Day One

Hello, everyone! It’s the first day of NaPoWriMo – I hope your poetry muscles are all warmed up.

We’ll be featuring a participant’s blog and an online poetry resource each day, as well as an (optional, as always) prompt. If you have ideas for featured participants or resources, or an idea for a prompt, let us know at napowrimonet-AT-gmail-DOT-com – we’ll credit it you if we use them!

Today’s featured participating site is the Poetry Month Scouts (PoMoSco) blog. Organized by the Found Poetry Review, the blog’s 213 participants are writing experimental and found poems each day for the month of April. They’ve gotten right out of the gate with a variety of poems produced by remixing and erasing existing texts.

And our first featured resource is the humorously-named Real Pants – a new online literary blog from the folks behind Publishing Genius Press. At Real Pants, you’ll find interviews with poets, prompts, and poet-written columns about everything from book cover design to fashion, and much, much more. I’ve really enjoyed reading along with Real Pants since the site launched in January – I hope you will, too.

And now, without further ado, our optional prompt. Today’s prompt is a poem of negation – yes (or maybe, no), I challenge you to write a poem that involves describing something in terms of what it is not, or not like. For example, if you chose a whale as the topic of your poem, you might have lines like “It does not settle down in trees at night, cooing/Nor will it fit in your hand.” Happy writing!