Day Fourteen

Happy Tuesday, everyone, and welcome back for the fourteenth day of National/Global Poetry Writing Month. It’s hard to believe we’ve been at this for two weeks already but, well, we have!

Our featured participant for the day is Narrative Paralysis, where the response to Day Thirteen’s landscape prompt brings back to life the remembered ghost of that most characteristic of 1980s American landscapes — a suburban mall.

Today’s resource is the website of the Poetry Translation Centre, a U.K. nonprofit dedicated to making poetry from Asia, Latin America, and Africa available both in the original languages and in English. Many of the poems they present are accompaned by notes on the process of translation, including the specific choices that the translators made in rendering each poem into English.

And now for our (optional!) prompt. Poetry is an ancient art, and one that revisits themes that existed thousands of years ago – love, nature, jealousy. But that doesn’t mean that poets live in a sort of pre-history unaffected by technological advances. Emily Dickinson wrote about trains, and I’m rather charmed by this 1981 poem about the “incredible hair” of actors on television. In a more recent example, Becca Klaver’s “Manifesto of the Lyric Selfie” draws inspiration from the contemporary drive to document everything in digital photographs. Today, we challenge you to write a poem that similarly bridges (whether smoothly or not) the seeming divide between poetry and technological advances.

Happy writing!