It Begins!

Hello, all. NaPoWriMo is finally here. Let the writing begin!

Our poetry-related link today is to the Best American Poetry blog, where they are celebrating National Poetry Month with links to — yes! — NaPoWriMo, as well as many other wonderful events that will be happening this month, both online and off.

Our featured blog for the day is Robert Lunday’s Cleaning My Attic. Robert was the first person to sign up for NaPoWriMo this year, so I thought I would point out his blog on this, the first day of NaPoWriMo. Robert also participated in NaPoWriMo last year, and made it to 26 poems, which is pretty darn good.

And now, our prompt! (The prompts are totally optional, by the way — use ’em or ignore ’em as you see fit.) Continuing with the theme of firsts, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem that has the same first line as another poem. You can use a favorite poem, pick up a random book of poetry and get a first line that way, or perhaps use one of the following:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

She walks in beauty, like the night

Slowly, silently, now the moon

anyone lived in a pretty how town

I have written some poems of this type in the past, and it can be fun to take a well-known first line and do something totally different with it! But if it’s hard for you to shake the original, maybe using a first line from a random poem would be best for you.