the constellation Leo from a medieval Arabic astronomical guide.

And now for today’s (optional) prompt. One fundamental aspect of music is its communal nature. While music can be made by a single person, of course, it’s often made in groups. Rock bands, orchestras, church choirs – they all involve making music together. And often, we’re playing or performing music that was written by, or inspired by, other people.

In her poem, Duet, Lisa Russ Spaar tells the story of two sisters making music together, based on two pre-existing songs by different artists. Today, we challenge you to write a poem that involves people making music together, and that references – with a lyric or line – a song or poem that is important to you.

Happy writing!

Happy Wednesday, everyone, and happy twenty-third day of National/Global Poetry Writing Month.

Today, our featured participant is Elizabeth Boquet, who brings us a poem with a poem in it in response to Day Twenty-Two’s lessons-based prompt.

Our resource for the day is the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The museum’s online image collection is practically endless, and to call it varied would be an understatement. There’s over 2,000 images just of baseball cards! To say nothing of candelabra featuring what appears to be a scandalized swan, a processional sword belonging to the guardsman of a sixteenth-century German duke, and a couch that I would very much like to fall upon in a melodramatic swoon.

And last but not least, here’s today’s (optional) prompt. Humans might be the only species to compose music, but we’re quite famously not the only ones to make it. Birdsong is all around us – even in cities, there are sparrows chirping, starlings making a racket. And it’s hardly surprising that birdsong has inspired poets. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem that focuses on birdsong. Need examples? Try A.E. Stallings’ “Blackbird Etude,” or for an old-school throwback, Shelley’s “To a Skylark.”

Happy writing!

Welcome back, everyone, for the twenty-second day of National/Global Poetry Writing Month.

Our featured participant today is Cutting Hail, who brings us not just one poem in response to Day 21’s “instructional” prompt, but three!

Today’s daily resource is the Uffizi Gallery, in Florence, Italy. If you are at all interested in Renaissance Italian masters, it’s the right place to get an eyeful of Titians, Caravaggios, Botticellis, Canallettos, and da Vincis.

And now for today’s optional prompt! Did you take music lessons as a child? Despite having all the musical talent of a dried-out lemon, I took two years of piano lessons. I was required to practice for half an hour a day, and showed my disgruntlement by playing certain very annoying songs – like Turkey in the Straw – over and over, as loudly as possible. But while I thought of the lessons as a kind of torture, I’m glad as an adult to have taken them – if only for the greater dexterity it gave to my hands!

In her poem, Thanking My Mother for Piano Lessons, Diane Wakoski is far more grateful than I ever managed to be, describing the act of playing as a “relief” from loneliness and worry, and as enlarging her life with something beautiful. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem about something you’ve done – whether it’s music lessons, or playing soccer, crocheting, or fishing, or learning how to change a tire – that gave you a similar kind of satisfaction, and perhaps still does.

Happy writing!

Happy Monday, all, and a very happy twenty-first day of Na/GloPoWriMo.

Today, our featured participant is Sunra Rainz, whose Roethke-inspired poem for Day Twenty has an irresistable and friendly rhythm.

Our daily resource is the Shanghai Museum, where you will find everything from a carved hairpin featuring two mustachioed fellows, to a hot-pink Taoist master, to a calligraphic ode to wine.

And now here’s our daily (optional) prompt. Sawako Nakayasu’s poem “Improvisational Score” is a rather surreal prose poem describing an imaginary musical piece that proceeds in a very unmusical way. Today, try your hand at writing your own poem in which something that normally unfolds in a set and well understood way  — like a baseball game or dance recital – goes haywire, but is described as if it is all very normal.

Happy writing!

What with time’s way of marching inexorably on, we suppose it was inevitable. We’ve come to the 2/3-way point of Na/GloPoWriMo.

Our featured participant today is Anna Enbom, whose tragedy/ballad poem for Day Nineteen is less tragic (thankfully) than it could be.

Today’s resource is the online galleries of the Tate Modern, where there’s oodles to discover, including a sculpture that sort of makes us think of the Loch Ness Monster holding a beach ball, a swirly bit of op/pop art reminiscent of either candy or a mustache, and this interesting exploration of five different artist-made books.

And now, here’s today’s (optional) prompt. Below, you’ll find Theodore Roethke’s poem, “In Evening Air.”

In Evening Air

1

A dark theme keeps me here,
Though summer blazes in the vireo’s eye.
Who would be half possessed
By his own nakedness?
Waking’s my care–
I’ll make a broken music, or I’ll die.

2

Ye littles, lie more close!
Make me, O Lord, a last, a simple thing
Time cannot overwhelm.
Once I transcended time:
A bud broke to a rose,
And I rose from a last diminishing.

3

I look down the far light
And I behold the dark side of a tree
Far down a billowing plain,
And when I look again,
It’s lost upon the night–
Night I embrace, a dear proximity.

4

I stand by a low fire
Counting the wisps of flame, and I watch how
Light shifts upon the wall.
I bid stillness be still.
I see, in evening air,
How slowly dark comes down on what we do.

