Welcome back, all, for Day 17 of Na/GloPoWriMo.

Our featured participant today is The Great Unknown, where Day Sixteen’s over-the-top prompt led to a poem rife with onamotapoeia, superlatives, and ebullient sarcasm.

Our resource for the day is the Poetry Foundation’s VS podcast, hosted by poets Franny Choi and Danez Smith. Every two weeks, they release a new episode in which they interview contemporary poets, and otherwise talk about what is going on in the world of poetry and beyond.

Our prompt for the day (optional, as always), asks you to move backwards in time away from such modern contrivances as podcasts. Today, I challenge you to write a poem that features forgotten technology. Maybe it’s a VCR, or a rotary phone. A cassette player or even a radio. If you’re looking for a potential example, check out this poem by Adam Clay, which takes its central metaphor from something that used to stoke fear in the hearts of kids typing term papers, or just trying to play a game of Oregon Trail.

Happy writing!

Happy third Thursday of NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo, everyone!

Today, our featured participant is: MD Kerr, who provides an audio recording of her musically-inspired poem from Day Fifteen.

Our poetry resource for the day is this PDF of Aram Saroyan’s Electric Poems, first published in 1972. Saroyan is known for his minimalist poetry. Often, his poems consist of re-mixed/chopped versions of a single word. In fact, one of his most famous one-word poems engendered some controversy in the U.S. Congress!

Hopefully, today’s (optional) prompt won’t expose you to controversy. Rather than encouraging minimalism, today we challenge you to write a poem of over-the-top compliments. Pick a person, place, or thing you love, and praise it in the most effusive way you can. Go for broke with metaphors, similes, and more. Need a little inspiration? Perhaps you’ll find it in the lyrics of Cole Porter’s “You’re The Top.” (Scroll down at the link for the lyrics and an annotated explanation of them).

Happy writing!

Today marks the halfway point of NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo 2020. I hope you’ve been enjoying the challenge so far.

Our featured participant today is Bag of Anything, where you will find a bouquet of humorous clerihews in response to Day Fourteen’s inspirational prompt.

Today’s poetry resource is this PDF of Fred Moten’s first chapbook, Arkansas. Since publishing it in 2000, he has published numerous full-length poetry collections, including The Feel Trio, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2014. The poems in Arkansas mix spoken language, musical rhythms, and a very precise eye for colors.

Our prompt for the day (optional, as always) takes its cue from Arkansas. Today, I’d like  to challenge you to write a poem inspired by your favorite kind of music. Try to recreate the sounds and timing of a pop ballad, a jazz improvisation, or a Bach fugue. That could mean incorporating refrains, neologisms and flights of whimsy, or repeating/inverting lines or ideas – whatever your chosen musical form would seem to require! Perhaps a good way to start is to listen to your favorite piece of music and “free-write” for the duration  of the piece, and then use what you’ve written as the building blocks for your poem.

Happy writing!

Wow, has it been two weeks of Na/GloPoWriMo already?

Today’s featured participant is Scrambled, Not Fried, where Day Thirteen’s theft-inspired prompt resulted in an ode to the joys of the illicit.

Our poetry resource for the day is “Dr. Williams’ Heiresses,” a chapbook published by Alice Notley in 1980. In it, she weaves strange and discursive creation-myth for American poetry, and her own work, as influenced by the work of the poet William Carlos Williams.

Today’s optional prompt asks you, like Alice Notley, to think about your own inspirations and forebears (whether literary or otherwise). Specifically, I challenge you today to write a poem that deals with the poems, poets, and other people who inspired you to write poems. These could be poems/poets/poepl that you strive to be like, or even poems, poets, and people that you strive not to be like. There are as many ways to go with this prompt as there are ways to be inspired.

Happy writing!

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!