Day Thirty

Well, it’s happened again, everyone. We’ve gotten to the final day of another Na/GloPoWriMo! We’ll be back tomorrow with a post to laud our final, featured participant, but in the meantime, let’s get to it!

Today, we have another trio of featured participants. First up, here’s Backwoods Walking‘s lyrical and nostalgic response to Day 29’s “gifts” prompt, and second and third, rather humorous responses from Graham Parker’s Poetry and Poetic Inquiry for Beginners.

Our final featured online magazine is Freeze Ray, which specializes in poems about pop culture. From their most recent issue, I’ll point you to Thomas Fucaloro’s “Into the Spider-verse Deleted Character: Charles Baudelaire Parker, the Loathsome Spiderman” and Heather Knowles’ “Wow (Or, the Time I Served Owen Wilson Coffee).”

And now – our final (but still optional!) prompt. Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a cento. This is a poem that is made up of lines taken from other poems. If you’d like to dig into an in-depth example, here’s John Ashbery’s cento “The Dong with the Luminous Nose,” and here it is again, fully annotated to show where every line originated. A cento might seem like a complex undertaking – and one that requires you to have umpteen poetry books at your fingertips for reference – but you don’t have to write a long one. And a good way to jump-start the process is to find an online curation of poems about a particular topic (or in a particular style), and then mine the poems for good lines to string together. You might look at the Poetry Foundation’s collection of love poems, or its collection of poems by British romantic poets, or even its surprisingly expansive collection of poems about (American) football.

Happy writing!