Day Twenty-Five

Hello, everyone! Happy final Monday of NaPoWriMo and GloPoWriMo!

Our featured participant for Day 25 is Rhyme and Reason, where the mix-and-match prompt for Day 24 is folded into a versical movie review!

Today, in addition to our featured participant, I’d like to post out the websites of some participants who have not been following our prompts, but instead have been using NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo to pursue independent, themed projects! Mark Lamoureux and Chris McCreary, for example, have been collaborating on poems based on The Dictionnaire Infernal, an old French demonology book. Over at the Bloof Books blog, a number of different poets have been publishing daily poems, including editor Shanna Compton, Natalie Eilbert, and Farrah Field. For her part, Joanna Penn Cooper has been focusing mainly on diaristic prose poems, interspersed with prompt-based and collaborative work.

Our poet in translation for today is Finland’s Olli Heikkonen, whose work is intimately concerned with the interrelation between city, suburb, and countryside, between forest and town. Thirteen of his poems can be found at the link above.

And now for our (optional) prompt! Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem that begins with a line from a another poem (not necessarily the first one), but then goes elsewhere with it. This will work best if you just start with a line of poetry you remember, but without looking up the whole original poem. (Or, find a poem that you haven’t read before and then use a line that interests you). The idea is for the original to furnish a sort of backdrop for your work, but without influencing you so much that you feel stuck just rewriting the original!. For example, you could begin, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day,” or “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,” or “I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster,” or “they persevere in swimming where they like.” Really, any poem will do to provide your starter line – just so long as it gives you the scope to explore. Happy writing!