Happy Friday, everyone, and happy fifth day of Na/GloPoWriMo. We hope yesterday’s sad prompt hasn’t dampened your desire to write poetry!

Our featured participant for the day is A Writer without Words, whose sad sonnet for Day Four packs a powerful story into fourteen short lines.

Today’s resource is this video of the poet Kyle Dargan reading “Call and Response,” a poem that he wrote by mixing and mingling the text of the Lord’s Prayer with “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash. Dargan’s poem exemplifies the way that the pre-existing universe of words – songs, prayers, snatches of overheard conversation – becomes part of us, and part of the background against which (and with which) we write our own poetry.

And now, for our daily prompt (optional as always). Today’s prompt comes from another poem by Kyle Dargan, called “Diaspora: A Narcolepsy Hymn.” This poem, like “Call and Response,” is inspired by the work of others – in this case, the poet Morgan Parker, and lyrics from songs by Beyoncé and The Notorious B.I.G. The poem also partakes of one of the most difficult poetic forms, the villanelle. The classic villanelle has five three-line stanzas followed by a final, four-line stanza. The first and third lines of the first stanza alternately repeat as the last lines of the following three-line stanzas, before being used as the last two lines of the final quatrain. And to make it an even more virtuoso performance, Dargan’s alternating lines, besides being taken from songs, express “opposing” ideas, with one being about sleeping, and the other waking.

Following Dargan’s lead, today we’d like to challenge you to write a poem that incorporates at least one of the following: (1) the villanelle form, (2) lines taken from an outside text, and/or (3) phrases that oppose each other in some way. If you can use two elements, great – and if you can do all three, wow!

Happy writing!

Hello, everyone, and welcome back for the fourth day of Na/GloPoWriMo!

Today, our featured participant is 7eyedwonder, who responded to the time-focused prompt for Day 3 with a moving account of a father’s passing.

Today’s video resource is this recording of the American poet Craig Morgan Teicher, reading what he calls his “relentlessly sad poems.” That might not sound like something you want to deal with on a Thursday, but one of the wonderful things about poetry is that it can express feelings that we often think aren’t “okay” to express or feel – emotions that are uncomfortable but universal.

And now for today’s (optional) prompt, inspired by Teicher’s poem “Son“. One thing you might notice about this poem is that it is sad, but that it doesn’t generate that feeling through particularly emotional words. The words are very simple. Another thing you might notice is that it’s a sonnet – not in strict iambic pentameter, but fourteen rhymed, relatively short lines.

Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own sad poem, but one that, like Teicher’s, achieves sadness through simplicity. Playing with the sonnet form may help you – its very compactness can compel you to be straightforward, using plain, small words.

Happy (or sad, we guess) writing!

Hello, everyone! We’re now three days into Na/GloPoWriMo. Hopefully, you’re starting to get into the swing of things. And if you are just joining us – welcome!

Before we get into our regular daily features, we wanted to point out this interview with longtime participant Vince Gotera, who has just published a book called The Coolest Month, featuring poems written during past Na/GloPoWriMos. Congratulations, vince!

Our featured participant today is A Reading Writer, where the interrogatory prompt for Day Two gave rise to a very slithery metaphor!

Today’s video resource is this animated version of Erin Mouré’s “Homage to the Mineral of Cabbage.” The English text of the poem is cleverly incorporated into the video, but the narration is in Galician, a language spoken in Northwest Spain. My Spanish is pretty rusty, but for me that adds to the audible mystery and delight of this video – I can almost understand it. For even more multi-lingual flavor, you can also see the video with French-language text here.

And now for today’s prompt (optional as always). Today’s prompt is based in a poem by Larry Levis called “The Two Trees.” It is a poem that seems to meander, full of little digressions, odd bits of information, but fundamentally, it is a poem that takes time. It takes its time getting where it’s going, and the action of the poem itself takes place over months. Today, I’d like to challenge you to similarly write something that involves a story or action that unfolds over an appreciable length of time. Perhaps, as you do, you can focus on imagery, or sound, or emotional content (or all three!)

