Two weeks down, two weeks and two days to go!

Today’s featured participant is Enheduanna’s Daughter, where you’ll find a lovely poem filled with in-the moment sensory details in response to Day 13’s rhyming word-bank prompt,

Our daily resource is biographyof.red, another Instagram account that regularly posts poetry, fragments from interviews with poets, and other poetry-minded tidbits.

Today’s (optional) prompt asks you to write a poem of at least ten lines in which each line begins with the same word (e.g., “Because,” “Forget,” “Not,” “If”). This technique of beginning multiple lines with the same word or phrase is called anaphora, and has long been used to give poems a driving rhythm and/or a sense of puzzlebox mystery. To give you more context, here’s an essay by Rebecca Hazelton on her students’ “adventures in anaphora,” and a contemporary poem that uses anaphora to great effect: Layli Long Soldier’s “Whereas.”

Happy writing!

Welcome back for the second Saturday of this year’s National/Global Poetry Writing Month.

Our featured participant for the day is Poem Dive, where you’ll find a vertiginous and expansive eulogy for a mayfly in response to Day 12’s “tall tale” prompt.

Today’s resource is the twitter account of the Wild and Precious Life reading series, where you’ll find a prompt every day for this month (if our own prompts don’t inspire you, or in case you just want to collect oodles of prompts to keep you going after April’s over).

Finally, our optional prompt for the day asks you to play with rhyme. Start by creating a “word bank” of ten simple words. They should only have one or two syllables apiece. Five should correspond to each of the five senses (i.e., one word that is a thing you can see, one word that is a type of sound, one word that is a thing you can taste, etc). Three more should be concrete nouns of whatever character you choose (i.e., “bridge,” “sun,” “airplane,” “cat”), and the last two should be verbs. Now, come up with rhymes for each of your ten words. (If you’re having trouble coming up with rhymes, the wonderful Rhymezone is at your service). Use your expanded word-bank, with rhymes, as the seeds for your poem. Your effort doesn’t actually have to rhyme in the sense of having each line end with a rhymed word, but try to use as much soundplay in your poem as possible.

Happy writing!

Happy twelfth day of NaPoWriMo / GloPoWriMo, everyone! (Too bad it’s not like the twelve days of Christmas – maybe we could have twelve words a-rhyming, eleven stanzas singing, ten poets sighing, etc., etc.)

Today’s featured participant is salovie, where you’ll find a tender response to Day 11’s monostich prompt.

Our resource for the day is the Poetry Foundation’s Poem-of-the-Day podcast, where – as you may have already surmised – there’s a new audio recording of a poem daily.

And last but not least, our optional prompt. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem that plays with the idea of a “tall tale.” American tall tales feature larger-than-life characters like Paul Bunyan (who is literally larger than life), Bulltop Stormalong (also gigantic), and Pecos Bill (apparently normal-sized, but he doesn’t let it slow him down). If you’d like to see a modern poetic take on the tall tale, try Jennifer L. Knox’s hilarious poem, “Burt Reynolds FAQ.” Your poem can revolve around a mythical character, one you make up entirely, or add fantastical elements into a real person’s biography.

Happy writing!

Happy Thursday, all, and welcome back for Day 11 of Na/GloPoWriMo.

Our featured participant for the day is The Cynical Optimist, where you’ll find a comic poem based in multiple animal-involving headlines in response to Day 10’s “news that stays news” prompt.

Today’s resource is grieftolight, an Instagram account where you will find a wealth of poems.

Finally, our optional prompt for the day honors the “ones” in the number 11. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write either a monostich, which is a one-line poem, or a poem made up of one-liner style jokes/sentiments. Need inspiration? Take a look at Joe Brainard’s poem “30 One-Liners” or Frank O’Hara’s “Lines for the Fortune Cookies.”

Happy writing!

Congratulations, all — we’ve made it one-third of the way through National/Global Poetry Writing Month!

Today’s featured participant is the sea close by, which brings us both a Spanish and an English version of a lovely and sensuous response to Day 9’s Neruda-inspired ode prompt.

