Day Twenty-Eight

There’s only three days left to go in this year’s Na/GloPoWriMo. I hope you’ve had – and are having – fun with the challenge.

Today’s featured participant is yet again, two participants! First up, we have Eunoia, bringing us a duplex that I certainly found meaningful, having grown up as a navy brat (and moving every six to twelve months as a result), and second, Karen Morris, bringing us a fully-rhymed duplex in the form of a mother’s humorous lament.

Our daily online magazine is failbetter. Among the poems that they’ve published recently, I’ll point out Jessie Raymundo’s “Memory with Water” and John Wall Barger’s “I Received a Bitter Email from a Good-Hearted Man.”

Today’s (optional) prompt is to write a concrete poem. Like acrostic poems, concrete poems are a favorite for grade-school writing assignments, so this may not be your first time at the concrete-poem rodeo. In brief, a concrete poem is one in which the lines are shaped in a way that mimics the topic of the poem. For example, May Swenson’s poem “Women” mimics curves, reinforcing the poem’s references to motion, rocking horses, and even the shape of a woman’s body. George Starbuck’s “Sonnet in the Shape of a Potted Christmas Tree” is – you guessed it – a sonnet in the shape of a potted Christmas tree. Your concrete poem could be complexly-shaped, but relatively simple strategies can also be “concrete” —  like a poem involving a staircase where the length of the lines grows or shrinks over time, like an ascending (or descending) set of stairs.

Happy writing!