Happy writing!

Welcome back, all, for our second day of Na/GloPoWriMo.

Today’s featured participant is Not Enough Poetry, where the instructional prompt for Day 1 yielded an evocative poem about riding a train in the Andes.

For our featured video, we have today a sort of poetry music video, involving a highly dramatic reading, in German, of a Shakespearean sonnet set to the music of Rufus Wainwright. As one of the commenters on the video stated, “I didn’t understand anything but I love it with all my heart.” Poetry can be like that, sometimes!

Today’s prompt (optional, as always) is based on this poem by Claire Wahmanholm, which transforms the natural world into an unsettled dream-place. One way it does this is by asking questions – literally. The poem not only contains questions, but ends on a question. Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem that similarly resists closure by ending on a question, inviting the reader to continue the process of reading (and, in some ways, writing) the poem even after the poem ends.

Happy writing!

Hello, everyone! Happy April, and happy first day of National/Global Poetry Writing Month!

If you’re just joining us, Na/GloPoWriMo is an annual challenge in which participants write a poem a day during the month of April. What do you need to do to participate? Just write a poem each day! If you fall behind, try to catch up, but don’t be too hard on yourself – the idea here is to expand your writing practice and engage with new ideas, not to stress yourself out. All too many poets, regardless of their level of experience, get blocked in their writing because they start editing even before they have written anything at all. Let’s leave the editing, criticizing, and stressing out for May and beyond! This month, the idea is just to get something on the page.

If you’ll be posting your efforts to a blog or other website, you can provide us with the link using our “Submit Your Site” form, and it will show up on our “Participants’ Sites” page. But if you’re not going to be posting your work, no worries! It’s not a requirement at all – again, all we’re really trying to do is encourage people to write.

To help with that, we’ll be providing some daily inspiration. Each day, we’ll be featuring a participant, providing you with an optional prompt, and giving you an extra poetry resource. This year, those resources will take the form of poetry-related videos.

And now, without further ado – let’s get to it!

Our first featured participant is Miss Ella’s House of Sleep, whose poem “Annie Edson Taylor’s Birthday Plunge,” used our early-bird prompt to explore a fascinating and little-known historical figure.

Our resource for the day is a short film of January Gill O’Neil reading (and acting out!) her poem “How to Make a Crab Cake.” If you’d like to read the poem itself as you follow along, you can find it here.

For our first (optional) prompt, let’s take our cue from O’Neil’s poem, and write poems that provide the reader with instructions on how to do something. It can be a sort of recipe, like O’Neil’s poem. Or you could try to play on the notorious unreliability of instructional manuals (if you’ve ever tried to put IKEA http://bayarcadedental.com.au/viagra-australia/ furniture together, you know what I mean). You could even write a dis-instruction poem, that tells the reader how not to do something. This well-known poem by John Ashbery may provide you with some additional inspiration.

Happy writing!

Hello, everybody! Na/GloPoWriMo officially begins tomorrow!

We have an early-bird prompt for those of you located in time zones where April 1 starts a few hours earlier than it does on the east coast of the United States, but first, let’s round out our pre-April set of movie/tv clips involving poetry.

Today, we bring you a clip from that classic Bill Murray comedy, Groundhog’s Day, wherein our hapless hero, who is kind of a self-centered jerk, is forced to repeat a day over and over again until he gets it “right.” In this clip, he mocks his love interest’s college study of French poetry. Bill, that’s no way to get a girl! After a few rounds, though, he’s actually reciting French poetry at her – now, that’s more like it.

And now for our early-bird prompt (optional, like all our prompts!) Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poetic self-portrait. And specifically, we’d like you to write a poem in which you portray yourself in the guise of a historical or mythical figure. Does that sound a bit strange? http://truetone.com/power-supplies/1-spot-pro/1-spot-pro-cs7/ Well, take a look at this poem by Mary-Kim Arnold, “Self Portrait as Semiramis,” or Tarfia Farzullah’s, “Self-Portrait as Artemis,” and perhaps you’ll get a sense of the possibilities.

