We made it to the weekend, everyone, and to the eleventh day of Na/GloPoWriMo!

Today’s featured participant is A.J.S., who brings us a mysterious and surreal response to Day Nine’s grief prompt.

Our resource for the day is Frank Skinner’s poetry podcast. Here, the English comedian and actor analyzes his favorite poems and interviews contemporary poets.

And now for today’s (optional) prompt! Erasure poetry — also known as blackout poetry — is written by taking an existing text and erasing or blacking out individual words. Here’s a great explainer with examples, and you’ll find another here. Some folks have written whole books of erasures/blackouts, including Chase Berggrun’s R E D (which is based on Dracula), Jen Bervin’s Nets (which is based on Shakespeare’s sonnets), and what is one of the grand-daddies of erasures as a form, Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os (which is based on Paradise Lost). Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own erasure/blackout poem. You could use a page from a favorite book, a magazine, what have you. It can be especially fun to play with a book you don’t know, particularly one that deals with an unfamiliar topic. If you’d like to go that route, maybe you’ll find something of interest in the thousands of scanned books at the Internet Archive? Feel free to maintain the whitespace of the original text (as is traditional for erasures/blackouts . . . if anything can be called traditional about them) or to pluck words/phrases from your chosen source material and rearrange them.

Happy writing (or erasing!)

One-third of the way through Na/GloPoWriMo already?! I guess the days go by fast when you spend them writing poems.

Our featured participant for the day is Poems by Sidra, where you’ll find that the response to Day Nine’s Marianne-Moore-inspired prompt brings us not only a poem in the voice of an animal, but a lovely and surprising opening simile.

Today’s daily resource is The Poetry Project‘s Youtube channel, where you can find videos of various readings, including the Project’s famous New Year’s Day poetry marathons.

And now, our (optional) daily prompt. In his poem, “Goodbye,” Geoffrey Brock describes grief in three short stanzas, the second of which is entirely made up of a rhetorical dialogue. Today, write your own meditation on grief. Try using Brock’s form as the “container” for your poem: a few short stanzas, with a middle section in which a question is repeated with different answers given.

Happy (or at least meaningful) writing!

Happy ninth day of National/Global Poetry Writing Month, all. We hope that you’re really getting into the groove of this whole poem-a-day thing!

Our featured participant today is Richard White, who brings us a poem about being (or not being) an EMT in reponse to Day Eight’s contradictory prompt.

Today’s resource is the Poetry Foundation’s collection of learning prompts, each one of which is geared toward introducing or exploring a different poetic form, mode, or concept, and then giving you a prompt to write from. If you just can’t get enough prompts, well, they’ve got a whole bunch more for you!

And that leads us to our own (optional) prompt for the day. Marianne Moore was a well-known modernist poet, with a curious taste in hats. Though she wrote on many themes, I’ve always had some affection for her many poems about – or in the voice of – animals, such as “The Fish,” “Dock Rats,” “The Pangolin,” and “No Swan so Fine.” Today, try writing your own poem in the voice of an animal or plant, or a poem that describes a specific animal or plant with references to historical events or scientific facts.

Happy writing!

Happy second Wednesday of Na/GloPoWriMo, everybody!

Today’s featured participant is Smita Vyas Kumar, whose response to Day Seven’s clapping/skipping prompt is a social media-themed poem that is very easy to imagine jumping rope to!

Our resource for the day is the University of Iowa International Writing Program’s “MOOC Packs” courses on How Writers Write Poetry I, and How Writers Write Poetry II. These free, online courses take you through all manner of poetic techniques, with suggested exercises and readings.

And now, here’s our optional prompt for the day! In his poem, “Poet, No Thanks,” Jean D’Amérique repeats the phrase “I wasn’t a poet” multiple times, while describing other things that he instead claims to have been. In your poem for today, use a simple phrase repeatedly, and then make statements that invert or contradict that phrase.

Happy writing!

Welcome back, all — we’ve now hit the one-week mark in this year’s National/Global Poetry Writing Month!

Also, thanks for your patience as we work through the continued over-enthusiasm of our Disqus comment-moderating system. We’re trying to keep on top of when it flags comments as spam (on bases that defy understanding), and then marking affected commenters as “trusted users” accordingly.

Our featured participant for the day is Veronica Zundel, whose response to Day Six’s slightly-surreal promp takes us through a list of lovely-sounding plants, with a casual glance at a “hot French gardener.” Ooh-la-la!

Today, our resource is the Ode & Psyche podcast from the Ruth Stone House, a nonprofit that celebrates the legacy of the Vermont poet Ruth Stone. Hosted by Ruth Stone’s granddaughter, the poet Bianca Stone, the podcast features interviews with poets, close readings of poems, and explorations of how poetry is made and moves.

Finally, here’s today’s prompt — optional, as always. In her poem, “Front Yard Rhyme,” Cecily Parks evokes the sing-songy beats that accompany girls’ clapping games, and jump-rope and skipping rhymes. Today, we challenge you to write your own poem that emulates these songs – something to snap, clap, and jump around to.

Happy writing!

Well, if it’s got to be Monday, at least it’s a Monday during Na/GloPoWriMo, so the work-week can start off with a bountiful crop of poems!

Our featured participant today is alex innocent, who reminds us that sometimes “less is more” with her very short, pointed response to Day Five’s things-I-dislike prompt.

Our daily resource is Nobel-winning poet Louise Glück’s essay, “Against Sincerity.” Here, Glück muses on the difference between honesty and truth, and how, in poetry, words that ring true are not necessarily those that are “honest” in the sense of recounting events as they happened. After all, a poem isn’t a newspaper article. Making art means selecting, trimming, choosing, exaggerating, and even deceiving, all in service of a goal that differs from a bare recitation of facts.

