Day Twelve

Welcome back, everyone, for Day Twelve of National/Global Poetry Writing Month!

Today, our featured participant is Kavya Janani U, who brings us a forbiddingly calm response to Day Eleven’s erasure/blackout prompt. It’s very interesting to contrast here the blacked-out text with the oiginal text.

Our daily resource is this essay by the poet Yuki Tanaka on (mis)translation and how unusual or surprising word choices can make a poem come alive.

Finally, here’s today’s (optional) prompt. Amarjit Chandan has a pretty wild biography, but his poetry is often focused on place and memory – with his hometown of Nakodar appearing repeatedly. His poem “Uncle Mohan Singh” recounts, with a sort of dreaminess, a memory of the titular uncle playing the accompaniment to a silent film. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem that recounts a memory of a beloved relative, and something they did that echoes through your thoughts today.

Happy writing!