Day 26

Happy last Saturday of NaPoWriMo, everyone.

Our featured journal for the day is Parcel, which will soon publish NaPoWriMo-er Rachel West. Parcel is just lovely-looking, and I’m quite please to make its acquaintance. Turns out some of my favorite poets have been published there, so I just ordered a subscription. And . . . they take submissions year-round.

Today’s featured participant is simple slanting bones, which has some lovely erasure poems, and a great (and appropriately themed) lune from Day 22.

Now for our prompt (optional, as always). Today’s prompt comes to us from Vince Gotera, who wrote his “family member” poem for Day 20 in the form of a curtal sonnet. As Vince explains, the curtal sonnet is shorter than the normal, fourteen line sonnet. Instead it has a first stanza of six lines, followed by a second stanza of four, and then closes with a half-line. The form was invented in the 1800s by Gerard Manley Hopkins, who used it in his famous poem “Pied Beauty”. So for today, I challenge you to give the curtal sonnet a whirl. It doesn’t need to rhyme — though it can if you like — and feel free to branch out beyond iambic pentameter. Happy writing!