So, let’s face it: this poem is weird. The rhythm is odd, the rhymes are too, and the language is strangely prophetic and not at all “conversational.” Despite – or maybe because – of this, it has a hypnotic quality, as if it were all inevitable. Your challenge is, with this poem in mind, to write a poem informed by musical phrasing or melody, that employs some form of soundplay (rhyme, meter, assonance, alliteration). One way to approach this is to think of a song you know and then basically write new lyrics that fit the original song’s rhythm/phrasing.

Happy writing!

Happy Saturday, everyone. We hope you’re ready to write some poems!

Today’s featured participant is Sara Hardy, who took me back to my 1980s childhood with her driving-and -singing poem for Day Eighteen.

Our resource for the day is a bit goofy. It’s the Gallery of Strange Museums. Some of the museums here don’t strike me as all that strange – more very local or specific. But the Wingnut Museum is definitely a bit odd, as is the World’s Largest Spool of Thread (less a museum than a roadside attraction), while the Hattiesburg Pocket Museum is a testament to the fact that people can – and do – make their own fun.

And now for our daily prompt – optional as always. This one is inspired by Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s poem “Song.”

The word “tragedy” comes from the Greek for “goat song.” The song in Kelly’s poem is quite literally a goat song. The poem also describes a tragedy, both in the modern sense of an awful event, and the ancient dramatic sense of a play in which someone does something terrible, and the play’s action shows the consequences.

The poem has a timeless, could-have-happened-anywhere/anywhen quality that I associate with blues and folk ballads – including murder ballads (a subgenre of song dealing with a gruesome crime, first arising from broadsheet ballads sold at English executions, and which later came to America in forms like “The Knoxville Girl” and then morphed their way into country music).

Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem that tells a story in the style of a blues song or ballad. One way into this prompt may be to use it to retell a family tragedy or story, or to retell a crime or tragic event that occurred in your hometown.

Happy(?) writing!

We’re three Fridays down, with just one left to go in this year’s National/Global Poetry Writing Month!

Our featured participant for the day is Poems by Sidra, where the surrealist-inspired poem of friendship for Day Seventeen rocks some fantastic similes — it’s all about those teeth!

Today’s resource is a virtual visit to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Gardner, who died in 1924, was a devoted and very wealthy art collector who built a Venetian-style palace (in Boston) to house her treasures. The museum building is beautiful and well known for its gorgeous courtyard. But the Gardner is also well known for having been the unfortunate site of one of the greatest – and still unsolved – art heists of all time. If you can figure out whodunnit, there might be $10 million in it for you.

And now for today’s (optional) prompt. Like our villanelle prompt from a week ago, this prompt plays around with song lyrics, but in a very specific context – singing while riding in a car. Take a look at Ellen Bass’s poem, “You’re the Top.” Now, craft your own poem that recounts an experience of driving/riding and singing, incorporating a song lyric.

Happy writing!

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

Today’s featured participant is Words with Ruth, where the soundtrack-inspired poem for Day Sixteen uses repetition, along with simple and conversational language, to convincingly recreate a moment in space and time.

Our resource today is Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, where you can find a smug ceramic pelican, a samurai’s ceremonial suit of armor, and a photograph of the French impressionist painter Camille Pissarro dressed as a Venezuelan herdsman.

And now for our daily optional prompt. The surrealist painters Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington moved to Mexico during the height of World War II, where they began a life-long friendship. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem themed around friendship, with imagery or other ideas taken from a painting by Carrington, and a painting by Varo.

Happy writing!

Happy Wednesday, all. We hope you’re having a fine beginning to the second half of April.

Our featured participant today is A Rhyme a Day, where the MC5/Jane Kenyon-inspired poem for Day Fifteen packs a lot of punch into six short lines.

Today’s resource is the Museum of Photographic Art, which is part of the San Diego Museum of Art. Through the museum’s online collection, you can explore a number of current and past exhibitions, including a series of portraits by Bern Schwartz (I rather like the one of Ralph Ellison) and a group of very painterly compositions by Lynn G. Fayman.

And now for our optional prompt! The Kay-Ryan-inspired prompt for Day Fourteen asked you to take inspiration from the sounds of the natural world. Today’s prompt twists that idea around a bit. Start by taking a look at this poem by James Schuyler.

FAURÉ’S SECOND PIANO QUARTET

On a day like this the rain comes
down in fat and random drops among
the ailanthus leaves—“the tree
of Heaven”—the leaves that on moon-
lit nights shimmer black and blade-
shaped at this third-floor window.
And there are bunches of small green
knobs, buds, crowded together. The
rapid music fills in the spaces of
the leaves. And the piano comes in,
like an extra heartbeat, dangerous
and lovely. Slower now, less like
the leaves, more like the rain which
almost isn’t rain, more like thawed-
out hail. All this beauty in the
mess of this small apartment on
West Twentieth in Chelsea, New York.
Slowly the notes pour out, slowly,
more slowly still, fat rain falls.

Like Kay Ryan’s poem, this one invites us to imagine music in the context of a place, but more along the lines of a soundtrack laid on top of the location, rather than just natural sounds. Today, try writing a poem that similarly imposes a particular song on a place. Describe the interaction between the place and the music using references to a plant and, if possible, incorporate a quotation – bonus points for using a piece of everyday, overheard language.

Happy writing!