Hello, everybody! Na/GloPoWriMo officially begins tomorrow!

We have an early-bird prompt for those of you located in time zones where April 1 starts a few hours earlier than it does on the east coast of the United States, but first, let’s round out our pre-April set of movie/tv clips involving poetry.

Today, we bring you a clip from that classic Bill Murray comedy, Groundhog’s Day, wherein our hapless hero, who is kind of a self-centered jerk, is forced to repeat a day over and over again until he gets it “right.” In this clip, he mocks his love interest’s college study of French poetry. Bill, that’s no way to get a girl! After a few rounds, though, he’s actually reciting French poetry at her – now, that’s more like it.

And now for our early-bird prompt (optional, like all our prompts!) Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poetic self-portrait. And specifically, we’d like you to write a poem in which you portray yourself in the guise of a historical or mythical figure. Does that sound a bit strange? http://truetone.com/power-supplies/1-spot-pro/1-spot-pro-cs7/ Well, take a look at this poem by Mary-Kim Arnold, “Self Portrait as Semiramis,” or Tarfia Farzullah’s, “Self-Portrait as Artemis,” and perhaps you’ll get a sense of the possibilities.

Happy writing!

Hello, all! There’s just two days until we start Na/GloPoWriMo 2019, otherwise known as “that month in which you write a poem a day for 30 days.”

Each day during the month, we’ll be bringing you a featured participant, a video resource, and an optional prompt. We’ll also continue accepting links to any websites where participants are posting work, through our “Submit Your Site” form.

We’ll be back tomorrow with an early-bird prompt and another fun instance of poetry in the movies, but for today, we’ll leave you with this clip from Memphis Belle, a WWII movie in which an airman passes off the work of Y.B. Yeats for his own.

Hello, all. There’s just three days left in March, and that means that there are only three days to go until NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo 2019.

To help you countdown, we’ll be posting a poetry-related move/tv clip each day until April 1 (at which point our video links will become a bit more “substantive”), and on March 31, we’ll have a special early-bird prompt (optional, as always), for those of you for whom April begins a few hours before it does here at Na/GloPoWriMo headquarters.

Our video clip for today is below, but first, we wanted to draw your attention to a project that one of our longtime participants needs help with. This will be the third Na/GloPoWriMo that poet Dawn Anderson, CreatetheDawn, uses postage stamps are her daily writing prompt. This year her theme is “World Stamps” and she needs your help collecting the stamps. 

If you’d like to contribute an international stamp, upload a photo of the stamp to Dawn’s GoogleDrive.  If you want credit for contributing the stamp and/or want to share a little story (50 words or less) about the stamp or the country or how you came to possess the stamp, email Dawn your story referencing which stamp is yours. She will share your name and story when she posts and publishes her poems. If you’d like to read some of Dawn’s past years’ stamp-poems, visit her blog and use the “search” box (bottom of page) to find “napowrimo” poems.

And now for some poetry-related video resource(s)! The poet William Blake was a visionary, a religious mystic, and pretty much all-around weirdo. He also seems to exert a strange pull on scriptwriters, as you will find him being quoted in both Bull Durham (a pretty good movie about minor league baseball) and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (a pretty awful movie about . . . raiding tombs), as well as being paraphrased in the dystopian sci-fi classic Blade Runner.

We’ll be back tomorrow to continue our countdown to April 1!

Hello, all! As of today, we have just one week to go until the start of National/Global Poetry Writing Month!

We hope you’re getting your pencils sharpened, your laptops charged, and all your finest glittery pens prepared for a full month of writing verse. We’ll be back on March 29 with the first of three countdown posts, and on March 31, we’ll also post an (optional) early-bird prompt for those of you located in time zones where April 1 arrives a bit earlier than it does here on the east coast of the United States.

In the meantime, our “Submit Your Site” page remains open and ready to receive any links to websites, blogs, or other internet-places where you’ll be posting work, and if you have any questions for us, you can send them to napowrimonet-AT-gmail-DOT-com.

Finally, as we’ll be featuring poetry-related video resources throughout April, we’ll leave you for the time being with this oldie-but-goodie – Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven,” as interpreted by The Simpsons. Fair warning – they may have taken some, er, minor liberties with the text.

Today is March 15, and that means there’s only half a month to go until the beginning of National/Global Poetry Writing Month!

We’ll be back on March 25 (which marks the one-week-to-go point) with a few more things to whet your interest, but in the meantime, for those of you who intend to post your April efforts 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!

As mentioned in our last post, we’ll be featuring poetry-related video resources throughout the month of April, including videos of poets reading their poems, animated film versions of poems, TED-style talks about poetry, etc. But while we’re counting down to April, we’ll be giving you occasional bouts of poetry and poetry-related content, as taken from popular films and television!

