Hello, all, and happy seventeenth day of Na/GloPoWriMo.

Our featured participant for the day is Glenn Mitchell, who brings us a quietly compelling poem in response to Day 16’s “negation” prompt.

Today’s resource is a pair of online reading series. If you’re looking for a regular poetry fix you can enjoy from the comfort of your laptop, why not try the Poets in Pajamas series, which hosts readings every month? Poet and professor Jordan Stempleman also hosts a monthly reading which you can attend online (and you can also access archived videos of past readings). Just click here, and then on “A Common Sense Reading Series” at the top of the page.

And now, for our daily (optional) prompt! Begin by reading Sayuri Ayers’ poem “In the Season of Pink Ladies.” A pretty common piece of writing advice is that poets should know, and use, the precise names for things. Don’t say flower when you can say daisy. Don’t say bird when you mean a hawk. Today’s challenge asks you to write a poem that contains the name of a specific variety of edible plant – preferably one that grows in your area. (That said, if you’re lacking inspiration, online seed catalogs provide a treasure trove of unusual and charming names for vegetables, fruits and flowers. Here’s one to get you started.) In the poem, try to make a specific comparison between some aspect of the plant’s lifespan and your own – or the life of someone close to you. Also, include at least one repeating phrase.

Happy writing!

Happy Sunday, everyone, and welcome back for the sixteenth day of Na/GloPoWriMo.

Our featured participant today is 7eyedwonder, who brings us a sly take on an old French teacher in response to Day 15’s invitation to consider troubling heroes.

Today’s resource is Poetry Northwest’s online collection of essays exploring different poets, craft elements, and styles of poetry.

And now, without further ado, our optional daily prompt, once again pulled from our archives. Today’s prompt is a poem of negation – yes (or maybe, no), I challenge you to write a poem that involves describing something in terms of what it is not, or not like. For example, if you chose a whale as the topic of your poem, you might have lines like “It does not settle down in trees at night, cooing/Nor will it fit in your hand.”

Happy writing!

Today marks the halfway point of Na/GloPoWriMo – I hope you and your poems are going strong!

You all really hit it out of the park yesterday, with your parodies and satires in response to Day 14’s prompt. I couldn’t choose just one — so we have two featured participants today. First up is Poem Dive, with a paean to the ubiquitous smartphone, and second, Orangepeel, with a timely grouse about the Internal Revenue Service (for those of you elsewhere, April 15 is traditionally the day that annual tax returns are due in the United States).

Today’s resource is Where to Submit, a feature of Heavy Feather Review. Updated every few months, this is a good resource for open calls for submission for journals, anthologies, chapbooks, presses, fellowships, and other poetry-related opportunities.

Finally, here’s our (optional) prompt for the day. Begin by reading June Jordan’s “Notes on the Peanut.” Now, think of a person – real or imagined – who has been held out to you as an example of how to be or live, but who you have always had doubts about. Write a poem that exaggerates the supposedly admirable qualities of the person in a way that exposes your doubts.

Happy writing!

Two weeks of Na/GloPoWriMo already? Wow!

Our featured participant today is Lisa Takes Flight, who offers us a quartet of little comic poems in response to Day Thirteen’s invitation to write poems that follow the beats of a joke.

Today’s featured resource is actually more a series of possibilities. Over the past few years – prompted in many cases by the pandemic – organizations that used to host in-person poetry workshops have increasingly moved their offerings online. These range from a few hours focused on a particular topic to multi-week intensives. They’re not always (or usually, even) cheap, but if you’re trying to push your writing in a new direction, or devote serious time to working on a particular issue (like revision, or organizing a manuscript), they can be very helpful. While there are a very large number of organizations that present such online workshops, here are a few to give you a sense of the kinds of offerings you might see: Poets House Workshops and Classes, Maine Writers & Publishers Workshops, and Poetry Barn Workshops.

And now for our (optional) daily prompt. Hopefully, this one will 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!

Happy thirteenth day of Na/GloPoWriMo! While thirteen is often considered an unlucky number, any day that you write a poem has a special luck of its own.

Today’s featured participant is Aakriti Kuntal, whose “meta”-poetry response to Day Twelve’s respons features a host of unusual images.

Our resource for the day is Poets & Writers’ “Craft Capsules” feature. Here, you’ll find essays on craft elements ranging from revision to using narrative to the lyric “I.” While some of the essays are focused on fiction, their lessons are widely applicable across genres and writing styles.

Last but not least, here’s our prompt for the day (optional, as always). Start by taking a look at these three short poems by Bill Knott.

Dear Advice Columnist

I recently killed my father
And will soon marry my mother;
My question is
Should his side of the family be invited to the wedding?

To X

You’re like a scissors
popsicle I don’t know
whether to jump back
or lick

Quickie

Poetry
is
like
sex
on
quicksand
therefore
foreplay
should
be
kept
at
a
minimum

Now, try writing a short poem (or a few, if you’re inspired) that follows the beats of a classic joke. Emphasize the interplay between the form of the poem – such as the line breaks – and the punchline.

Happy writing!

During the twelve days of Christmas, you collect rings, partridges, pears, leaping lords, and other bizarre items. The first twelve days of Na/GloPoWriMo don’t offer anything so complicated, but twelve new poems is nothing to sneeze at!

Our featured participant today is Laura McGinnis, who brings us a charming little joke (in rhyme) in response to Day Eleven’s “overheard” prompt.

Today’s featured resource is another podcast: A Mouthful of Air. In each episode of this relatively new series, a contemporary poet (generally from the U.K.) discusses one of their poems or, alternatively, host Mark McGuinness discusses a classic poem, like Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “The Windhover.”

