Welcome back, all, for the thirteenth day of NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo 2020.

Our featured participant for the day is Wiederholt Fallen, where Day 12’s triolet prompt resulted into a short-lined gem.

Today, our poetry resource is the archives of The Found Poetry Review. During its five years of operation, this journal specialized in publishing poems that were “found,” rather than written. What does that mean? Well, it means poems collaged from existing language, rather than newly created from scratch. A sort of borrowing from the universe.

There’s a pithy phrase attributed to T.S. Eliot: “Good poets borrow; great poets steal.” (He actually said something a bit different, and phrased it a bit more pompously – after all, this is T.S. Eliot we’re talking about). Nonetheless, our optional prompt for today (developed by Rachel McKibbens, who is well-known for her imaginative and inspiring prompts) plays on the idea of stealing. Today, I challenge you to write a non-apology for the things you’ve stolen. Maybe it’s something as small as your sister’s hairbrush (or maybe it was your sister’s boyfriend!) Regardless, I hope this sly prompt generates some provocative verse for you.

Happy writing!

Hello, all. I hope this twelfth day of Na/GloPoWriMo is treating you well.

Today, our featured participant is Katie Staten, who provides us with a humorous twist on Day Eleven’s floriography pompt.

Our poetry resource for the day is Ours Poetica, a poetry YouTube Channel, where you will find new video poems three times a week.

For today’s prompt (optional, as always), I’d like to challenge you to write a triolet. These eight-line poems involve repeating lines and a tight rhyme scheme. The repetitions and rhymes can lend themselves to humorous poems, as well as to poems expressing dramatic or sorrowful moods. And sometimes the repetitions can be used in deceptive ways, by splitting the words in a given line into different sentences, and making subtle changes, as in this powerful triolet by Sandra McPherson.

Happy writing!

Happy Saturday, everyone, and welcome back for the eleventh day of Na/GloPoWriMo 2020.

Our featured participant for the day is wordshophop, where the hay(na)ku prompt for Day Ten resulted in a seemingly simple but powerful poem.

Today’s poetry resource is a twitter hashtag, #InternationalPoetryCircle. You’ll find tons of videos under this hashtag of poets all over the world reading individual poems. If you’re looking for something to do this weekend, why not create your own video, and add it to the parade?

Our optional prompt for the day is based on the concept of the language of flowers. Have you ever heard, for example, that yellow roses stand for friendship, white roses for innocence, and red roses for love? Well, there are as many potential meanings for flowers as there are flowers. The Victorians were particularly ga-ga for giving each other bouquets that were essentially decoder-rings of meaning. For today, I challenge you to write a poem in which one or more flowers take on specific meanings. And if you’re having trouble getting started, why not take a gander at this glossary of flower meanings? (You can find a plain-text version here). Feel free to make use of these existing meanings, or make up your own.

Happy writing!

Wow, everyone – we’re 1/3 of the way through Na/GloPoWriMo! Time flies when you’re writing poetry.

Today’s featured participant is Mexcessive, where the concrete poem for Day Nine opens doors (or maybe closes them?).

Our poetry resource for the day is From the Fishouse, an online archive of audio recordings of emerging poets. Maybe add some poetry to your daily listening (it’s more relaxing than the news – usually!)

Today’s prompt (optional, as always) is another one from the archives, first suggested to us by long-time Na/GloPoWriMo participant Vince Gotera. It’s the hay(na)ku). Created by the poet Eileen Tabios and named by Vince, the hay(na)ku is a variant on the haiku. A hay(na)ku consists of a three-line stanza, where the first line has one word, the second line has two words, and the third line has three words. You can write just one, or chain several together into a longer poem. For example, you could write a hay(na)ku sonnet, like the one that Vince himself wrote back during NaPoWriMo 2012!

Happy  writing!

Welcome back, everyone, for the ninth day of Na/GloPoWriMo!

