Wow, it’s hard to believe, but we’re already one week into Na/GloPoWriMo. Here’s to another three weeks and change!

Today’s featured participant is Lucky Cat Comics, where the homophonic translation that came out of Day Six’s prompt is short, sweet, and artistic.

Our resource for the day is the Poem of the Day. Like Verse Daily, this feature presented by the Poetry Foundation brings you a new poem every day. You can even sign up to have it emailed you, so you don’t need to check the website.

Last, but not least, here’s our daily prompt (optional, as always). Start by reading James Tate’s poem “The List of Famous Hats.”  Now, write a poem that plays with the idea of a list. Tate’s poem is a list that isn’t – he never gets beyond the first entry. You could try to write a such a non-list, but a couple of other ideas would be to create a list of ingredients, or a list of entries in an index. A self-portrait (or a portrait of someone close to you) in the form of a such a list could be very funny. Another way into this prompt might be a list of instructions.

Happy writing!

Welcome back, fellow poets, for another frabjous day of poetry!

Today, our featured participant is LYNDYH, where Day Five’s laughter prompt gave rise to a very moving meditation.

Our daily resource is Poetry International, a wonderful source of contemporary poems in many different languages. Besides hosting so many poems online, Poetry International also puts on an annual poetry festival. This year’s will take place in Rotterdam in June.

Today’s (optional) prompt is again drawn from our archives, and builds off our daily resource. Take a look around Poetry International for a poem in a language you don’t know. For example, I grabbed this one in Finnish by Olli Heikkonen. Now, read the poem to yourself, thinking about the sound and shape of the words, and the degree to which they remind you of words in your own language. Use those correspondences as the basis for a new poem.

Happy writing!

Happy Wednesday, all, and happy fifth day of Na/GloPoWriMo. We hope you’ve started to settle into the rhythm of writing a poem every day!

It was difficult to choose just one featured daily participant for the day, given how wonderfully you all rose to the triolet challenge! I’m pretty bad at triolets myself, but you all give me hope. Anyway, what with the difficulty of choosing one participant…I didn’t. So we have two today! First up is Words With Ruth, where the triolet prompt for Day 4 resulted in “precipitous” words (if you’ll excuse the pun), and second (but only because any two things have to appear in some kind of order), An Inveterate Indoorswoman, who offers us a poignant elegy in triolet form.

Today, our featured resource is Verse Daily, where you will find – you guessed it – a new poem every day. You can also check out more than twenty years of archived poems – a rich collection indeed.

Finally, here’s our (optional) prompt for the day. Begin by reading Charles Simic’s poem “The Melon.” It would be easy to call the poem dark, but as they say, if you didn’t have darkness, you wouldn’t know what light is. Or vice versa. The poem illuminates the juxtaposition between grief and joy, sorrow and reprieve. For today’s challenge, write a poem in which laughter comes at what might otherwise seem an inappropriate moment – or one that the poem invites the reader to think of as inappropriate.

Happy writing!

Welcome back, everyone, for Day Four of Na/GloPoWriMo!

Our featured participant today is The Scribbletorium, which used our “opposite” prompt for Day 3 to turn a mysterious Borges poem into its equally mysterious mirror-image — an act that, come to think of it, is something Borges himself likely would have approved of!

Today’s poetry resource is this collection of poetry video recordings from the Dodge Poetry Program. If you’re not familiar with the Program, every two years it sponsors a four-day poetry festival in New Jersey, bringing together poets and students from across the United States and internationally.

And now here’s another prompt drawn from our archives – and, as usual, optional! Today, let’s try writing triolets. A triolet is an eight-line poem. All the lines are in iambic tetramenter (for a total of eight syllables per line), and the first, fourth, and seventh lines are identical, as are the second and final lines. This means that the poem begins and ends with the same couplet. Beyond this, there is a tight rhyme scheme (helped along by the repetition of lines) — ABaAabAB.

Here’s an example by Thomas Hardy:

Birds at Winter

Around the house the flakes fly faster,
And all the berries now are gone
From holly and cotoneaster
Around the house. The flakes fly! – faster
Shutting indoors the crumb-outcaster
We used to see upon the lawn
Around the house. The flakes fly faster
And all the berries now are gone!

Triolets were in vogue among the Victorians — all those repetitions can add a sort of melancholy gravitas to a poem, but watch out! They can also make the poem sound oddly gong-like. A playful, satirical poem, on the other hand, can be easily written in the triolet form, especially if you can find a way to make the non-repeating lines slightly change the meaning of the repeated ones. Here’s an example of a modern, humorous triolet, by Wendy Cope:

Valentine

Happy writing!

Happy third day (and first Monday) of Na/GloPoWriMo, everyone. We hope that starting the work-week with poems makes it a little better than usual.

Today, our featured participant is Window Drafts, where the response to the surrealist prompt for Day 2 takes us to Mobile and beyond

Our resource for the day is this archive of recordings of poets reading at the U.S. Library of Congress. Most of the recordings are from the 1990s and early 2000s, but one nice thing about poetry is that it doesn’t go stale. The recordings also span a huge number of genres, from cowboy poetry to “surly” holiday poems. Poets from Lucille Clifton to Russell Edson are represented – there’s a lot of explore!

