Day Twenty-One

Hello, all, and welcome back for the third week of Na/GloPoWriMo!

As for today’s featured participant, well, I seem to be making a habit of having two featured daily participants, instead of just one. But that’s because you all are making it so difficult to choose! Today’s dynamic duo is Words with Ruth, where you’ll find a slightly jarring but very wonderfully observed sijo in response to our prompt for Day 20, and Smoke Words Every Day, which braids three sijo verses into a single poem.

Our featured daily reading is a live event that will take place tomorrow, April 22, at 7 p.m. eastern. It will involve poet Douglas Kearney giving the Bagley Wright Lecture at New York University.

And now for our (optional) prompt. Have you ever heard or read the nursery rhyme, “There was a man of double deed?” It’s quite creepy! A lot of its effectiveness can be traced back to how, after the first couplet, the lines all begin with the same two phrases (either “When the . . .” or “Twas like,”). The way that these phrases resolve gets more and more bizarre over the course of the poem, giving it a headlong, inevitable feeling.

Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem that, like this one, uses lines that have a repetitive set-up. Here’s an example I came up with after seeing this video of . . . a bucket of owls.

Bucket List

Several owls can fill a bucket.

Several buckets can fill a wheelbarrow.

Several wheelbarrows can fill a truckbed.

Several truckbeds can fill a song.

Several songs can fill a head.

Several heads can fill a bucket.

Several buckets filled with heads and owls

Sing plaintive verse all night long.

Happy writing!