Day Two

Welcome back for the second day of Na/GloPoWriMo, everyone. We hope you feel invigorated after the first day of the challenge. And my apologies to those of you who had comments marked as spam yesterday — sometimes whatever algorithm Disqus uses to flag spam gets a wee bit over-enthusiastic!

Our featured participant today is aetherianessence, where you’ll find a response to Day One’s prompt that shows you just how much feeling the small form of the tanka can accommodate.

Today’s resource is the nineteenth century poet and critic Matthew Arnold’s essay, “The Study of Poetry.” Arnold believed that the fundamental purposes of poetry were to uplift and console. Do you agree? Maybe you think it should annoy or perplex? I’m somewhat partial to the idea of poems as little puzzles with surprises in them, or doorways into unfamiliar ways of thinking. And I find Arnold’s thesis a little strange given that “Dover Beach,” one of his most famous poems, ends in such an unsettling way.

Speaking of things that are unsettling, it’s now time for our daily prompt — optional, as always! In her poem, “Pittsylvania County,” Ellen Bryant Voigt recounts watching her father and brother play catch with sensory detail and a strangely foreboding sense of inevitability. The speaker watches the scene, but is outside of it – cut off. She’s not so much jealous of the interaction between her father and brother, as filled with a pervading sense that she wants something more or different from life than what the moment seems to presage. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem in which you recount a childhood memory. Try to incorporate a sense of how that experience indicated to you, even then, something about the person you’d grow up to be.

Happy writing!