Day Five

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!