Happy writing!

Hello, all! There’s just two days until we start Na/GloPoWriMo 2019, otherwise known as “that month in which you write a poem a day for 30 days.”

Each day during the month, we’ll be bringing you a featured participant, a video resource, and an optional prompt. We’ll also continue accepting links to any websites where participants are posting work, through our “Submit Your Site” form.

We’ll be back tomorrow with an early-bird prompt and another fun instance of poetry in the movies, but for today, we’ll leave you with this clip from Memphis Belle, a WWII movie in which an airman passes off the work of Y.B. Yeats for his own.

Hello, all. There’s just three days left in March, and that means that there are only three days to go until NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo 2019.

To help you countdown, we’ll be posting a poetry-related move/tv clip each day until April 1 (at which point our video links will become a bit more “substantive”), and on March 31, we’ll have a special early-bird prompt (optional, as always), for those of you for whom April begins a few hours before it does here at Na/GloPoWriMo headquarters.

Our video clip for today is below, but first, we wanted to draw your attention to a project that one of our longtime participants needs help with. This will be the third Na/GloPoWriMo that poet Dawn Anderson, CreatetheDawn, uses postage stamps are her daily writing prompt. This year her theme is “World Stamps” and she needs your help collecting the stamps. 

If you’d like to contribute an international stamp, upload a photo of the stamp to Dawn’s GoogleDrive.  If you want credit for contributing the stamp and/or want to share a little story (50 words or less) about the stamp or the country or how you came to possess the stamp, email Dawn your story referencing which stamp is yours. She will share your name and story when she posts and publishes her poems. If you’d like to read some of Dawn’s past years’ stamp-poems, visit her blog and use the “search” box (bottom of page) to find “napowrimo” poems.

And now for some poetry-related video resource(s)! The poet William Blake was a visionary, a religious mystic, and pretty much all-around weirdo. He also seems to exert a strange pull on scriptwriters, as you will find him being quoted in both Bull Durham (a pretty good movie about minor league baseball) and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (a pretty awful movie about . . . raiding tombs), as well as being paraphrased in the dystopian sci-fi classic Blade Runner.

We’ll be back tomorrow to continue our countdown to April 1!

Hello, all! As of today, we have just one week to go until the start of National/Global Poetry Writing Month!

We hope you’re getting your pencils sharpened, your laptops charged, and all your finest glittery pens prepared for a full month of writing verse. We’ll be back on March 29 with the first of three countdown posts, and on March 31, we’ll also post an (optional) early-bird prompt for those of you located in time zones where April 1 arrives a bit earlier than it does here on the east coast of the United States.

In the meantime, our “Submit Your Site” page remains open and ready to receive any links to websites, blogs, or other internet-places where you’ll be posting work, and if you have any questions for us, you can send them to napowrimonet-AT-gmail-DOT-com.

Finally, as we’ll be featuring poetry-related video resources throughout April, we’ll leave you for the time being with this oldie-but-goodie – Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven,” as interpreted by The Simpsons. Fair warning – they may have taken some, er, minor liberties with the text.

Today is March 15, and that means there’s only half a month to go until the beginning of National/Global Poetry Writing Month!

We’ll be back on March 25 (which marks the one-week-to-go point) with a few more things to whet your interest, but in the meantime, for those of you who intend to post your April efforts to a blog or other webspace, we have a few “buttons” or “badges” below that you are welcome to use! And of course, please go ahead and submit the link to your site for inclusion on our list of participants’ sites, using the “Submit Your Site” form at the top of the page!

As mentioned in our last post, we’ll be featuring poetry-related video resources throughout the month of April, including videos of poets reading their poems, animated film versions of poems, TED-style talks about poetry, etc. But while we’re counting down to April, we’ll be giving you occasional bouts of poetry and poetry-related content, as taken from popular films and television!

Today, why not check out this scene from the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral, a romantic comedy starring, alongside Hugh Grant and Andie MacDowell , a recitation of W.H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues.”