Day Six

Welcome to Day Six of Na/GloPoWriMo, everyone!

We have two featured participants for today, because I just couldn’t choose between Salovie‘s tongue-in-cheek take on mother dragons, and Serendippity‘s equally ironic poem about Cyclops dating protocols.

Our featured online magazine today is Couplet. This is a relatively new journal, with just two issues so far. Couplet focuses on publishing pairs of poems that complement one another. From their most recent issue, I’ll point out Sarah Gridley’s poems “Aquatic” and “Anchor,” and W. Todd Kaneko’s “How to Stay Safe” and “When Our Twin Sons are Born.”

Finally, here’s our optional prompt for the day. Many of us had to write “acrostic” poems in school. These are poems in which the first letter of each line spells a word as you go down the poem. For example, the first line of an acrostic poem that spells the word “ghost” would start with a word beginning with “g”; the second line would start with a word beginning with an “h,” and so on.

Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a variation of an acrostic poem. But rather than spelling out a word with the first letters of each line, I’d like you to write a poem that reproduces a phrase with the first words of each line. Perhaps you could write a poem in which the first words of each line, read together, reproduce a treasured line of poetry? You could even try using a newspaper headline or something from a magazine article. Whatever you choose, I hope you enjoy this prompt.

Happy writing!