Welcome back, everyone, for the 27^th day of NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo 2020.

Today’s featured participant is Ordinary Average Thoughts, where Day 26’s “almanac” poem get entwined in the zeitgeist.

Our poetry resource for the day is a digital presentation of a rather strange book. Since the late 1930s, Harvard University has hosted The Morris Gray Lecture Series, featuring mainly poets, and simultaneously has collected the signatures of all the lecturers in a large ledger. You can explore a PDF of the ledger here. Who’d have thought that W.H. Auden’s signature would be so tight and small? Theodore Roethke signed on the wrong side of the page, and some unidentified persons seem to have snuck their signatures into the book over the years. A lyrical mystery!

And now for our (optional) prompt. Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem in the form of a review. But not a review of a book or a movie of a restaurant. Instead, I challenge you to write a poetic review of something that isn’t normally reviewed. For example, your mother-in-law, the moon, or the year 2020 (I think many of us have some thoughts on that one!)

Happy writing!

Happy final Sunday of NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo, all. It’s hard to believe that we have just a few days left to go in April!

Our featured participant today is Barbara Turney Wieland, who stepped up admirably in response to Day 25’s Schuyler-based prompt, providing us with a wonderfully-textured anatomy of a hike in the country-side.

Today’s poetry resource is a series of videos being placed online by the organizers of the New Orleans Poetry Festival. While the festival was canceled this year due to the coronavirus outbreak, poets who planned to present and attend are creating video-poems in lieu of the in-person proceedings.

And now for our prompt (optional, as always). This is one that we’ve used before, but one test of a  good prompt is that you can come back to it! For this prompt, you will need to fill out, in five minutes or less, the following “Almanac Questionnaire.” Then, use your responses as to basis for a poem.

Happy writing!

Almanac Questionnaire

Weather:
Flora:
Architecture:
Customs:
Mammals/reptiles/fish:
Childhood dream:
Found on the Street:
Export:
Graffiti:
Lover:
Conspiracy:
Dress:
Hometown memory:
Notable person:
Outside your window, you find:
Today’s news headline:
Scrap from a letter:
Animal from a myth:
Story read to children at night:
You walk three minutes down an alley and you find:
You walk to the border and hear:
What you fear:
Picture on your city’s postcard:                

Hello, everyone! Happy Saturday, and welcome back for Day 25 of Na/GloPoWriMo.

Today’s featured participant is Anna Enbom, who brings us a sweet poem in response to Day 24’s fruit-based prompt.

Our poetry resource for the day is The Nuyorican Poets Café, where you can sign up for virtual open-mic readings each Monday and Thursday.

Because it’s a Saturday, I have an (optional) prompt for you that takes a little time to work through — although you can certainly take short-cuts through it, if you like! The prompt, which you can find in its entirety here, was  developed by the poet and teacher Hoa Nguyen, asks you to use a long poem by James Schuyler as a guidepost for your poem. (You may remember James Schuyler from our poetry resource for Day 2.) This is a prompt that allows you to sink deeply into another poet’s work, as well as your own.

Happy writing!

Hello, all, and thanks for joining us for the final Friday of NaPoWriMo and GloPoWriMo 2020!

Our featured participant for the day is GibberJabber, which brings us a many-lettered appreciation of the beverage that gets so many of us out of bed in the morning, in response to Day 23’s “look-of-the-letter”-based prompt.

Today’s poetry resource is the Poets House Digital Initiatives page, where you’ll find links to live-streamed poetry readings, online exhibitions of poetry broadsides and trading cards, and a daily, kids-themed poetry and story-reading series. 

And last but not least, our daily (optional) prompt! Today’s prompt is a fairly simple one: to write about a particular fruit – your choice. But I’d like you to describe this fruit as closely as possible. Perhaps your poem could attempt to tell the reader some (or all!) of the following about your chosen fruit: What does it look like, how does it feel, how does it smell, what does it taste like, where did you find it, do you need to thump it to know if it’s ripe, how do you get into it (peeling, a knife, your teeth), do you need to spit out the seeds, should you bake it, can you make jam with it, do you have to fight the birds for it, when is it available, do you need a ladder to pick it, what is your favorite memory of eating it, if you threw it at someone’s head would it splatter them or knock them out, is it expensive . . . As you may have realized from this list, there’s honestly an awful lot you can write about a fruit!

Happy writing!

Hello, everyone, and welcome back for Day Twenty-Three of Na/GloPoWriMo.

Today’s featured participant is Judy Dykstra-Brown, who offers rhyming, Swedish-inspired advice in response to our proverbs-and-phrases prompt for Day 22!

Our poetry resource for today is the YouTube channel of the Woodberry Poetry Room, offering more than a hundred video recordings of readings, talks, seminars, and conversations between poets.

Today’s prompt (optional, as always) asks you to write a poem about a particular letter of the alphabet, or perhaps, the letters that form a short word. Doesn’t “S” look sneaky and snakelike? And “W” clearly doesn’t know where it’s going! Think about the shape of the letter(s), and use that as the take-off point for your poem. Need an example? Here is my down-and-dirty translation of Eduardo Galeano’s “The letters of the word AMOR”:

The A has its legs open.
The M is a seesaw that comes and goes between heaven and hell.
The O is a closed circle, it will choke you.
The R is scandalously pregnant.

