Hello, everyone! We’re really starting to wind down now. I’ll miss this – and you!

Today’s featured participant is From the Corner Out, where the parody for Day 24 updates “The Road Not Taken” for the cell-phone era.

Our featured poetry resource today is The Favorite Poem Project, the online presence of a large-scale effort spearheaded by former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky, to foster interest in poetry by collecting and showcasing Americans’ favorite poems. You’ll find videos of people reading their favorite poems, along with text of the poems themselves, as well as information about the history of the project and the various books, DVDs and other materials that it has engendered.

And now for our prompt (optional, as always)! It’s the weekend, so I’d thought we might go with something short and just a bit (or a lot) silly – the Clerihew. These are rhymed, humorous quatrains involving a specific person’s name. You can write about celebrities, famous people from history, even your mom (hopefully she’s got a good name for rhyming with).

Happy writing!

It’s the final Friday of NaPoWriMo!

Our featured participant today is J Luukkonen Poetry, where the six of spades from Day 23’s card-based prompt becomes six spades digging the earth.

Today’s featured resource is the The Library of Congress’ Poetry Resource Page, which will guide you in exploring the poetry-related content of the library’s website. You can find all kinds of things, including the state poem of Tennessee, the emo love poems of a teenage George Washington, and other wonders and oddities.

Our prompt today (optional, as always), will hopefully provide you with a bit of Friday fun. Today, I challenge you to write a parody or satire based on a famous poem. It can be long or short, rhymed or not. But take a favorite (or unfavorite) poem of the past, and see if you can’t re-write it on humorous, mocking, or sharp-witted lines. You can use your poem to make fun of the original (in the vein of a parody), or turn the form and manner of the original into a vehicle for making points about something else (more of a satire – though the dividing lines get rather confused and thin at times).

Happy writing!

Hello, everyone! There’s just one week left now! I hope your poetry muscles are keeping pace.

Today, our featured participant is Graceful Poetry Press, where the Earth Day poem for Day 22 has both gratitude and a sense of melancholy.

Our poetry resource for the day is From the Fishhouse, an audio archive of emerging poets. Here, you’ll find a host of interviews with poets, as well as recordings of poets reading their work.

And now for today’s prompt (optional, as always). Today, I challenge you to take a chance, literally. Find a deck of cards (regular playing cards, tarot cards, uno cards, cards from your “Cards Against Humanity” deck – whatever), shuffle it, and take a card – any card! Now, begin free-writing based on the card you’ve chosen. Keep going without stopping for five minutes. Then take what you’ve written and make a poem from it. (Hat tip to Amy McDaniel for the idea!)

Happy writing!

Hello, all, and welcome back for the 22nd day of NaPoWriMo!

Our featured participant for the day is: Alphabet Salad, where the erasure poem for Day 21 comes out of a page from Walden.

Today’s poetry resource is Empty Mirror, an online literary review. The site, which started out as focused on Beat Generation writing, now publishes new poems, book reviews, interviews and more!

And now for (as always, optional) prompt! Today is Earth Day, so I would like to challenge you to write a “pastoral” poem. Traditionally, pastoral poems involved various shepherdesses and shepherds talking about love and fields, but yours can really just be a poem that engages with nature. One great way of going about this is simply to take a look outside your window, or take a walk around a local park. What’s happening in the yard and the trees? What’s blooming and what’s taking flight?

Happy writing!

Hello, all. Today marks the end of the third week of NaPoWriMo. We’re getting near the finish line now!

Today’s featured participant is Whimsygizmo, where the “I know” poem has a restless sort of melancholy, the sense of taking stock and summing up before continuing on.

And our poetry resource for the day is Leslie D.’s NaPoWriMo poet interviews. Blogger Leslie D. is not just writing poems each day for NaPoWrimo; she’s interviewing a poet every day!

Our prompt for today (optional, as always) is an old favorite – the erasure! This involves taking a pre-existing text and blacking out or erasing words, while leaving the placement of the remaining words intact. I’ve been working on an erasure project that involves an old guide to rose-growing. Here’s an example of an original page, side-by-side with my “erased” page:

One easy way to get started is just to photocopy a page from a book or magazine, and black out words. Or you can copy a text into Microsoft Word, and turn the words you don’t want white. Erasures can feel almost like a game – carving new poems out of old texts like carving statues from blocks of marble — and so they take some of the anxiety out of writing. They can also lead to surprising new ideas, as the words of the original text are given new contexts.

Happy writing!

Hello, everyone. We’re now two-thirds of the way through the month. I hope you’ve been having fun.

And we have two featured participants today, each of which took the landay prompt for Day 19 in a slightly different direction. Here’s Kiana Donae’s serious and furtive landay of love, and here’s Voiceless Fricative’s humorous and slightly nutty one.

Today’s poetry resource is the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, which – you guessed it – features a new poem each day. Featuring work by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends, it’s a nice mix of old and new.

And now for our prompt (optional, as always). Today, I challenge to write a poem that states the things you know. For example, “The sky is blue” or “Pizza is my favorite food” or “The world’s smallest squid is Parateuthis tunicata. Each line can be a separate statement, or you can run them together. The things you “know” of course, might be facts, or they might be a little bit more like beliefs. Hopefully, this prompt will let your poem be grounded in specific facts, while also providing room for more abstract themes and ideas.

Happy writing!

Hello, all, and welcome back for Day 19 of NaPoWriMo.

Our featured participant today is Camionneuse, where the multi-scene poem for Day 18’s “urgent journey/message” prompt really conveys, at once, a sense of rush and specific moments in time.

Today’s poetry resource is: THEthe Poetry Blog, a blog on poetics aimed at poets and non-poets alike. The blog regularly features new poetry, as well as essays, interviews, and reviews.

