Day Nine

Happy Sunday, everyone, and happy ninth day of NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo.

Our featured participant for the day is Ordinary Average Thoughts, where the repetition poem for Day Eight completely cracked me up.

Today, our interview is with Thomas Lux. When he passed away earlier this year, he was the author of twenty books of poetry. Known for his sardonic verse (titles of his books include Pecked To Death By Swans and Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy), Lux taught for many years at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, as well as in other writing programs around the country. You can read more about Lux here, and find examples of his poems here and here.

Finally, here is our prompt (optional, as always). Because today is the ninth day of NaPoWriMo, I’d like to challenge you to write a nine-line poem. Although the fourteen-line sonnet is often considered the “baseline” form of verse in English, Sir Edmund Spenser wrote The Faerie Queene using a nine-line form of his own devising, and poetry in other languages (French, most particularly) has always taken advantage of nine-line forms. You can find information of various ways of organizing rhyme schemes, meters, etcetera for nine-line works here. And of course, you can always eschew such conventions entirely, and opt to be a free-verse nine-line poet.

Happy writing!