Hello all, and welcome back for Day Twenty-Seven of Na/GloPoWriMo.

Our featured participant today is Real Momma Ramblings, where getting breakfast on the table takes all five senses and strong nerves to boot.

Today we have a new interview for you, with Lauren Hunter, whose first book of poetry, HUMAN ACHIEVEMENTS, was published last year by Birds LLC. You can read some of Hunter’s poetry here and here, and you can check out our interview with her here.

And now for today’s (optional) prompt. Following Lauren Hunter’s practice of relying on tarot cards to generate ideas for poems, we challenge you to pick a card (any card) from this online guide to the tarot, and then to write a poem inspired either by the card or by the images or ideas that are associated with it.

Hello, everyone! Happy twenty-sixth day of Na/GloPoWriMo.

Our featured participant for the day is palimpsestic possibilities, where the Warning Label poem for Day Twenty-Five comes with footnotes!

Today we bring you a new craft resource, in the form of this essay by Josh Roark exploring engagement of the senses, and of the notion of embodiment, in the poetry of Ocean Vuong. Roark argues that the key to the success of Vuong’s poems is his particular ability to make the reader feel a poem as a visceral object, and not one that is removed or merely intellectual. If you’d like to check out some more of Vuong’s work, you might look at this poem that, fittingly for our purposes, is titled Essay on Craft.

And now for our prompt (optional as always). Taking our cue from today’s craft resource, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem that includes images that engage all five senses. Try to be as concrete and exact as possible with the “feel” of what the poem invites the reader to see, smell, touch, taste and hear.

Happy writing!

Hello, all! It’s the twenty-fifth day of Na/GloPoWriMo. We’re really in the home stretch now!

Today, our featured participant is Zouxzoux, where the elegy for Day Twenty-Four breathes life into a lost dancer.

We bring you a new interview today, with Rodney Gomez, whose book Citizens of the Mausoleum, is being put out by Sundress Publications. Gomez is the author of several chapbooks, and his poems have previously been published in journals including Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, Blackbird, Pleiades, Denver Quarterly, and Puerto del Sol, You can read some of Gomez’s poems here and here, and our interview with him here.

And now for our daily prompt (optional, as always). Today, we challenge you to write a poem that takes the form of a warning label . . . for yourself! (Mine definitely includes the statement: “Do Not Feed More Than Four Cookies Per Hour.”

Happy writing!

Happy final Tuesday in Na/GloPoWriMo, everyone.
Our featured participant today is kavyastream, where the overheard/regional language prompt for Day 23 gives us more Texas sayings than you can shake a stick at.

Today’s craft resource is a long-ish essay by Hyejung Kook regarding how poetry can be created from absence, or in the wake of loss, and how awareness of mortality drives a desire to produce art, people, poems.

And now for our prompt (optional, as always). Today, we’d like to challenge you to write an elegy – a poem typically written in honor or memory of someone dead. But we’d like to challenge you to write an elegy that has a hopefulness to it. Need inspiration? You might look at W.H. Auden’s elegy for Yeats, which ends on a note suggesting that the great poet’s work will live on, inspiring others in years to come. Or perhaps this elegy by Mary Jo Bang, where the sadness is shot through with a sense of forgiveness on both sides.

Happy (or at least, hopeful) writing!

Hello, everyone! It’s hard to believe, but there’s just one week left to go in this year’s Na/GloPoWriMo.

Our featured participant for the day is Eat All the Words, where the impossible prompt for Day Twenty-Two has been transformed into a study guide!

We have a new interview for you today, with Kate Greenstreet, whose fourth book of poetry, The End of Something, is just out from Ahsahta Press. You can read some of Greenstreet’s poetry here and here, and our interview with her here.

And now for today’s (optional) prompt! Kate Greenstreet’s poetry is spare, but gives a very palpable sense of being spoken aloud – it reads like spoken language sounds. In our interview with her, she underscores this, stating that “when you hear it, you write it down.” Today, we challenge you to honor this idea with a poem based in sound. The poem, for example, could incorporate overheard language. Perhaps it could incorporate a song lyric in some way, or language from something often heard spoken aloud (a prayer, a pledge, the Girl Scout motto). Or you could use a regional or local phrase from your hometown that you don’t hear elsewhere, e.g. “that boy won’t amount to a pinch.”

Happy writing!

Happy fourth Sunday of Na/GloPoWriMo, all.

Today’s featured participant is ARHtistic License, where the Narcissus/narcissism poem for Day 21 treats the myth from Echo’s point of view.

Our craft resource for the day is a series of reflections by Wesley McNair on “indirect entry” into a poem. McNair writes of inviting mystery and uncertainty into our poems, both with respect to the writing process and the finished work.