All of the letters of the word AMOR are dangerous.

Happy Writing!

Happy Wednesday, all!

Our featured participant today is Voyage des Mots, where the homophonic translation prompt for Day 21 resulted in some atypical motherly advice.

Today, our poetry resource is the South Asian Literary Recordings Project, where you will find audio files of readings given by prominent poets, playwrights, and novelists from India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, in twenty-two different languages.

Our (optional) prompt for the day asks you to engage with different languages and cultures through the lens of proverbs and idiomatic phrases. Many different cultures have proverbs or phrases that have largely the same meaning, but are expressed in different ways. For example, in English we say “his bark is worse than his bite,” but the same idea in Spanish would be stated as “the lion isn’t as fierce as his painting.” Today, I’d like to challenge you to find an idiomatic phrase from a different language or culture, and use it as the jumping-off point for your poem. Here’s are a few lists to help get you started: One, two, three.

Happy Writing!

Welcome back, all, as we round out the third week of NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo 2020!

Our featured participant today is The Word Tinker, which delivers us a lovely ode to a finger-knit scarf in response to Day 20’s “handmade gift” prompt .

Today’s poetry resource is the archives of Poetry International, where you’ll find poems from all over the world, both in their original languages and in translation.

Today’s optional prompt asks you to make use of today’s resource. Find a poem in a language that you don’t know, and perform a “homophonic translation” on it. What does that mean? Well, it means to try to translate the poem simply based on how it sounds. You may not wind up with a credible poem at the end, but this can be a fun way to step outside of your own mind for a bit, and develop a poem that speaks in a distinctive voice. As an example, here are the first four lines of a poem by the Norwegian poet Gro Dahle:

Linnea ligger syk under treet
‒ Oj oj oj, hvisker treet
Og treet lar sine blader falle
Det store treet, det snille treet

Based on the sound alone, I might translate this as

Lithe lines sink under the street.
Oh, that wintry street.
Oh, street of signs like falling blades
A street of shops and smiles.

It’s not really a poem yet, but I certainly have created some odd and interesting images and ideas to play with.

Happy writing!

As of today, we are 2/3 through this year’s Na/GloPoWriMo! I hope you feel rich in poems.

Today, our featured participant is Chitraksh Ashray, where the “walking archive” prompt for Day 19 resulted in the charming tale of a magical stone.

Our poetry resource for today is Commonplace, a podcast that features “conversations with poets (and other people.”)

Today, in gratitude for making it to Day 20, our (optional) prompt asks you to write a poem about a handmade or homemade gift that you have received. It could be a friendship bracelet made for you by a grade-school classmate, an itchy sweater from your Aunt Louisa, a plateful of cinnamon toast from your grandmother, a mix-tape from an old girlfriend. And whatever gift you choose, we wish you happy writing!

As of today, we are 2/3 through this year’s Na/GloPoWriMo! I hope you feel rich in poems.

Welcome back for Day 19 of Na/GloPoWriMo, everyone.

Our featured participant today is My Musings Through Life, where the “small pleasures” prompt for Day 18 gives voice to the joy of flowers, time with family, tea, and hearing the birds sing.

Today’s poetry resource is a podcast from the Poetry Translation Centre. Every week, they feature a poem from a poet not writing in English, along with an English translation. This podcast is a great way to learn more about contemporary poetry in other countries!

Today, our optional prompt challenges you to write a poem based on a “walking archive.” What’s that? Well, it’s when you go on a walk and gather up interesting things – a flower, a strange piece of bark, a rock. This then becomes your “walking archive” – the physical instantiation of your walk. If you’re unable to get out of the house (as many of us now are), you can create a “walking archive” by wandering around your own home and gathering knick-knacks, family photos, maybe a strange spice or kitchen gadget you never use. One you’ve finished your gathering, lay all your materials out on  a tray table, like museum specimens. Now, let your group of materials inspire your poem! You can write about just one of the things you’ve gathered, or how all of them are all linked, or even what they say about you, who chose them and brought them together.

Happy writing!

Happy Saturday, all!

Today’s featured participant is soulfluff, where the “forgotten technology” prompt for Day 17 engendered an ode to typewriters.

Because it is Saturday, let’s give ourselves the pleasure of a featured resource that’s just a bit silly – a PDF version of Eugene Ostashevksy’s 2008 chapbook “Enter Morris Imposternak, Pursued by Ironies.” (Click on “Read Online” to do just that).

Our optional prompt for the day also honors the idea of Saturday (the Saturdays of the soul, perhaps?), by challenging you to write an ode to life’s small pleasures. Perhaps it’s the first sip of your morning coffee. Or finding some money in the pockets of an old jacket. Discovering a bird’s nest in a lilac bush or just looking up at the sky and watching the clouds go by.

Happy writing!