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!

Happy fourth day of Na/GloPoWriMo, everyone!

Our featured participant today is Lizzy Burnham, who brings us an appropriately peculiar — and vinegary — poem in response to Day 3’s surrealist prose poem prompt.

Today’s resource is the Instagram account Read a Little Poetry, where you will in fact find a lot of poetry.

Our (optional) prompt for the day challenges you to write a poem in which you take your title or some language/ideas from The Strangest Things in the World. First published in 1958, the book gives shortish descriptions of odd natural phenomena, and is notable for both its author’s turn of phrase and intermittently dubious facts. Perhaps you will be inspired by the “The Self-Perpetuating Sponge” or “The World’s Biggest Sneeze.” Or maybe the quirky descriptions of luminous plants, monstrous bears, or the language of ravens will give you inspiration.

Happy writing!

Hello, all! Let’s hope poetry helps us get over the “hump” of this Wednesday.

Today, our featured participant is Joy Wright, who brings us a wistful poem in response to yesterday’s platonic love poem prompt.

Our resource for the day is the twitter account Peege, where you’ll find lots of poetry, but also cool art and photos.

Last but not least, here’s our prompt for the day – optional, as always. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a surreal prose poem. For inspiration, check out Franz Kafka’s collection of short parables (my favorite is “The Green Dragon”).

Happy writing!

Happy Tuesday, everybody, and welcome back for Day 2 of Na/GloPoWriMo. Hopefully, Day 1 whetted your appetite for verse, and now you’re ready for seconds.

Our featured participant for the day is A Rhyme a Day, where the response to Day 1’s prompt cleverly blends the memory of reading a book with the memory of what was going on in the poet’s life while reading it.

Today’s poetry resource is Secret Chords, an Instagram account where you will find a new poem every day.

Finally, here’s today’s optional prompt. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a platonic love poem. In other words, a poem not about a romantic partner, but some other kind of love – your love for your sister, or a friend, or even your love for a really good Chicago deep dish pizza. The poem should be written directly to the object of your affections (like a letter is written to “you”), and should describe at least three memories of you engaging with that person/thing.

Happy writing!

Hello, everyone. It’s the first day of NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo 2024, and we hope you’re eager to get writing. As usual, we’ll be featuring a participant each day, giving you a poetry resource, and – of course – an optional prompt to help you in case you’re having trouble with inspiration.

Today’s featured participant is Glenn Mitchell, whose response to our early-bird prompt brings us rhyme, wordplay, and a heartfelt theme.

This year, our poetry resources will focus on social media accounts (though we’ll have a few other things, too) that regularly post poems from books, magazines, and elsewhere, letting you discover new-to-you poets, and just get a quick fix of poetry from time to time. Today’s resource is the twitter account of the poet Tom Snarsky, where you will find a plethora of poems to peruse!

And now for our daily (and totally optional) prompt. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write – without consulting the book – a poem that recounts the plot, or some portion of the plot, of a novel that you remember having liked but that you haven’t read in a long time.

Happy writing!

It’s so close to the start of Na/GloPoWriMo that we can practically read the poems already! Okay, maybe not exactly that, but we’re certainly starting to feel the bubbling sensation that portends imminent inspiration.

We’ll be back tomorrow with our first daily featured participant and resource, along with a prompt. But for now, and to help out all of you for whom April 1 comes a bit earlier than it does to Na/GloPoWriMo’s secret headquarters (yes, our lair is built into a volcano), here’s an early-bird prompt: Pick a word from the list below. Then write a poem titled either “A [your word]” or “The [your word]” in which you explore the meaning of the word, or some memory you have of it, as if you were writing an illustrative/alternative definition.

• Cage
• Ocean
• Time
• Cedar
• Window
• Sword
• Flute

Happy writing!

Happy 30^th of March, everyone! April is just a hair’s breadth away from us (but not a hare’s breath, which is different). We hope you’re feeling excited about the prospect of writing 30 poems in 30 days.

Tomorrow, we’ll have an early-bird prompt for those of you whose position relative to the international date line means that April 1 arrives a few hours in advance. But in the meantime, why not check out the “Archive of the Now”? While it appears to have stopped updating a few years back – becoming more archive than now, if you get our drift – it remains a pleasingly organized clearinghouse of recordings of contemporary (well, as of ten years ago) British poets.

Hello, poetry fans! We’re just three days out from April 1, and the beginning of National/Global Poetry Writing Month. We assume you’ve been spending March deep within your poetry caverns, meditating on metaphors, and clearing your minds of attachments to non-metrical things. (Actually, we don’t assume that at all – we’re just glad you’re here!)

As we wait out the maddeningly long month of March, why not check out these images of “spine poems”? As the phrase implies, these are poems made up out of stacked book titles, visible in the books’ spines. If you’re feeling creative, you could get a jump-start on your poetic output by trying to put together a spine poem of your own.

We’ll be back tomorrow with another resource, and then on March 31 with an early-bird prompt.

Hello, everyone! April 1 is just 15 days away, and that means Na/GloPoWriMo 2024 is nearly upon us. I hope you’re excited for this year’s challenge, and that you’re sharpening your poetry pencils (or, er, your keyboards) in anticipation.

We’ll be back in the three days leading up to April 1, but in the meantime, to help get you in the mood to write, here’s a giant list of poetry podcasts. It may sound a bit strange, but I find inspiration often strikes while I’m listening to poetry. And it helps, too, that with podcasts, I can listen while doing the dishes, folding the laundry, or just looking off into the distance as if I were posing for a particularly moody rock album cover. Something about engaging multiple senses –listening, movement– really helps me come up with new ideas (which is also why I always have a pen and a tiny notebook to hand).

UPDATED: to fix the link, which was going to the wrong place. Whoops!