Day Six

Happy first Friday of Na/GloPoWriMo, all. We hope your poetic momentum is building as we head into our first weekend of the month.

Today’s featured participant is Voyagedesmots, where the photo-plus-translation poem for Day 4 is short, but wonderfully lyrical and beautiful!

We have a new craft resource for you today, consisting of Alberto Ríos’s thoughts on the poetic line. Unless you are writing prose poems, poems have line breaks. Which means we have to decide where we are breaking our lines, and why. I often get into the bad habit, when drafting, of breaking a line just because it looks long in comparison with the other lines in the poem. That’s not a very good reason! While line-breaking is more art than science (sometimes a break just feels right), I’ve been trying to take more time lately to slow down and really think about where a line should break.

And last but not least, here is our prompt for the day (optional, as always). Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem that stretches your comfort zone with line breaks. That could be a poem with very long lines, or very short lines. Or a poem that blends the two. You might break to emphasize (or de-emphasize) sounds or rhymes, or to create a moment of hesitation in the middle of a thought. Looking for inspiration? You might take a look at this poem by Lorine Niedecker, this poem by Stanley Kunitz, or this one by Amiri Baraka.

Happy writing!