We’ve got just six days left until NaPoWriMo begins!

Today, as we count down to April 1, let’s explore some of the poetry resources available on Twitter. Yes, there is poetry on twitter! In fact, both poets and poetry journals have taken to twitter in spades, leading to lists like these: 38 Gifted Poets on Twitter and Twenty-Five Literary Magazines to Follow. Following your favorite journals on twitter is a particularly good way to keep on top of submission periods, new issues, and other news.

Of course, it’s not all straight-faced and straight-laced. Every profession, hobby, and lifestyle, from extreme snowboarding to competitive crochet to – yes – creative writing, has both its ups and downs, its foibles and follies as well as its merits and achievements. And where there are foibles, there is . . . the internet, and, in particular, there are parodic Twitter accounts. One that may give you a laugh – or possibly, have you cringing — is Guy in Your MFA. Why get a Master of Fine Arts degree when you can get the wisdom of an over-pretentious classmate for free?

If you have a Twitter account yourself, you might find some amusement in Poetweet, the website that turns your tweets into poetry. Really! Just enter your twitter handle and the website will build a rhyming poem from your old tweets.

And finally, you can follow us on Twitter, too — @napowrimo2015!

There are seven days to go until NaPoWriMo! As we count down to the big day, why not take a look at this intriguing article on a video game that teaches you to write poetry?

Or if you already know how to write poetry, but also like video games, you might consider this article on a serialized anthology of poems about video games. Or perhaps you’ll enjoy perusing the offerings at Cartridge Lit, an online journal devoted to literature, including poetry, about video games.

After all, Who’s to say that, were he alive today, Lord Byron wouldn’t be writing odes to Clash of Clans?

We have just one week to go until NaPoWriMo. I hope you are as excited as we are for the challenge of writing thirty poems in thirty days. To help keep that excitement going, we’ll have countdown posts each day over the next week until April 1 is here.

If you’re interested in including a NaPoWriMo button on your blog or or website, here are a couple to choose from:

And remember, you can check us out on Facebook and Twitter.

A very happy St. Patrick’s Day to everyone, as well as a very happy Two-Weeks-Until-NaPoWriMo. We’re busy drafting prompts and researching online poetry resources to share with all of you once April comes around. If you have ideas for prompts or resources, please let us know at napowrimonet-AT-gmail-DOT-com. We’ll credit you if we use your idea!

In the meantime, one sometimes-overlooked resource for poetic inspiration is . . . Twitter. In addition to thousands of people chatting about their everyday lives, you’ll find twitter accounts for Walt Whitman (where the entirety of Leaves of Grass is being tweeted, a line at a time), the British Romantic poets, and revolutionary Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. Perhaps a perusal of these poetic accounts will help you to get your poetry muscles primed for NaPoWriMo!

Hello, everyone! There are just three weeks to go until NaPoWriMo. Signups are now open, and we’re happy to see both new and familiar faces in our participants’ list. Whether you’re trying NaPoWriMo for the first time, the second, or the twelfth, we hope that the process of writing a poem a day will loosen up your writing process, and get you a wealth of new poems to play with.

As always, we’ll be posting optional prompts each day, featuring a participating site, and suggesting online poetry resources for NaPoWriMo-ers. If you have ideas for prompts, or participants or sites to feature, we’d love to hear from you. Send your suggestions to napowrimonet-AT-gmail-DOT-com.

We’ve also put together two blog buttons, for those of you who would like them!

More soon, and in the meantime, maybe this list of poetic forms will help you get your poetry engines revved?

Hello, all! It’s that time of year again — time to dust off your pencils, feather pens, typewriters, and notebooks, and get ready to write a poem a day for the month of April.

In addition to hosting a searchable list of participants’ websites, we’ll be featuring optional prompts each day, as well as poetry-related websites, and the daily work of participants. If you have an idea for a prompt, or an online poetry resource you’d like to see featured here, please drop us a line at napowrimo-AT-gmail-DOT-com. If I select your prompt or feature a website you’ve suggested, I’ll credit you, and if you are participating in NaPoWriMo, I’ll link to your site as well.

And if you’d like to follow along on social media, check us out on Twitter at @napowrimo2015, or onFacebook.

Hello, everyone. NaPoWriMo is over for 2014. I hope you enjoyed flexing your poetry muscles! Thanks to everyone who submitted prompt and journal/press ideas, and thanks to all of you for participating.The best thing about NaPoWriMo is seeing how many people are able to use the project to clear through their mental underbrush and just sit down to write — whether they are trying poetry for the first time, returning after a long while, or just using it to further what has already become a lifelong practice.