And now for our daily prompt (optional as always). I’ve found this one rather useful in trying to ‘surprise’ myself into writing something I wouldn’t have come up with otherwise. Today, I’d like you to take one of the following statements of something impossible, and then write a poem in which the impossible thing happens:

The sun can’t rise in the west.

A mouse can’t eat an elephant.

Happy writing!

Today marks three full weeks of Na/GloPoWriMo!

Our featured participant for the day is Unassorted Stories, where the rebellious poem for Day 19 shows how repetition, used well, can drive a poem along, giving it momentum and heft. It also provides a really interesting window into the poet’s “rules,” which she broke in writing the poem.

Today, we have a new interview for you, with Antoinette Brim, whose newest book of poetry, These Women You Gave Me, has been published by Indolent Books. Brim is a Cave Canem Foundation fellow, a recipient of the Walker Foundation Scholarship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. You can read some of her poems here and here, and you can check out our interview with her here.

And now for our (optional) prompt. In her interview, Brim provides us with several suggestions for generative writing exercises, and we’d like to challenge to today to tackle her third one, which is based in the myth of Narcissus. After reading the myth, try writing a poem that plays with the myth in some way. For example, you could imagine that imagine the water is speaking to you, the narcissus flower. Or you could write a poem in which the narcissus berates the Kardashians for stealing their neurosis. Or a poem that comments on the narcissism of our time, i.e. beauty and body obsession, etc.

Happy writing!

Today is April 20th, and that means we are now two-thirds of the way through Na/GloPoWriMo, 2018. Time flies when you’re writing poems!

Today’s featured participant is Summer Blues, where the simple language of the poem written for Day 19’s structured erasure prompt eases you into a subtle but satisfying resolution.

Our craft resource for the day is Alice Notley’s essay, The Poetics of Disobedience. In it, Notley advocates for a poet to “maintain a state of disobedience against…everything.” By this she means remaining open to all forms, all subjects, and not becoming beholden to “usual” methods for writing. Whenever we are sure that there is one “right” way to write, or some specific set of topics that are the “right” ones to discuss, we should ask ourselves, what part of experience are we leaving out? And why?

Our prompt for the day (optional as always) takes its cue from Notley’s rebelliousness, and asks you to write a poem that involves rebellion in some way. The speaker or subject of the poem could defy a rule or stricture that’s been placed on them, or the poem could begin by obeying a rule and then proceed to break it (for example, a poem that starts out in iambic pentameter, and then breaks into sprawling, unmetered lines). Or if you tend to write funny poems, you could rebel against yourself, and write something serious (or vice versa). Whatever approach you take, your poem hopefully will open a path beyond the standard, hum-drum ruts that every poet sometimes falls into.

Happy writing!

Happy 19th day of Na/GloPoWriMo, everyone!

Our featured participant for the day is clay and branches, where the “work-your-way-up-from-the-bottom” poem for Day Eighteen is an unsettling, intensive narrative.

Today, we have a new interview for you, with the poet Dan Brady, whose first book of poems, Strange Children, is newly out from Publishing Genius. Brady is the poetry editor for Barrelhouse Magazine, and the author of the chapbooks Cabin Fever / Fossil Record (Flying Guillotine Press, 2014) and Leroy Sequences (Horse Less Press, 2014). You can read some of Brady’s poems here and check out our interview with him here.

Our (optional) prompt for the day takes it cue from Brady’s suggestion that erasure/word banks can allow for compelling repetitive effects. Today we challenge you to write a paragraph that briefly recounts a story, describes the scene outside your window, or even gives directions from your house to the grocery store. Now try erasing words from this paragraph to create a poem or, alternatively, use the words of your paragraph to build a new poem.

Happy writing!

Welcome back, everyone, for the 18th day of Na/GloPoWriMo.

Today’s featured participant is Oaks to Acorns, where the family anecdote poem for Day 17 powerfully evokes the sensation of a journey, and a homecoming.

Today we have a new craft resource for you, in the form of this collection of images of poets’ first drafts of their poems, complete with their crossings-out/notes. I find these particularly interesting in how they show a poet’s own evaluation of their initial thoughts – what works, what doesn’t work, what is too discursive, what is too confusing, and how certain lines/ideas can move from where they originally sat to new places to heighten the overall rhetorical effect of the poem.

Our prompt for the day (optional as always) isn’t exactly based in revision, but it’s not exactly not based in revision, either. It also sounds a bit more complicated than it is, so bear with me! First, find a poem in a book or magazine (ideally one you are not familiar with). Use a piece of paper to cover over everything but the last line. Now write a line of your own that completes the thought of that single line you can see, or otherwise responds to it. Now move your piece of paper up to uncover the second-to-last line of your source poem, and write the second line of your new poem to complete/respond to this second-to-last line. Keep going, uncovering and writing, until you get to the first line of your source poem, which you will complete/respond to as the last line of your new poem. It might not be a finished draft, but hopefully it at least contains the seeds of one.

Happy writing!