Day Three

Happy third day (and first Monday) of Na/GloPoWriMo, everyone. We hope that starting the work-week with poems makes it a little better than usual.

Today, our featured participant is Window Drafts, where the response to the surrealist prompt for Day 2 takes us to Mobile and beyond

Our resource for the day is this archive of recordings of poets reading at the U.S. Library of Congress. Most of the recordings are from the 1990s and early 2000s, but one nice thing about poetry is that it doesn’t go stale. The recordings also span a huge number of genres, from cowboy poetry to “surly” holiday poems. Poets from Lucille Clifton to Russell Edson are represented – there’s a lot of explore!

Last but not least, here’s our prompt for the day (optional, as always). Find a shortish poem that you like, and rewrite each line, replacing each word (or as many words as you can) with words that mean the opposite. For example, you might turn “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” to “I won’t contrast you with a winter’s night.” Your first draft of this kind of “opposite” poem will likely need a little polishing, but this is a fun way to respond to a poem you like, while also learning how that poem’s rhetorical strategies really work. (It’s sort of like taking a radio apart and putting it back together, but for poetry).

Happy writing!