Day Twenty

Hello, everyone, and welcome back for Day Twenty of Na/GloPoWriMo. We’re heading into the home stretch now!

Our featured participant today is M. Jay Dixit, who brings us a poignant trio of flowers in response to Day 19’s florilegium prompt.

Today’s featured resource is a YouTube-based course in how to “close read” poetry. In other words, how to do a focused analysis of a poem. It can be very helpful not just if you’re trying to write a paper for school or something along those lines, but if you’re a poet trying to figure out how a particular poem does what it does, so you can recognize and replicate those tactics in your own work.

And now, for our daily (optional) prompt! Start by reading the poem below, written by Carl Phillips:

Black Swan on Water

Seen this way,
through that lens where need
and wanting swim at random

toward each other, away again, and
now and then together, he moves less like
a swan—black, or otherwise—than like any

man for whom sex is, or has at last become,
an added sense by which to pass ungently but more
entirely across a life where, in between the silences,

he leaves what little he’s got to show for himself
behind him in braids of water, green-to-blue wake of
Please and Don’t hurt me and You can see I’m hurt, already.

You may not realize it at first, but the poem is a single sentence! The three-line stanzas mimic the “braids in water” in the penultimate line, and the way the lines get longer and longer also makes the poem as a whole look a bit like the widening wake that a swan leaves as it swims.

For today, try writing your own poem that uses an animal that shows up in myths and legends as a metaphor for some aspect of a contemporary person’s life. Include one spoken phrase.

Happy writing!