Our featured participant today is Hephaestus’ Waste and Cosmic Rubble, where the borrow-a-line prompt for Day 8 resulted in a Plath-inspired foray into sensuality.

Today’s resource is Kirsten Kaschock’s chapbook, Windowboxing. Kaschock, a dancer as well as a poet, titles her poems using neologisms or portmanteaus, and each one proceeds as a series of essay-like sentences. The poems are interspersed with drawings, and some are even formatted in the shapes of boxes, forcing the reader to turn the book (or their head) and engage with the poems as they move through space.

Our prompt for the day (optional as always) is inspired by Kaschock’s use of space to organize her poems. Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a “concrete” poem – a poem in which the lines and words are organized to take a shape that reflects in some way the theme of the poem. This might seem like a very modernist idea, but poets have been writing concrete poems since the 1600s! Your poem can take a simple shape, like a box or ball, or maybe you’ll have fun trying something more elaborate, like this poem in the shape of a Christmas tree.

Happy writing!

Happy eighth day of NaPoWriMo, all.

Our featured participant today is clayandbranches, where the news poem for Day 7 takes an article about a far-off world and brings it close to home..

Today’s poetry resource is a series of twitter accounts that tweet phrases from different poets’ work. The Sylvia Plath Bot, as you might expect, tweets snippets of Plath. @PercyBotShelley tweets Shelley, @ruefle_exe tweets bits of Mary Ruefle’s poems, and @carsonbot and @sikenpoems send into the world small fragments of the work of Anne Carson and Richard Siken.

And if you’re feeling puckish, perhaps you might enjoy (or enjoy the act of not-enjoying) the “poems” created by @VogonB. If you’ve ever read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you may remember the Vogons as the aggressive aliens who, in addition to destroying the Earth, have an unpleasant habit of reading their poetry – known as the third worst in the entire universe – to their victims.

Our prompt for the day (optional as always) asks you to peruse the work of one or more of these twitter bots, and use a line or two, or a phrase or even a word that stands out to you, as the seed for your own poem. Need an example? Well, there’s actually quite a respectable lineage of poems that start with a line by another poet, such as this poem by Robert Duncan, or this one by Lisa Robertson.

Happy writing!

Happy Tuesday, everybody, and Happy One Week of Na/GloPoWriMo!

Our featured participant today is Sufia Khatoon, whose poem for Day Six’s Boschian prompt is rife with the desires of birds. And may I say how happy I am that so many of you enjoyed the prompt? I was a bit worried about this one, as Bosch is definitely strange. But many of you seem to have found the strange quite inspirational!

Our poetry resource for this seventh day of Na/GoPoWriMo consists of three Twitter accounts that provide all sort of interesting poetry-related “news:” The Poetry Foundation, The Poetry Society (U.K.), and the Poetry Society of America.

And speaking of news, today our prompt (optional, of course) is another oldie-but-goodie: a poem based on a news article. Frankly, I understand why you might be avoiding the news lately, but this is a good opportunity to find some “weird” and poetical news stories for inspiration. A few potential candidates:

“Earth Has Acquired a Brand New Moon That’s About the Size of a Car,”

 “Ohio Man Seeks World Record with Beer-Only Lent Diet”

“Pablo Escobar’s ‘Cocaine Hippos’ May Be Restoring Colombia’s Ecosystem”

“Researchers Discover Faraway Planet Where the Rain is Made of Iron”

Happy writing!

Hello, everyone! I hope the act of writing a poem today helps to cure your Monday Blahs.

Today, our featured participant is Algae and Silt, where the 20-little-projects prompt for Day Five resulted in a multilingual tour-de-force.

Our poetry resource today is an online poetry journal, The Ekphrastic Review. As its name suggests, this magazine publishes only work inspired by works of visual art, and often provides images of the specific paintings alongside each poem.

