Day Fourteen

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!