Day Twenty-Six

Wow, we’re really into the home-stretch of Na/GloPoWriMo now, with just five days left to go!

We again have two featured participants for the day! First, A Poet’s Vision brings us a healing and watery response to Day 25’s “aisling” prompt, while Arti Jain brings us a poem that blends gardening and philosophy.

Our featured online magazine for today is Longleaf Review, which has been publishing quarterly issues since the fall of 2018. From their recent issues, I’ll point you to Sara Elkamel’s “A Bride for a Flood” and Jad Josey’s “Not Bruise, Not Eggplant.”

And now for our daily prompt (optional, as always). A couple of days ago, we played around with hard-boiled similes. Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem that contains at least one of a different kind of simile – an epic simile. Also known as Homeric similes, these are basically extended similes that develop over multiple lines. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they have mainly been used in epic poems, typically as decorative elements that emphasize the dramatic nature of the subject (see, by way of illustration, this example from Milton’s Paradise Lost). But you could write a complete poem that is just one lengthy, epic simile, relying on the surprising comparison of unlike things to carry the poem across. And if you’re feeling especially cheeky, you could even write a poem in which the epic simile spends lines heroically and dramatically describing something that turns out to be quite prosaic. Whatever you decide to compare, I hope you have fun extending your simile(s) to epic lengths.

Happy writing!