And now for another (optional) prompt from our archives. Today, I challenge you to write a poem that addresses itself or some aspect of its self (i.e., “Dear Poem,” or “what are my quatrains up to?”; “Couplet, come with me . . .”) This might seem a little “meta” at first, or even kind of cheesy. But it can be a great way of interrogating (or at least, asking polite questions) of your own writing process and the motivations you have for writing, and the motivations you ascribe to your readers.

Happy writing!

Happy Monday, all, and welcome back for the eleventh day of Na/GloPoWriMo.

Our featured participant today is Amita Paul, whose shanty in response to Day Ten’s prompt is as rollicking as the sea itself.

Today, our daily resource is Chill Subs. Since it was first created couple of years back as an easy way to find journals and magazines accepting submissions of poetry and other writing, the site has grown to include software for tracking your submissions, a blog with fun posts about writing, and much more. It’s free to join, and I know I’ve found it very helpful in seeking publication opportunities.

And finally, our (optional) prompt for the day. This prompt challenges you to play around with the idea of overheard language. First, take a look at Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “One Boy Told Me.” It’s delightfully quirky, and reads as a list, more or less, of things that she’s heard the boy of the title – her son, perhaps? – say. Now,  write a poem that takes as its starting point something overheard that made you laugh, or something someone told you once that struck you as funny. If you can’t think of anything, here’s a few one-liners I picked out of the ever-fascinating-slash-horrifying archives of Overheard in New York.

•             So I asked my priest, and he said “I think you should see other people.”

•             Don’t say “no” to drugs. Say “no, thank you.”

•             You smell like you want to be alone.

•             Oh hi! We were just speaking very poorly about you!

•             I feel so elated! Wait…no, I mean, “violated.”

Happy writing!

Wow, everybody! As of today, we’re one third of the way through Na/GloPoWriMo.

Today’s featured participant is Michael Jarmer, who brings us a meditative (see what I did there?) sonnet in response to Day 9’s prompt.

Our poetry resource for the day is Poem Talk, a monthly podcast hosted by Al Fireis, sponsored by the Poetry Foundation and Kelly Writers House. Each episode features a roundtable discussion of a single poem.

Today’s daily prompt (optional, as always) again comes from our archives. I’m playing to my own strengths here, but I challenge you to write a sea shanty (or shantey, or chanty, or chantey — there’s a good deal of disagreement regarding the spelling!) Anyway, these are poems in the forms of songs, strongly rhymed and rhythmic, that sailors might sing while hauling on ropes and performing other sea-going labors. Probably the two most famous sea shanties (at least before TikTok gave us The Wellerman) are What Shall We Do With A Drunken Sailor? and Blow the Man Down. And what should your poem be about? Well, I suppose it could be about anything, although some nautical phrases tossed into the chorus would be good for keeping the sea in your shanty. Haul away, boys, haul away!

Happy writing!

Welcome back for the ninth day of Na/GloPoWriMo, fellow poets!

Our daily participant is To Create . . . where Day Eight’s “twenty projects” prompt resulted in a breathtakingly claustrophobic family memory. But I also want to give a shout-out to all of you who stuck with the prompt! I know that it was a lot.

Today’s poetry resource is UbuWeb, a vast repository of the avant-garde. You could get lost for days among the films, audio recordings, PDFs of small press publications, and other oddities here. If you’re looking to have the top of your head screwed off (figuratively), check out the “365 Days Project.”

Finally, here’s our prompt for the day (as always, optional). We’re calling today Sonnet Sunday, as we’re challenging you to write in what is probably the most robust poetic form in English. A traditional sonnet is 14 lines long, with each line having ten syllables that are in iambic pentameter (where an unstressed syllable is followed by a stressed syllable). While love is a very common theme in sonnets, they’re also known for having a kind of argumentative logic, in which a problem is posed in the first eight lines or so, discussed or argued about in the next four, and then resolved in the last two lines. A very traditional sonnet will rhyme, though there are a variety of different rhyme schemes.

Today, sonnets are probably most commonly associated with Shakespeare (who wrote more than 150, and felt very little compunction about messing around with the form, at least to the extent of regularly saying “who cares” to strict iambs). But poets’ attention to the form hasn’t waned in the 400 years or so since the Bard walked the fields around Stratford-upon-Avon and tramped the stage-boards of Merrie Old England. Take a look at this little selection of contemporary sonnets by Dennis Johnson, Alice Notley, Robert Hass, and Jill Alexander Essbaum. You’ll notice that while all of these poems play in some way on the theme of love, they are tonally extremely different – as is the kind or quality of love that they discuss. Some rhyme, some don’t. They mostly stick to around 14 lines but They’re also not at all shy about incorporating contemporary references (the Rolling Stones, telephones, etc).

Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own sonnet. Incorporate tradition as much or as little as you like – while keeping in general to the theme of “love.”

Happy writing!

Happy second Saturday of Na/GloPoWriMo, everyone.

Our featured participant for the day is Poems by Sidra, where the list poem for Day Seven has a very end-of-the-workweek kind of vibe.

Today’s resource is “Public Access Poetry,” an online feature from the Poetry Project, presenting digitized audio files of a poetry-themed public-access TV show that aired in New York City in 1977 and 1978. Listen to stalwarts and shining lights of the late-70s NYC “scene” such as Bernadette Mayer, Ron Padgett, Eileen Myles, and more!

And now for our daily (optional) prompt. This is another oldie-but-goodie. I remember being assigned to use it in a college poetry class, and loving the result. It really pushes you to use specific 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:

Happy writing!