Day Seventeen

Hello, everyone, and welcome back for Day Seventeen of NaPoWriMo!

Our featured participant today is Translunary Things, whose terzanelle for Day 16 involves a topic that — having woken up many an evening because somebody’s tail was whisking back and forth over my face — I can sympathize with! It also gets extra points for working in a Shakespearean allusion. This poem also underscores one way to approach a technical and demanding form — which is to make your topic light and bubbly. It at least makes it seem like more of a game to keep up with the meter, rather than a chore. Once you’ve managed the form in “light verse,” you may feel more confident about tackling it in service of deeper themes.

Today’s poetry resource is the Poetry Map from the University of Toronto’s Representative Poetry Center. Among other things, the map lets you explore places mentioned in poems! It’s sort of a fun way to find new poems, and you can also see if your home town has been immortalized in verse.

And now for our prompt (optional, as always). Today, I want you to try to write a “social media”-style poem. Namecheck all of your friends. Quote from their texts, tweets, FB status updates, twitter accounts, and blogposts, and the back of the cereal box on your breakfast table. The poem is about you and you are about what you say, think, talk, eat. You might end up with a poem that seems bizarrely solipsistic (like the internet itself, maybe?), but there might also be a spark there of something live and fun and present (like the verbal equivalent of a really great animated cat .gif).

Happy writing!