Hello, everyone! We have just two days to go until April, and the beginning of National Poetry Writing Month/Global Poetry Writing Month.

One surefire way to get inspired to write some poetry is to actually read some poetry! There are a few good daily-poetry websites out there, including Verse Daily, Poetry Daily, and Poem-A-Day. Sites like these are a great way to add a little poetry to your life, and to discover new poets and books.

Also, for those of you who will be posting your work to a personal website, we have some “blog buttons” that you can place on your site. These are totally optional – use them if you like them, ignore them if you don’t!

We’ll be back tomorrow with an early-bird prompt for those of you located in areas of the world where April 1 comes a few hours earlier than it does in Washington, DC, current home of NaPoWriMo.net.

In the meantime, if you’d like us to link to a website where you’ll be posting your work, you’ll need to submit the web address using the “Submit Your Site” feature above. And you can always follow our prompts and other posts on Facebook and on Twitter (@napowrimo2017).

Hello, all! Today is March 29th, which means we have just three days until the beginning of National Poetry Writing Month/Global Poetry Writing Month. I hope you are getting ready – whether that means buying a new notebook for your drafts, or just dusting off your keyboards.

One good way to learn about what’s going on in Poetry-Land is to check out poetry-related blogs. The Poetry Foundation keeps a good one here, which features long-form pieces from guest bloggers, interviews, and interesting poetry-related news. Or maybe you’d like your poetry information to be more audio-based? Then you should check out PennSound, which archives hundreds of readings and interviews. And if you’d prefer a truly multi-media approach, perhaps Moving Poems, focusing on videopoetry, is more your style!

We’ll be back tomorrow with some more resources to get you excited for April. Until then, please remember that if you’d like us to link to a website where you’ll be posting your work, you’ll need to submit the web address using the “Submit Your Site” feature above. And you can always follow our prompts and other posts on Facebook and on Twitter (@napowrimo2017).

Hello, everyone! It’s March 21, and that means we have just ten days left until April. We’re getting close to NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo now!

As you gear up for April, remember that NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo isn’t the only thing going on! April is National Poetry Month, and there are a lot of ways to celebrate. You can sign up to receive a poem each day by email from the Academy of American Poets, or plan to participate in their Poem in Your Pocket Day event on April 27th. If you happen to be in New York City, you can drop in to a National Poetry Month book exhibition at the Brooklyn Public Library. You could check out poetry festivals in Miami, New Orleans, and Boston. Attend a poetry reading in your area! Can’t find one? Maybe you should organize one — find a local coffee shop or bar and put together an open mic.

Or maybe you could just write 30 poems (hee).

We’ll be back on the 29th for our three-day countdown to NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo, with more resources and an early-bird prompt. In the meantime, if you’d like us to link to a website where you’ll be posting your work, you can submit the web address using the “Submit Your Site” feature above. And you can always follow our prompts and other posts on Facebook and on Twitter (@napowrimo2017).

Hello, everyone! Is it March 15 already? We’ve got just over two weeks left until April 1 and the start of NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo.

To help you get in the mood for our upcoming month-long sprint of poetry writing, why not peruse Poetry International? The site contains a wealth of information on poets from all over the world. You can find many poems in both their original languages and in English translation, and can search by country, language, poet, or even poem. I’ve spent many pleasant hours hopping from one country to the next, one poet to the next, learning about global poetry movements, styles, and finding new favorite poets as well.

We’ll have some other poetry resources to share with you as March winds down, and we start gearing up for April in earnest. In the meantime, please remember that you can follow our prompts and other posts on Facebook and on Twitter (@napowrimo2017).

Hello, everyone! There’s a little more than three weeks left until NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo 2017 begins! I hope you are getting your pencils and, er, your keyboards, sharpened.

If you’ll be posting your poetry-writing efforts to a blog or other website this year, please go ahead and send us the URL through the “Submit Your Site” link above, so that we can link to it.

Throughout March, as we all prepare for our monthlong stint of poetry writing, we’ll be posting occasional links to resources to help get you in the mood. Today we invite you to check out the poetry and prose at that Center for the Art of Translation, where you will find English versions of work originally written in other languages.

It’s March 1, and you know what that means! There’s just one month to go until National Poetry Writing Month (or, for our international participants, Global Poetry Writing Month).

If it’s your first time here, welcome! The FAQ will give you the details, but in brief, this site provides encouragement, support, and community for people who want to try to write a poem a day for the month of April. Each day during April, we’ll post an (optional) prompt to help get your creative juices flowing! We’ll also feature a participant each day, provide a bonus poetry-related feature daily — this year, we’ll be linking to interviews with poets — and, if you’ll be posting your poems to a website of some kind, we’ll link to that website. Just use the “Submit Your Site” form.

If you’re an old hand at NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo, welcome back! Our site submission form is back up, and waiting for your links.

As we get closer to April 1, we’ll be checking in weekly (and in the last week, more like daily) with poetry-related links, updates, and general cheerleading. You can also follow our prompts and other posts on Facebook and on Twitter (@napowrimo2017).

In the meantime, if you have questions, comments, or ideas for prompts, please email us at napowrimonet-AT-gmail-com.