Last but not least, here’s our prompt for the day (optional, as always). Find a shortish poem that you like, and rewrite each line, replacing each word (or as many words as you can) with words that mean the opposite. For example, you might turn “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” to “I won’t contrast you with a winter’s night.” Your first draft of this kind of “opposite” poem will likely need a little polishing, but this is a fun way to respond to a poem you like, while also learning how that poem’s rhetorical strategies really work. (It’s sort of like taking a radio apart and putting it back together, but for poetry).

Happy writing!

Welcome back, all, for the second day of Na/GloPoWriMo. We hope the first day has only increased your appetite for poems.

Today’s featured participant is What Rhymes with Stanza?, where the book-cover poem for Day 1 takes us through all of recorded history and into the future, through the lens of the moon.

Our poetry resource for the day is Jacket2. This online magazine features a wealth of podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and other uncategorizable writings about contemporary poetry.

And now for today’s (optional) prompt! The Romanian-born poet Paul Celan once wrote a series of surrealist questions and answers. Here are a couple of examples:

                What is forgetting?

                                An unripe apple stabbed by a spear.

                What is a tear?

                                A scale awaiting a weight.

Today’s prompt asks you to begin by picking 5-10 words from the following list. Next, write out a question for each word that you’ve selected (e.g., what is seaweed?)

owl
generator
fog
river
clove
miracle
cyclops
oyster
mercurial
seaweed
gutter
artillery
salt
elusive
thunder
ghost
acorn
cheese
longing
cowbird
truffle
quahog
song

Now for each question, write a one-line answer. Try to make the answer an image, and don’t worry about strict logic. These are surrealist answers, after all!

After you’ve written out your series of questions and answers, place all the answers, without the questions, on a new page. See if you can make a poem of just the answers. You may find that what you have is very beautifully mysterious, and somehow has its own logic.

Happy writing!

April 1 is finally here, and with it comes Na/GloPoWriMo. Huzzah!

Our first featured participant is Flipped Serendipity, where the “fun fact” early-bird poem draws attention to something many of us experience when starting a challenge like NaPoWriMo — even if you feel very enthusiastic about the project, it can be hard to push yourself out of your rut and really get writing. But the first step to shaking the rust off your verse is to get something down on the page. And having done these thirty-day-challenges many times, I can say that it does get easier as you go.

Speaking of featured participants, one of the ways we find them is through the comments on each day’s post. Don’t know where to find those? Just click on the title to the day’s post, and it will take you to a new page featuring just that post, and a comment section. Many folks paste links to their daily efforts there, or if they don’t have websites, copy out the poems themselves. The conversation between participants in the comment section is really supportive, and we’re particularly grateful for our “super-commenters,” including Paula, Gloria, Elizabeth, and Romana, who make the effort to engage with other writers, and to cheerlead their work. We couldn’t do this without yu!

Our poetry resource for the day is What Sparks Poetry, a regular feature of Poetry Daily. In each article in the series, a different poet discusses the craft of writing, and provides a prompt.

And here’s our own prompt (optional, as always) for the first day of Na/GloPoWriMo. They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, but they never said you can’t try to write a poem based on a book cover — and that’s your challenge for today! Take a look through Public Domain Review’s article on “The Art of Book Covers.” Some of the featured covers are beautiful. Some are distressing. Some are just plain weird (I’m looking at you, “Mr Sweet Potatoes”). With any luck, one or more of these will catch your fancy, and open your mind to some poetic insights.

Happy writing!

Happy Na/GloPoWriMo Eve, all! Tomorrow is April 1, and the official start of the twentieth year of the project. We can’t believe it’s been going on for so long. Its longevity is due to you all – the enthusiasm our participants bring to this yearly challenge is wonderful to see.

We’ll be back tomorrow with a new poetry resource, our first featured participant and, of course, our optional prompt. This year, in honor of the 20^th anniversary of Na/GloPoWriMo, we’ll be featuring a mix of prompts from our archives and brand-new challenges.

For those of you who just can’t wait – or are in time zones in which April arrives a bit earlier than it does here on the east coast of the United States, here’s an early bird prompt for you.

Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem that plays with the idea of a “fun fact.” Your fact could actually be fun – or the whole point could be that it’s not fun. Maybe you have a favorite wacky fact already, but if not, Mental Floss’s “Amazing Fact Generator” is here to help!

(Note: I’ve corrected the link! Sorry for the error, and hat tip to Elizabeth Boquet for bringing the problem to my attention!)

What does a poem taste like, we wonder? There’s a prompt for you right there!

With just two days to go, we are indeed on the brink, the precipice, the teetering edge of Na/GloPoWriMo. Luckily, if you fall over and in, all that happens is you wind up writing some poems. If you have to take a plunge, that’s really not so bad.

Tomorrow we’ll be back with an early-bird prompt, for the benefit of those of you who can’t wait to get started, as well as those of you for whom April 1 begins a few hours earlier than it does at Na/GloPoWriMo HQ, on the U.S. east coast.

If you’re hungry for prompts in the meantime, Poets and Writers has a huge collection, which you can find here.

Hello, everyone! There’s just three days left until April 1, and the start of Na/GloPoWriMo 2023. We hope you’ve got your keyboards charged, your pens filled with ink, and that your minds are starting to spark with poetic possibility.

As usual, we’ll be providing an optional prompt each day during the month, to help you if you are having trouble getting started. But if our prompts aren’t enough, why not browse the Poetry Foundation’s online collection?