And now, to put theory in our practice, here’s our optional prompt! This one takes its inspiration from Yentl van Stokkum’s poem, “It’s the Warmest Summer on Record Babe,” which blends casual, almost blasé phrasing with surreal events like getting advice from a bumblebee. In your poem today, try writing with a breezy, conversational tone, while including at least one thing that could only happen in a dream.

Happy writing!

Happy first Sunday of Na/GloPoWriMo, all!

Our featured participant today is Kim M. Russell, who brings us a stormy response to Day Four’s weather/season prompt.

Today, our resource is a brief history of the poetry chapbook, with digitized examples. It’s quite common for poets to publish one or more of these short, informal collections, often in very short runs, before they publish a more formal, “full-length” collection of poetry. And even quite well known poets may publish chapbooks as a means of showcasing shorter, cohesive groups of poems. If you’re interested in learning more about chapbooks, check out Bull City Press’s podcast series in which the press’s editors interview poets about their recently published chapbooks.

And now, here’s our prompt for the day — totally optional, as usual. The Roman poet Catullus wrote a famous two-line poem:

Odi et amo: quare id faciam fortasse requiris.
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

Here’s an English translation.

                I hate and I love. Why do I do this, you ask?
                I don’t know, but I feel it happening and am tortured.

I thought about this poem the other day when I read a social media post collecting sentences from Charles Darwin’s letters, including:

                “Oh my God how do I hate species & varieties.”

                “I am very tired, very stomachy & hate nearly the whole world.”

                “I am very poorly today & very stupid & hate everybody & everything.”

                “I hate myself, I hate clover, and I hate bees.”

                “I am languid & bedeviled & hate writing & hate everybody.”

I must confess, the idea of being so grumpy that you have come to hate clover and bees is highly amusing to me. Today, your challenge is to take a page from Catullus and Darwin, and write a poem in which you talk about disliking something – particularly something utterly innocuous, like clover. Be over the top! Be a bit silly and overdramatic.

Happy grumpy writing!

Hello, all, and welcome back for Day Four of Na/GloPoWriMo.

Our featured participant for today is W.B.J. Williams, whose response to Day Three’s prompt is a good reminder that jobs aren’t always like they’re made out to be on tv.

Today’s resource is an oldie-but-a-goodie, the Poem-a-Day from the Academy of American Poets. Check back each day for a new poem, or subscribe and the poem will show up in your inbox each morning!

Finally, here’s today’s optional prompt. In his poem, “Spring Thunder,” Mark van Doren brings us a short, haunting evocation of weather and the change in seasons. Today, we’d like to challenge you to craft your own short poem that involves a weather phenomenon and some aspect of the season. Try using rhyme and keeping your lines of roughly even length.

Happy writing!

Happy Friday, everyone, and happy third day of National/Global Poetry Writing month.

Today, our featured participant is Eden Ligon, whose response to Day Two’s prompt about childhood and growing up is both sweet and bittersweet.

Our resource today is the University of Pennsylvania’s free, online class on Modern & Contemporary Poetics. In this go-at-your-own-pace course, instructor Al Fireis takes you from Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman up to the more-or-less present day, with stops along the way to see the sights and sounds of the Harlem Renaissance, the Beat poets, the L=A-N=G=U=A=G=E poetry movement, and more.

And now, last but not least, here is today’s optional prompt. In his poem, “Treasure Hunt,” Prabodh Parikh brings us a refreshingly different view of what being a poet is like – that is, if you grew up on the cultural notion of poets being wan and ethereal, or ill and doomed. Parikh’s boisterous pirate of a poet might be an “unreliable” character, but seems like he’d be the life of any party, and quite satisfied with his existence. Today, we challenge you to write a poem in which a profession or vocation is described differently than it typically is considered to be. Perhaps your poem will feature a very relaxed brain surgeon, or a farmer that hates vegetables. Or maybe you have a poetical alter-ego of your own, who flies a non-wan, treasure-hunting flag with pride.

Happy writing!

Welcome back for the second day of Na/GloPoWriMo, everyone. We hope you feel invigorated after the first day of the challenge. And my apologies to those of you who had comments marked as spam yesterday — sometimes whatever algorithm Disqus uses to flag spam gets a wee bit over-enthusiastic!

Our featured participant today is aetherianessence, where you’ll find a response to Day One’s prompt that shows you just how much feeling the small form of the tanka can accommodate.

Today’s resource is the nineteenth century poet and critic Matthew Arnold’s essay, “The Study of Poetry.” Arnold believed that the fundamental purposes of poetry were to uplift and console. Do you agree? Maybe you think it should annoy or perplex? I’m somewhat partial to the idea of poems as little puzzles with surprises in them, or doorways into unfamiliar ways of thinking. And I find Arnold’s thesis a little strange given that “Dover Beach,” one of his most famous poems, ends in such an unsettling way.

Speaking of things that are unsettling, it’s now time for our daily prompt — optional, as always! In her poem, “Pittsylvania County,” Ellen Bryant Voigt recounts watching her father and brother play catch with sensory detail and a strangely foreboding sense of inevitability. The speaker watches the scene, but is outside of it – cut off. She’s not so much jealous of the interaction between her father and brother, as filled with a pervading sense that she wants something more or different from life than what the moment seems to presage. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem in which you recount a childhood memory. Try to incorporate a sense of how that experience indicated to you, even then, something about the person you’d grow up to be.

Happy writing!