Welcome back, everyone. I hope the first Friday of Na/GloPoWriMo is treating you well.

Our featured participant today is Put Out to Pasture, where the place-based prompt for Day 2 breathes life into the memory of a library.

Today’s poetry resource is one I find myself using frequently – an online rhyming dictionary. This one provides both “pure” rhymes and near rhymes, a way to find “similar sounding” words, and also a thesaurus. It might seem a bit like “cheating,” but I think all’s fair in love and poetry.

Today’s prompt (optional, as always) asks you to make use of our resource for the day. First, make a list of ten words. You can generate this list however you’d like – pull a book  off the shelf and find ten words you like, name ten things you can see from where you’re sitting, etc. Now, for each word, use Rhymezone to identify two to four similar-sounding or rhyming words. For example, if my word is “salt,” my similar words might be “belt,” “silt,” “sailed,” and “sell-out.”

Once you’ve assembled your complete list, work on writing a poem using your new “word bank.” You don’t have to use every word, of course, but try to play as much with sound as possible, repeating  sounds and echoing back to others using your rhyming and similar words.

Happy writing!

Happy Thursday, all. I hope that your first day of Na/GloPoWriMo went swimmingly, and that you are ready for another dip in the refreshing pool of poetry!

Today, our featured participant is Poem Dive, where Day 1’s life-as-metaphor prompt generated a visually arresting reverie rooted in painting and internet research.

Our poetry resource for today is this PDF of a short, rather whimsical chapbook by the Pulitzer Prize-winnning poet James Schuyler, whose poems are known for constantly mixing together spoken language, observations about the weather, high and low diction, and for their attention to the profundities (and absurdities) of everyday life.

Our (optional) prompt for the day takes a leaf from Schuyler’s book, as it were, and asks you to write a poem about a specific place —  a particular house or store or school or office. Try to incorporate concrete details, like street names, distances (“three and a half blocks from the post office”), the types of trees or flowers, the color of the shirts on the people you remember there. Little details like this can really help the reader imagine not only the place, but its mood – and can take your poem to weird and wild places.

Happy writing!

Welcome, everyone, to the official first day of NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo 2020!

Let’s kick things off with our first featured participant, Honey Stew, where the early-bird poem is a paean to sanderlings and the ” many fast little birds who peep by the sea.”

As in past years, we’ll be featuring a different poetry-related resource daily. This year, instead of concentrating on a single kind of resource, we’ll be cycling through a potpourri of them, including online poetry chapbooks, poetry-related Twitter accounts, and more.

Today, we bring you what might seem like a rather silly resource, but one thing that poetry has taught me is that silly tricks are sometimes the best, at least for getting one’s creativity going. It’s an online metaphor generator https://www.wildstrawberrylodge.com/dressing-for-the-weather-fishing-with-the-elderly/ ! Plug in some parameters, and get a phrase that may strike you as interesting, arresting, or . . . just ridiculous. At any rate, I hope this generator is something you can return to when you find yourself staring at the page and thinking “ummmmmmmmm.”

And now for our (optional) prompt, which also deals with metaphors! Forrest Gump famously said that “life is like a box of chocolates.” And there are any number of poems out there that compare or equate the speaker’s life with a specific object. (For example, this poem of Emily Dickinson’s). Today, however, I’d like to challenge you to write a self-portrait poem in which you make a specific action a metaphor for your life – one that typically isn’t done all that often, or only in specific circumstances. For example, bowling, or shopping for socks, or shoveling snow, or teaching a child to tie its shoes.

Happy writing!

Hello, all! Tomorrow is April 1, and the first day of NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo 2020! But since April 1 arrives a bit earlier in some parts of the globe than the east coast of the United States, we have an early-bird resource and prompt for you.

Today’s resource is The Slowdown, a daily poetry podcast hosted by former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith. Podcasts are a nice way to add some poetry to your life. They also give you a chance to hear the rhythm of poetry out loud. Sometimes it can be very surprising, if you’ve been reading a poet on the page for many years, to hear their voice out loud, and realize it’s much different than the voice you’ve been giving that same poet in your head.

And now, in the spirit of an early-bird prompt, I’d like to invite you to write a poem about your favorite bird. As this collection of snippets from longer poems suggests, birds have been inspiring poets for a very long time indeed!