Today, why not check out this scene from the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral, a romantic comedy starring, alongside Hugh Grant and Andie MacDowell , a recitation of W.H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues.”

Hello, poetry lovers!

It’s March 1, and that means that just one month separates us from the beginning of National/Global Poetry Writing Month! Haven’t heard of it? Well, this is your opportunity, whether you’re a published poet, a beginning, or just someone who is up for a challenge, to try your hand at writing a poem a day for the month of April.

How does it work? Simple — just write a poem every day from April 1 to April 30. If you’ll be posting 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.

And if you’re not planning to post your work online? No worries! Na/GloPoWriMo doesn’t require that at all. All you have to day is write a poem a day for April.

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. This year, we’ll also be featuring daily poetry-related video links, ranging from videos of poets reading their poems, to animated film-poems, to TED-style talks on the value of poetry. To get us started off, here’s a poetry-related movie scene you might recognize! Take that, stilted approaches to the value of poems!

We’ll be back on the 15th with another resource for you, as we build up to our count-down to April 1! And if you have questions in the meantime, please contact us at napowrimonet AT gmail DOT com.

We finally made it, everyone — another year’s Na/GloPoWriMo has come and gone. Our thanks go out to our featured participants, interviewees, and of course to everyone who participated — without you, there’d be no Na/GloPoWriMo!

As usual, we’ll leave the participating sites list intact until early next year, when we’ll start our housecleaning for Na/GloPoWriMo 2019. All posts and comments will remain live in our archives as well.

We hope that you had fun this year, whether you wrote 1 poem or 30 or any number in between. And we hope that you’ll join us again next year. In the meantime, whether you pen verse on a schedule, or whenever the whim hits you . . . Happy writing!

Well, it had to happen, what with time being linear and all. We have finally arrived at the last day of Na/GloPoWriMo 2018! I hope you have had fun writing poetry over the course of the month, and that you’ll come back next year, when we will do it all over again, with new prompts, new featured participants, and a to-be-determined other kind of poetry feature.

Our final, featured participant for the year is NaNoPoRaWriMo, where the Plath-inspired poem for Day Twenty-Nine takes the form of a sonically-dense and lyrical recipe.

Our last craft resource for you is this online collection of recordings of Borges’ lectures on poetry and many other topics. Borges was, in addition to being a poet and writer of strange and compelling short stories, an inveterate professor who lectured widely in both Spanish and English. His lectures are seeded throughout with strange factoids, fascinating observations linking the poets and poetry of different ages and languages, and an overwhelmingly omnivorous approach to knowledge.

And for our final (optional) prompt, I’d like you to take your cue from Borges, and write a poem that engages with a strange and fascinating fact. It could be an odd piece of history, an unusual bit of art trivia, or something just plain weird. While I cannot vouch for the actual accuracy of any of the facts presented at the links above (or any other facts you might use as inspiration!), I can tell you that there are definitely some poetic ideas here, just waiting for someone to use them.

We’ll be back tomorrow with a last post bidding farewell to Na/GloPoWriMo 2018, but in the meantime . . .

Happy writing!

Welcome back, everyone, for the penultimate day of Na/GloPoWriMo Day 29. I hope today you’ll be writing your 29th poem of the month! And even if it’s only your tenth, or even your first, well, that’s more poems than you started with, isn’t it?

Our featured participant today is What Rhymes with Stanza, where the postcard poem for Day Twenty-Eight is a pun-filled prose poem actually laid out as a postcard.

Today we have new interview (and our last for this year!), with the poet Chris Tonelli’s, whose second full-length poetry collection, Whatever Stasis, is just out from Barrelhouse Books. You can read some of Tonelli’s poetry here and here, and our interview with him here.

And now for our daily prompt (optional, as always). Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem based on the Plath Poetry Project’s calendar. Simply pick a poem from the calendar, and then write a poem that responds or engages with your chosen Plath poem in some way.

Happy writing!

Hello, all! There are just three days left in our April poetry-writing adventure! I hope you’ve been enjoying it.

Our featured participant today is Thoughts of Words, where the Tarot poem for Day Twenty-Seven features a poetical hermit.

Today, we bring you a new craft resource, in the form of this history and exploration of the prose poem. This essay helpfully catalogs several different styles of prose poem, with examples, and possible strategies for writing.

And now for our prompt (optional, as always). Following the suggestion of our craft resource, we challenge you today to draft a prose poem in the form/style of a postcard. If you need some inspiration, why not check out some images of vintage postcards? I’m particularly fond of this one.

Happy writing!