Day Two

Welcome back, all, for the second day of Na/GloPoWriMo. We hope the first day has only increased your appetite for poems.

Today’s featured participant is What Rhymes with Stanza?, where the book-cover poem for Day 1 takes us through all of recorded history and into the future, through the lens of the moon.

Our poetry resource for the day is Jacket2. This online magazine features a wealth of podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and other uncategorizable writings about contemporary poetry.

And now for today’s (optional) prompt! The Romanian-born poet Paul Celan once wrote a series of surrealist questions and answers. Here are a couple of examples:

                What is forgetting?

                                An unripe apple stabbed by a spear.

                What is a tear?

                                A scale awaiting a weight.

Today’s prompt asks you to begin by picking 5-10 words from the following list. Next, write out a question for each word that you’ve selected (e.g., what is seaweed?)

owl
generator
fog
river
clove
miracle
cyclops
oyster
mercurial
seaweed
gutter
artillery
salt
elusive
thunder
ghost
acorn
cheese
longing
cowbird
truffle
quahog
song

Now for each question, write a one-line answer. Try to make the answer an image, and don’t worry about strict logic. These are surrealist answers, after all!

After you’ve written out your series of questions and answers, place all the answers, without the questions, on a new page. See if you can make a poem of just the answers. You may find that what you have is very beautifully mysterious, and somehow has its own logic.

Happy writing!