If you don’t have a favorite bird, or are having trouble picking one, perhaps I might interest you in my favorite bird, the American Woodcock? These softball-sized guys are exactly the color of the leaves on the floor of a Maine forest, and they turn up each spring to make buzzy peent noises, fly up over meadows in elaborate courtship displays, and to do little rocking dances that YouTube jokesters delight in setting to music. They are also quite odd looking, as every part of their body appears to be totally out of proportion with the rest. For a poetic bonus, they also have many regional nicknames. In Maine, they’re often called “timberdoodles,” but other regionalisms for them include “night partridge,” “mudbat,” “prairie turtle,” Labrador twister,” “bogsucker,” “wafflebird,” “billdad,” and “hokumpoke.”

Tomorrow we’ll be back with another resource, prompt, and our first featured participant. In the meantime, happy writing!

Hello, everybody! In a mere two days, April will begin, and so will National/Global Poetry Writing Month.

We’ll be back tomorrow with an early-bird resource and a prompt for all of you that see April begin a bit sooner than it does on the east coast of the United States, where napowrimo.net makes its headquarters.

In the meantime, however, to whet your poetry appetite, why not check out noted thespian and space captain Sir Patrick Stewart’s twitter account, where he is posting a video of himself reading one of Shakespeare’s sonnets every day, under #sonnetaday?

Yes, it’s true! We’re just three days out from the beginning of National/Global Poetry Writing Month, when people all over the world take up the challenge of writing a poem every day for all of April.

We’ll be back tomorrow with a new poetry resource for you, and the next day we’ll follow up with another resource and an early-bird prompt. After that, it’s off to the races — each day we’ll be featuring a participant and a poetry-related resource, and providing a (totally optional!) prompt to help anyone who is having trouble coming up with lyrical inspiration on their own.

For now, why not grease your lyrical wheels with a silly test that aims to see if you can tell the difference between poems written by humans and those written by computers?

Hello, everyone! I hope you’re all staying safe and healthy out there, and that you are getting excited about April 1, and the beginning of National/Global Poetry Writing Month 2020.

We’re busily writing prompts and researching poetry resources, to make Na/GloPoWriMo as inspirational and educational as ever. And our “Submit Your Site” page is open and ready to receive any links to websites, blogs, or other internet-places where you’ll be posting work.

We’ll be back on March 29 with the first of three countdown posts (inclusive of an early-bird prompt on March 31). If you have any questions for us in the meantime, you can send them to napowrimonet-AT-gmail-DOT-com.

It’s hard to believe that it’s March 15, already, but here we are — just 16 days away from Na/GloPoWriMo 2020!

We’ll be back on March 25 (which marks the one-week-to-go point) with some pre-April posts, but in the meantime, for those of you who intend to post your poems to a blog or other webspace, we have a few “buttons” or “badges” below that you are welcome to use! And of course, please go ahead and submit the link to your site for inclusion on our list of participants’ sites, using the “Submit Your Site” form at the top of the page!

Come, all you poets and versifiers, all you line-crafters yearning to breathe free!

Today is March 1, and that means not only that spring is on its way, but that we just have 30 days to go until the start of National/Global Poetry Writing Month, otherwise known as Na/GloPoWriMo!

What is Na/GloPoWriMo? It’s simple — it’s just the month of April, but as experienced by people all over the world who commit to writing a poem every day for the whole month. That’s 30 poems apiece. They don’t have to be long, they don’t have to be “good” (whatever that means) — they just have to be written!

How does it work? That’s simple, too — just write a poem every day from April 1 to April 30. There’s no requirement that you publish or share them. You can write them in your own notebook; you can keep them all to yourself. But if you do decide to post your efforts to a blog or other internet space this year, you can submit the link using our “Submit Your Site” form, and your website will show up in our “Participants’ Sites” list.

As in prior years, we’ll be posting an optional daily prompt to help you get inspired, as well as featuring a different participant each day. We’ll also be featuring a daily poetry resource — a link to an interesting essay, video, recording, or article that we hope will help you to get — and stay — excited about poetry.

As April approaches, watch this space for further updates and of course, once April is here, you can come here for prompts and resources every day. And if you have questions in the meantime, please contact us at napowrimonet AT gmail DOT com.

Whew! We did it, everyone! Another Na/GloPoWriMo has come and gone! I hope that everyone enjoyed the challenge. You might have gotten thirty poems out of it — if so, congratulations! But even if you didn’t, I hope that you found inspiration and joy in our prompts, resources, and featured participants.

Our final featured participant for the year is Aloha Promises Forever, where the minimalist prompt for Day Thirty resulted in a thematically-appropriate haiku.

As usual, we’ll be leaving the “Participants’ Sites” list up until later this year, when we’ll start cleaning up and getting ready for Na/GloPoWriMo 2020.

Finally, thank you to everyone who participated! Your enthusiasm for writing and encouragement of other participants is a wonderful thing to behold. And wherever your poetry may take you until another April rolls around — happy writing!