Our resource for the day is the YouTube channel of Canada’s Griffin Poetry Prize, where you’ll find videos of past prize nominees as well as discussions of the art of translation.

And now for our optional prompt! Ezra Pound famously said that “poetry is news that stays news.” While we don’t know about that, the news can have a certain poetry to it. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem based on one of the curious headlines, cartoons, and other journalistic tidbits featured at Yesterday’s Print, where old new stays amusing, curious, and sometimes downright confusing.

Happy writing!

Happy Tuesday, all, and happy ninth day of Na/GloPoWriMo.

Our featured participant for today is Rook Poetry, where a cowboy and samurai circle around each other in response to Day 8’s unlikely connections prompt (reminding me of The Magnificent Seven / Seven Samurai).

Today’s daily resource is Poem Today, a twitter account where you’ll typically find at least one poem every day, and usually more.

Our prompt for today (optional, as always) takes its inspiration from Pablo Neruda, the Chilean-born poet and Nobel Prize Winner. While he is most famous in the English-speaking world for his collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, he also wrote more than two hundred odes, and had a penchant for writing sometimes-long poems of appreciation for very common or mundane things. You can read English translations of “Ode to the Dictionary” at the bottom of this page, “Ode to My Socks” here, and “Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market” here.

Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own ode celebrating an everyday object.

Happy writing!

Well, we’ve officially passed the one-week mark! We hope your inspiration is holding up. But if you find it flagging, our daily optional prompts might just give you the lift you need to power through.

Today, we have two featured participants: (1) Behind Door Number 3 and (2) Orangepeel, where you’ll find very differnt, but compelling, takes on Day 7’s postcard prompt.

Our featured resource today is this animated video of a talk given by the poet Jane Hirshfield on the art of the metaphor.

Finally, our (optional) prompt for the day takes its inspiration from Laura Foley’s poem “Year End.” Today, we challenge you to write a poem that centers around an encounter or relationship between two people (or things) that shouldn’t really have ever met – whether due to time, space, age, the differences in their nature, or for any other reason.

Happy writing!

Happy first Sunday of Na/GloPoWriMo, all. Let’s give ourselves all a virtual round of applause for making it through the first week of the poem-a-day challenge!

Our featured participant today is Oregano Oranges, where you’ll find a response to Day 6’s “weird wisdom” prompt that places a unique spin on telling a lie.

Today’s featured resource is theheartofpoems, an Instagram account featuring both poetry and art.

And last but not least, we’re taking it easy with today’s (optional) prompt. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem titled “Wish You Were Here” that takes its inspiration from the idea of a postcard. Consistent with the abbreviated format of a postcard, your poem should be short, and should play with the idea of travel, distance, or sightseeing. If you’re having trouble getting started, perhaps you’ll find some inspiration in these images of vintage postcards.

Happy writing!

Welcome back, everyone, for the sixth day of NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo.

Today, our featured participant is Skrol an Yeth, where you’ll find a response to Day 5’s prompt in not just English but Welsh Cornish! (Sorry for that very silly mistake!)

Our featured resource for the day is “A Poetry Channel” on YouTube, where you’ll find an eclectic array of poems being read with accompanying images and video.

And now for our (optional) prompt. Today’s we’d like to challenge you to write a poem rooted in “weird wisdom,” by which we mean something objectively odd that someone told you once, and that has stuck with you ever since. Need an example? Check out Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Making a Fist.”

Happy writing!

Friday is here, and so is the fifth day of Na/GloPoWriMo.

Today’s featured participant is Narrative Paralysis, which brings us a spooky, cosmic poem in response to Day 4’s “strange things” prompt.

Our resource for the day is not a social media account, but a podcast that we’ve featured in past years (and is good enough to bear repeating): The Slowdown. You’ll find a poem here every day — you can listen online and read the transcript with the daily poem as well.

Now, let’s get to our optional prompt! Today we’d like you to start by taking a look at Alicia Ostriker’s poem, “The Blessing of the Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog.” Now try your hand at writing your own poem about how a pair or trio very different things would perceive of a blessing or, alternatively, how these very different things would think of something else (luck, grief, happiness, etc).

Happy writing!