I hope to see you all again next year. In the meantime, happy writing!

Well, everyone — it’s finally here. Today is the last day of NaPoWriMo. We had over 1500 participants this year, a very good turnout indeed. I hope you’ve enjoyed the challenge and if you didn’t quite make it to 30 poems this year, no worries. NaPoWriMo will be back next year!

But for now, let’s meet our final featured press: Ahsahta, which published NaPoWriMo’er Kirsten Kaschock’s first book, A Beautiful Name for a Girl, back in 2011. The press has published many wonderful books over the years, and reads book manuscripts for its Sawtooth Prize in January-March of each year, and also occasionally has open reading periods. Right now (and I mean, really right now), the press is reading chapbook manuscripts — today is the last day to submit, so if you have something you feel is ready to go out into the world, why not send it their way?

And our featured participant for Day 30 is Jennifer Liston. I love the playfulness of these poems!

And now for our final (yet still optional!) prompt. Today, as befits the final poem of NaPoWriMo, I challenge you to write a poem of farewell. It doesn’t have to be goodbye forever — like I said, NaPoWriMo will be back again next year. If you need a little inspiration, you might find some in perusing this selection of goodbye-and-good-luck poems from the Poetry Foundation website.

Happy writing, everyone, and good-bye, and see you next year!

Hello, everyone, and welcome back for Day 29. I can’t believe tomorrow’s the last day of NaPoWriMo 2014.

Our featured journal today is Work To A Calm, which focuses on confessional poetry, and has published NaPoWriMo-er Kendall A. Bell. Work To a Calm accepts submissions year-round.

Today’s featured participant is Rhythms Nest. I kind of have a thing for erasure poems, and this poet shows us both the original and the erased text. Very cool!

And now our prompt (optional, as always). This may remind you a bit of the “New York School” recipe, but this prompt has been around for a long time. I remember using it in a college poetry class, and loving the result. It really forces you into details, and to work on “conducting” the poem as it grows, instead of trying to force the poem to be one thing or another in particular. The prompt is called the “Twenty Little Poetry Projects,” and was originally developed by Jim Simmerman. And here are the twenty little projects themselves — the challenge is to use them all in one poem:

1. Begin the poem with a metaphor.
2. Say something specific but utterly preposterous.
3. Use at least one image for each of the five senses, either in succession or scattered randomly throughout the poem.
4. Use one example of synesthesia (mixing the senses).
5. Use the proper name of a person and the proper name of a place.
6. Contradict something you said earlier in the poem.
7. Change direction or digress from the last thing you said.
8. Use a word (slang?) you’ve never seen in a poem.
9. Use an example of false cause-effect logic.
10. Use a piece of talk you’ve actually heard (preferably in dialect and/or which you don’t understand).
11. Create a metaphor using the following construction: “The (adjective) (concrete noun) of (abstract noun) . . .”
12. Use an image in such a way as to reverse its usual associative qualities.
13. Make the persona or character in the poem do something he or she could not do in “real life.”
14. Refer to yourself by nickname and in the third person.
15. Write in the future tense, such that part of the poem seems to be a prediction.
16. Modify a noun with an unlikely adjective.
17. Make a declarative assertion that sounds convincing but that finally makes no sense.
18. Use a phrase from a language other than English.
19. Make a non-human object say or do something human (personification).
20. Close the poem with a vivid image that makes no statement, but that “echoes” an image from earlier in the poem.

Hello, everyone! Today begins our three-day countdown until the end of NaPoWriMo. I hope you’ve enjoyed your April!

Today’s featured journal is CSHS Quarterly, which is helmed by NaPoWriMo-ers Joseph Harker and Tessa Racked. The journal is just about to publish its second issue and is currently reading for its third. There’s only two days left in NaPoWriMo now, so if you have a journal you’d like me to feature, please let me know at napowrimonet-AT-gmail-DOT-com.

Today’s featured poet is Salon Z, where you will find carefully observed details and wonderful images, like “permitting her /
to chase the random / fox thought/ down the escalator.”

And now our (optional) prompt. Today I challenge you to find a news article, and to write a poem using (mostly, if not only) words from the article! You can repeat them, splice them, and rearrange them however you like. Although the vocabulary may be “just the facts,” your poem doesn’t have to be — it doesn’t even have to be about the subject of the news article itself. Happy writing!