Another NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo has come and gone! But I would be remiss in closing the year out without featuring a participant for Day 30. For our final prompt, we’re featuring Kavyastream, where the final poem is a ghazal translated from Urdu!

I’m hoping to redesign the website for next year. If there are additional features you’d like, or if you have ideas for ways to improve what we already have, please let me know at napowrimonet-AT-gmail-DOT-com. I can’t promise to incorporate every idea, but I can promise to take them all seriously.

Thank you to all who have reached out to me to to say that you found the prompts helpful, and enjoyed learning about poets from around the globe through our focus on poets in translation. It’s always great to hear from those who have found NaPoWriMo useful, interesting, or just plain, old fun.

I’ll be leaving the participants list up for a while, so feel free to browse through the list of your fellow poets. And whether you completed this year’s challenge or not, I hope to see you next year!

We’ve made it, everyone! Today is the last day of NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo 2016! Congratulations to everyone who had made it through the month. And if you didn’t get all the way to thirty poems, don’t worry! You can always play catch-up, or try again in 2017.

I’ll be keeping the participants list up for a while, but I’m also planning to do a redesign of the website for 2017. If you have ideas on how to make the site more user-friendly and useful overall, please drop me a line at napowrimo-AT-gmail-DOT-com!

Our final featured participant is My Own Garden of Verse, where the “I remember” poem for Day 29 catalogs a host of sensory memories.

And now for our last poet in translation, Mexico’s Dolores Dorantes. Now living in the United States, Dorantes spent twenty-five years in Ciudad Juarez, and her poems interrogate the intersection between violence and gender. You can find a number of her poems at the link above, and bilingual editions of several of her books are available, including sexoPUROsexoVELOZ//Septiembre, Style, and her collaboration with Rodrigo Flores Sanchez, INTERVENIR/INTERVENE.

And now our prompt (still optional!) Because we’ve spent our month looking at poets in English translation, today I’d like you to try your hand at a translation of your own. If you know a foreign language, you could take a crack at translating a poem by a poet writing in that language. If you don’t know a foreign language, or are up for a different kind of challenge, you could try a homophonic translation. Simply find a poem (or other text) in a language you don’t know, and then “translate” it based on the look or sound of the words. Stuck for a poem to translate? Why not try this one by Nobel Laureate Wislawa Szymborska? Or here’s one by another Laureate, Tomas Transtromer. Happy writing!

Just one day left in NaPoWriMo and GloPoWriMo!

Our featured participant is undercaws, where the backwards-story poem for Day 28 tells the tale of an unsettling encounter with a neighbor.

Today’s poet in translation is Haiti’s Frank Etienne. Unfortunately, there’s very little Haitian poetry available in English translation, and even though Etienne is one of Haiti’s best-known writers (he is a playwright, novelist, and artist, as well as a poet), the same is true for him. Still, you can read his poem “Dialect of Hurricanes” here, and check out a New York Times profile of Etienne here.

And now for our prompt (optional, as always). Poet and artist Joe Brainard is probably best remembers for his book-length poem/memoir, I Remember. The book consists of a series of statements, all beginning with the phrase “I remember.” Here are a few examples:

I remember the only time I ever saw my mother cry. I was eating apricot pie.

I remember how good a glass of water can taste after a dish of ice cream.

The specific, sometimes mundane and sometimes zany details of the things Brainard remembers builds up over the course of the book, until you have a good deal of empathy and sympathy for this somewhat odd person that you really feel you’ve gotten to know.

Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem based on things you remember. Try to focus on specific details, and don’t worry about whether the memories are of important events, or are connected to each other. You could start by adopting Brainard’s uniform habit of starting every line with “I remember,” and then you could either cut out all the instances of “I remember,” or leave them all in, or leave just a few in. At any rate, hopefully you’ll wind up with a poem that is heavy on concrete detail, and which uses that detail as its connective tissue. Happy writing!

Happy 28th! Day of NaPoWriMo and GloPoWriMo, everyone. Including today, we’ve just got three days left. If you’ve kept up all this time – kudos!

Our featured participant today is erbiage, where the long-lined poem for Day 27 is a wonderfully claustrophobic account of a data center.

Today’s poet in translation is Brazil’s Marcio-Andre, who is also a visual and sound artist. The lines of his poems are spaced across the page, forcing the reader’s eye to jump restlessly from place to place, while providing a visual sense of airy openness. You can find fourteen of his poems at the link above.

And now, for our prompt (optional, as always). Today I’d like to challenge you to write a poem that tells a story. But here’s the twist – the story should be told backwards. The first line should say what happened last, and work its way through the past until you get to the beginning. Now, the story doesn’t have to be complicated (it’s probably better if it isn’t)! Here’s a little example I just made up:

The Story of a Day

She lay her head down on the table.
She climbed the stairs to her room and sat down.
The afternoon of the boarding house was cool and dusty.
She walked home slowly, watching the sun settle on brick walls and half-kept gardens.
Work lasted many hours. Office lights buzzing with a faint, mad hum.
Breakfast was a small miracle.
She thought it a wonder, as always, that she’d woken up at all.

Well, that’s kind of unsettling! But I think it works as a poem. Maybe you’ll have better luck working backwards toward a happy beginning. Happy writing!