April 1 – It Begins!

Happy Tuesday, all, and Happy April 1. Today marks the start of another National/Global Poetry Writing Month!

If it’s your first time joining us, the process is quite simple. Just write a poem every day during the month of April. 30 days means 30 poems. We’ll have an optional prompt every day to help you along, as well as a resource. We’ll also be featuring a participant each day. And if you’re interested in looking at other people’s poems, sharing links to your daily efforts, and/or cheering along, a great way to do that is by clicking on the title of each day’s post. That will take you to a page with a comment section for the day.

But now, let’s get started!

Today’s featured participant is fitoori_scribes, where the self-portrait poem written in response to our early-bird prompt brings us some lovely similes and a nice play on “silver” and “sliver.”

This year, our daily resources will take the form of online museum collections and exhibits. Hopefully, you’ll find these to be at least entertaining, and you may even be able to use some of what you see as inspiration for your poems – particularly given that our prompts this year will all be themed around music and art. Today’s resource is the Getty Museum’s online exhibit on the Florentine Codex, a 16^th-century sort of encyclopedia created in Mexico by a Franciscan friar and a group of Nahua elders, authors, and artists. All twelve books are presented page by page, with translations into English. You can also look at individual illustrations. It’s really quite rich and wonderful.

And now, to round out our first day, here’s our optional prompt! As with pretty much any discipline, music and art have their own vocabulary. Today, we challenge you to take inspiration from this glossary of musical terms, or this glossary of art terminology, and write a poem that uses a new-to-you word. For (imaginary) extra credit, work in a phrase from, or a reference to, the Florentine Codex.

Happy writing!