Three Days Until Na/GloPoWriMo

Hello, everybody. There are just three days left until National/Global Poetry Writing Month begins! There are lots of programs out there for training people to run races – I wonder what a training program for writing 30 poems would look like? Probably lots of time spent reviewing your favorite books of poetry, tossing off practice rhymes, and listening to “Eye of the Tiger” repeatedly. That last one seems to work for training for anything!

New participants’ sites are being added to our list every day, and we’ll keep those submissions open throughout the month of April. But I’d also like to give a shoutout to all of those who will be writing, but who won’t be posting your poems online. You are also part of Na/GloPoWriMo!

Our craft resource for the day is an essay by the poet Mark Strand (scroll down to “from ‘Notes on the Craft of Poetry’”). Strand is skeptical of the idea of “craft,” resisting the idea that you can build a poem like a car, just by having the right parts and the right know-how. Strand advocates for a bit of the mystical and the personal in poetry. While he doesn’t deny that there is a “way of doing” poetry, he believes that the way is unique to each poet, and must be discovered through practice. And we’re all about practice here!