Day Four

Hello, all. It’s Day Four of NaPoWriMo. I hope your writing is going well.

Our featured press for the day is Bloof Books. Bloof’s publisher, Shanna Compton, has been doing NaPoWriMo since the very beginning and each year, she rounds up a group of Bloof authors to participate. You can follow their progress at here. Bloof publishes both chapbooks and full-length poetry collections. Bloof will hold an open reading period for chapbook manuscripts later this year — likely in June or July. Maybe your NaPoWriMo poems will result in just such a manuscript!

Today’s featured participant is Little Learner, whose ekphrastic poem for Day 1 uses parentheticals and indentations to create a sense of dramatic space, in some ways visually reflecting the monument that is the subject of the poem.

Today’s optional prompt is to write a lune. A lune is a sort of English-language variation on the haiku, meant to better render the tone of the Japanese haiku than the standard 5-7-5 format we all learned (and maybe loved) in elementary school. There are a couple of variants on the lune form, but just to keep things simple, let’s try the version developed by Jack Collum. His version of the lune involves a three-line stanza. The first line has three words. The second line has five, and the third line has three. You can write a poem that consists of just one stanza, or link many lune-stanzas together into a unified poem. Happy writing!