Today’s (optional) prompt is ekphrastic in nature – but rather particular! Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem from the point of view of one person/animal/thing from Hieronymous Bosch’s famous (and famously bizarre) triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. Whether you take the position of a twelve-legged clam, a narwhal with a cocktail olive speared on its horn, a man using an owl as a pool toy, or a backgammon board being carried through a crowd by a fish wearing a tambourine on its head, I hope that you find the experience deliriously amusing https://truetone.com/v3-series/jekyll-hyde/ . And if the thought of speaking in the voice of a porcupine-as-painted-by-a-man-who-never-saw-one leaves you cold, perhaps you might write from the viewpoint of Bosch himself? Very little is known about him, so there’s plenty of room for invention, embroidery, and imagination.

Happy writing!

Happy Sunday, all!

Our featured participant today is Side Trips, where the response to Day 4’s dream-based prompt comes with a side of Prufrock.

Today’s poetry resource is Entropy’s “Where to Submit” page. If you are thinking about submitting your work for consideration by journals and presses, this is a wonderful resource for learning about which ones are accepting work, what kind of work they’re looking for, and just finding new magazines to read!

Our (optional) prompt for today is one that we have used in past years, but which I love to come back to, because it so often takes me to new and unusual places, and results in fantastic poems. It’s called the “Twenty Little Poetry Projects,” and was originally developed by Jim Simmerman. The challenge is to use/do all of the following in the same poem. Of course,  if you can’t fit all twenty projects into your poem, or a few of them get your poem going, that is just fine too!

1. Begin the poem with a metaphor.
2. Say something specific but utterly preposterous.
3. Use at least one image for each of the five senses, either in succession or scattered randomly throughout the poem.
4. Use one example of synesthesia (mixing the senses).
5. Use the proper name of a person and the proper name of a place.
6. Contradict something you said earlier in the poem.
7. Change direction or digress from the last thing you said.
8. Use a word (slang?) you’ve never seen in a poem.
9. Use an example of false cause-effect logic.
10. Use a piece of talk you’ve actually heard (preferably in dialect and/or which you don’t understand).
11. Create a metaphor using the following construction: “The (adjective) (concrete noun) of (abstract noun) . . .”
12. Use an image in such a way as to reverse its usual associative qualities.
13. Make the persona or character in the poem do something he or she could not do in “real life.”
14. Refer to yourself by nickname and in the third person.
15. Write in the future tense, such that part of the poem seems to be a prediction.
16. Modify a noun with an unlikely adjective.
17. Make a declarative assertion that sounds convincing but that finally makes no sense.
18. Use a phrase from a language other than English.
19. Make a non-human object say or do something human (personification).
20. Close the poem with a vivid image that makes no statement, but that “echoes” an image from earlier in the poem.

Happy writing!

Hello, all, and happy fourth day of NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo!

Today’s featured participant is 7eyedwonder, where, from Day 3’s rhymes-and-near-rhymes prompt, a mighty ode to bread has risen (like dough…it’s risen…get it?).

Our poetry resource today isn’t exactly a poetry resource. Rather, it is a series of very silly twitter accounts. One thing that poetry is often said to do is make us see the familiar in a new way, and expose us to the magic of everyday life. These twitter accounts do something similar. For example @MagicRealismBot provides daily doses of weirdness, and poet Mathias Svalina’s longstanding @dreamdeliveryer does the same (Mathias also has a subscription service through which you can get dreams sent directly to you in the mail, or, if he is in your city, delivered in person!) And if that’s not enough, perhaps you will enjoy the strangeness of @GardensBritish, or the whimsy of @A_single_bear?

Our prompt for the day (optional as always) takes its cue from our gently odd resources, and asks you to write a poem based on an image from a dream. We don’t always remember our dreams, but images or ideas from them often stick with us for a very long time. I definitely have some nightmares I haven’t been able to forget, but I’ve also witnessed very lovely things in dreams (like snow falling on a flood-lit field bordered by fir trees, as seen through a plate glass window in a very warm and inviting kitchen). Need an example of a poem rooted in dream-based imagery? Try this one by Michael Collier.

Happy writing!