Day 21

Hello, everyone. We’re three weeks into NaPoWriMo. This is the home stretch!

Our featured link for today is to Publisher’s Weekly’s Poetry Reviews. PW’s short-form reviews are a good way to keep up with what’s new in American poetry.

Our featured participant’s blog for today is bigger than a lasagna, where the poem for Day 20 accurately (and humorously) illustrates one of our words for yesterday, “rodomontade.” I also very much like the poem for Day 18 — tight and with more of an emotional punch than you would think so short a poem could offer.

And now the (optional) prompt! Today I challenge you to re-write Frank O’Hara’s Lines for the Fortune Cookies. When I was a kid, I found a fortune cookie recipe, and made the cookies, which were pretty good. But mostly I was attracted to the idea of writing the fortunes. Unfortunately (rimshot, here), I wrote such long ones that they were very difficult to fold up small enough to fit into the cookies! Hopefully, you won’t have that problem — after all, the ideal fortune is a one-liner, and one-liners thrive on a very poetic compactness of expression. This should be a good chance for all of us to practice that, and amusing to boot. Happy writing!