Day Eighteen

Welcome back, everyone, for Day Eighteen of Na/GloPoWriMo.

Today, our featured participant is words & words, where you’ll find a lovely reminiscence on reeds and the wind in response to Day 17’s prompt inviting you to play with repetition and with correspondences between human life and the natural world.

Our daily resource is the YouTube channel of Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room. Here, you can check out more than 100 videos of poetry readings, lectures, and discussions. There’s much to explore!

Finally, here’s our prompt for the day, once again taken from our archives and, as always, optional. Today, I’d like to challenge you to write an abecedarian poem – a poem in which the word choice follows the words/order of the alphabet. You could write a very strict abecedarian poem, in which there are twenty-six words in alphabetical order, or you could write one in which each line begins with a word that follows the order of the alphabet. This is a prompt that lends itself well to a certain playfulness. Need some examples? Try this poem by Jessica Greenbaum, this one by Howard Nemerov or this one by John Bosworth.

Happy writing!