And for today’s prompt (optional, as always!), I’d like to challenge you to write a landay. Landays are 22-syllable couplets, generally rhyming. The form comes from Afghanistan, where women often use it in verses that range from the sly and humorous to the deeply sardonic and melancholy. Check out this long investigative article on landays for a fascinating look into a form of poetry often composed in secret, and rarely written down. You could try to write a single landay – a hard-hitting couplet that shares some secret (or unspoken) truth, or you could try to write a poem that strings multiple landays together like stanzas (maybe something akin to a syllabic ghazal?)

Happy Writing!

Happy Eighteenth Day of NaPoWriMo!

Our featured participant today is Shawn L. Bird, where the social media poem for Day 17 is a hilarious riot of mixed-up tweets. Really, it was hard to pick among yesterday’s poems — there were so many surprising and funny results. For anyone interested in learning more about poetry that mines internet search terms and other social detritus for lines and inspiration, you might enjoy reading up on flarf.

Our poetry resource for the day is The Electronic Poetry Center at the University of Buffalo, where you’ll find an extensive online library of resources devoted to electronic, digital, and formally innovative poetry. Including flarf!

And now for our (as always, optional) prompt, which takes us from 2015 back to the 1700s. After all, it’s the eighteenth of April, which means that today is the 240th anniversary of the midnight ride of Paul Revere! Today, in keeping with the theme of rush and warning, I challenge you to write a poem that involves an urgent journey and an important message. It could historical, mythical, entirely fictional, or memoir-ical.

Happy Writing (oh, and by the way, “THE BRITISH ARE COMING”)!

Hello, everyone, and welcome back for Day Seventeen of NaPoWriMo!

Our featured participant today is Translunary Things, whose terzanelle for Day 16 involves a topic that — having woken up many an evening because somebody’s tail was whisking back and forth over my face — I can sympathize with! It also gets extra points for working in a Shakespearean allusion. This poem also underscores one way to approach a technical and demanding form — which is to make your topic light and bubbly. It at least makes it seem like more of a game to keep up with the meter, rather than a chore. Once you’ve managed the form in “light verse,” you may feel more confident about tackling it in service of deeper themes.

Today’s poetry resource is the Poetry Map from the University of Toronto’s Representative Poetry Center. Among other things, the map lets you explore places mentioned in poems! It’s sort of a fun way to find new poems, and you can also see if your home town has been immortalized in verse.

And now for our prompt (optional, as always). Today, I want you to try to write a “social media”-style poem. Namecheck all of your friends. Quote from their texts, tweets, FB status updates, twitter accounts, and blogposts, and the back of the cereal box on your breakfast table. The poem is about you and you are about what you say, think, talk, eat. You might end up with a poem that seems bizarrely solipsistic (like the internet itself, maybe?), but there might also be a spark there of something live and fun and present (like the verbal equivalent of a really great animated cat .gif).

Happy writing!

Well, it’s official. We’re now on the “downward slope” of NaPoWriMo!

Our featured participant today is Eramosa River Journal, where the poetry-addressing poem for Day 15 is written using poetry refrigerator magnets! I love the resulting visual playfulness of the poem, as well as its rather clever use of refrigerator-based metaphors.

Today’s poetry resource is Jacket2, an online compendium of reviews, critical essays, podcasts, interviews, and more. Smart people saying smart things about smart poems and poets. If you’re feeling a bit half-hearted and down, spend some time with Jacket2, and you will emerge refreshed and reinvigorated. People do care about poetry!

And now for our (as always, optional) prompt! Today, I challenge you to write in the form known as the terzanelle. A hybrid of the villanelle and terza rima, terzanelles consist of five three-line stanzas and a concluding quatrain. Lines and rhymes are chained throughout the poem, so that the middle line of each triplet is repeated as the last line of the following triplet (or, for the last triplet, in the concluding quatrain). The pattern goes like this:
ABA
bCB
cDC
dED
eFE
fAFA or fFAA.

You can use any meter or line length, though you may want to try to have all of your lines in the same meter! (And you can always fall back on that old favorite, iambic pentameter). Here are two example terzanelles to give you a sense of what the form looks like in action:

Terzanelle: Manzanar Riot

This is a poem with missing details,
of ground gouging each barrack’s windowpane,
sand crystals falling with powder and shale,

where silence and shame make adults insane.
This is about a midnight of searchlights,
of ground gouging each barrack’s windowpane,

of syrup on rice and a cook’s big fight.
This is the night of Manzanar’s riot.
This is about a midnight of searchlights,

a swift moon and a voice shouting, Quiet!
where the revolving searchlight is the moon.
This is the night of Manzanar’s riot,

windstorm of people, rifle powder fumes,
children wiping their eyes clean of debris,
where the revolving searchlight is the moon,

and children line still to use the latrines.
This is a poem with missing details,
children wiping their eyes clean of debris—
sand crystals falling with powder and shale.

— Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan

Terzanelle in Thunderweather

This is the moment when shadows gather
under the elms, the cornices and eaves.
This is the center of thunderweather.

The birds are quiet among these white leaves
where wind stutters, starts, then moves steadily
under the elms, the cornices, and eaves–

these are our voices speaking guardedly
about the sky, of the sheets of lightning
where wind stutters, starts, then moves steadily

into our lungs, across our lips, tightening
our throats. Our eyes are speaking in the dark
about the sky, of the sheets of lightening

that illuminate moments. In the stark
shades we inhibit, there are no words for
our throats. Our eyes are speaking in the dark

of things we cannot say, cannot ignore.
This is the moment when shadows gather,
shades we inhibit. There are no words, for
this is the center of thunderweather.

— Lewis Turco