Day 30

Hello, all! It’s the final day of NaPoWriMo 2013. Thank you all for participating — this has been the biggest year yet. More than 2000 people signed up!

Our poetry-related link for the day is to Lemonhound, where you’ll find essays and reviews on poetry and poetics, as well as new poems by contemporary poets.

Our featured participant’s blog for the day is Joanna Penn Cooper. Her poems have a serious levity to them — a sort of humorous gravity. Is that a contradiction? Maybe, but take a look and perhaps you’ll see what I mean.

And now our final (and still optional) prompt! I know I’ve used this one in prior years, but it’s one of my favorites, so bear with me. Find a shortish poem that you like, and rewrite each line, replacing each word (or as many words as you can) with words that mean the opposite. For example, you might turn “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” to “I won’t contrast you with a winter’s night.” Your first draft of this kind of opposite poem will likely need a little polishing, but this is a fun way to respond to a poem you like, while also learning how that poem’s rhetorical strategies really work. (It’s sort of like taking a radio apart and putting it back together, but for poetry). Happy writing!