Welcome back, all, for the twenty-sixth day of Na/GloPoWriMo.

Today’s featured participants are Barbara Turney Wieland, who has brought us a happy, snappy poem sprinkled with daisies, and Manja Mexi Mexcessive, whose poem about the not-so-normal process of trying to get back to normal may resonate with many of you — it surely did for me!

Our featured daily reading is pre-recorded, so that you can enjoy it whenever time allows. It involves Brenda Shaughnessy reading for the Chicago Humanities Festival back in 2013.

And now for our (optional) prompt. Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a parody. Besides being fun, writing parodies can be a great way to hone your poetic skills – particularly your sense of rhyme and sound, as you try to mimic the form of an existing poem while changing the content. Just find a poem – or a song – that has always annoyed you, and write an altered, silly version of it. Or, alternatively, find a poem with a very particular rhyme scheme or form, and use that scheme/form as the basis for a poem that mocks something else.

If you’d like to get some inspiration, you might consider some of the poems that Lewis Carroll included in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which parody the moralistic verse of Isaac Watts. For example, “The Crocodile” is a send-up of Watts’ “How Doth the Little Busy Bee,” while “Tis the Voice of the Lobster” is a parody of Watts’ poem “The Sluggard.” Or, for a briefer and more whimsical poem, consider “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Bat,” which is a parody of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”

Happy writing!

As of today, there’s less than one week left in Na/GloPoWriMo. I hope you’ve been happy with your writing! And remember, if you fall behind, you can always catch-up! Or just pick up fresh with the new day.

Our featured participants for the day are Sunra Rainz, who gives us a poem in which sorrow and other minor-key feelings become flying insects, and Paula Aamli, who has turned rage into a strange, burrowing parrot.

Today’s featured reading is a pre-recorded one, so that you can enjoy it at your leisure. It’s a video showing selections from two poetry readings given by John Ashbery and Barbara Guest, both associated with the “New York School” of poetry, in the mid-1990s.

Our prompt for today (optional, as always) is to write an “occasional” poem. What’s that? Well, it’s a poem suited to, or written for, a particular occasion. This past January, lots of people who usually don’t encounter poetry got a dose when Amanda Gorman read a poem at President Biden’s inauguration. And then she followed it up with a poem at the Superbowl (not traditionally an event associated with verse!) The poem you write can be for an occasion in the past or the future, one important to you and your family (a wedding, a birth) or for an occasion in the public eye (the Olympics, perhaps?).

Happy writing!

Happy Saturday, everyone, and happy twenty-fourth day of Na/GloPoWriMo 2021.

Today, our featured participants are Writing in North Norfolk, where you will find a swift and lyrical poem responding to Carol Ann Duffy’s “The Light Gatherer,” and Graham Parker’s Poetry, where you’ll find a meditative response to the Carl Phillips poem we shared yesterday.

Our featured reading for the day is pre-recorded, so you can enjoy it whenever your schedule allows. It’s a reading given by the poet Ross Gay last year for Kelly Writers’ House.

Today’s (optional) prompt is a fun one. Find a factual article about an animal. A Wikipedia article or something from National Geographic would do nicely – just make sure it repeats the name of the animal a lot. Now, go back through the text and replace the name of the animal with something else – it could be something very abstract, like “sadness” or “my heart,” or something more concrete, like “the streetlight outside my window that won’t stop blinking.” You should wind up with some very funny and even touching combinations, which you can then rearrange and edit into a poem.

Happy writing!

Good morning, and welcome back for Na/GloPoWriMo’s twenty-third day!

I just can’t seem to kick this new habit of having two featured participants. I suppose there are worse things! Today, we have Donna M. Day, who brings us a lovely meditation on kiwi fruit, and Judy Dykstra-Brown, who has basically written us a country music song.

Our daily featured reading is a live event scheduled for tomorrow, April 24, at 7 p.m. eastern time. Poets Martha Collins, Laura Cronk, Rebecca Morgan Frank, Nathan McClain, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers will read for the COUPLET Reading Series at New York City’s storied KGB Bar.

And now for today’s prompt (optional, as always). One thing that makes me want to write poetry is reading poetry. Sometimes, reading another poet’s work gives me an idea or image. And sometimes I read a poem that I want to formally respond to – whether because I agree with it, or disagree with it, or just because it starts a conversation in my head that I want to continue on the page.

Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem that responds, in some way, to another. This could be as simple as using a line or image from another poem as a jumping-off point, or it could be a more formal poetic response to the argument or ideas raised in another poem. You might use a favorite (or least favorite poem) as the source for your response. And if you’re having trouble finding a poem to respond to, here are a few that might help you generate ideas: “This World is Not Conclusion,” by Peter Gizzi, “In That Other Fantasy Where We Live Forever,” by Wanda Coleman, “La Chalupa, the Boat,” by Jean Valentine, or “Aubade: Some Peaches, After Storm,” by Carl Phillips.

Happy writing!

Happy Thursday, everyone, and happy twenty-second day of Na/GloPoWriMo.

Our featured participant today is again, two participants. If you all would just stop writing such great poems, I could probably get myself back down to one. Oh well! First up, we have Connect/Hook, with a rollicking and silly response to the “double deed” prompt for Day 21, and My Musings Through Life, which brings us a softer, more haunting response.

Today, our featured reading is a pre-recorded one, which you can enjoy whenever you have the time. It’s the poet James Dickey (who despite having been the Poet Laureate of the United states, is probably best remembered for his novel, Deliverance, and the film it inspired), reading his poems for the Library of Congress back in 1960.

Finally, here’s our (optional) prompt for the day. It comes to us from Poets & Writers’ “The Time is Now” column, which provides weekly poetry prompts, as well as weekly fiction and creative non-fiction prompts.

In a prompt originally posted this past February, Poets & Writers directs us to an essay by Urvi Kumbhat on the use of mangoes in diasporic literature. As she discusses in her essay, mangoes have become a sort of shorthand or symbol that writers use to invoke an entire culture, country, or way of life. This has the beauty of simplicity – but also the problems of simplicity, in that you really can’t sum up a culture in a single image or item, and you risk cliché if you try.

But at the same time, the “staying power” of the mango underscores the strength of metonymy in poetry. Following Poets & Writers’ prompt, today I’d like to challenge you to write a poem that invokes a specific object as a symbol of a particular time, era, or place.

Happy writing!

Hello, all, and welcome back for the third week of Na/GloPoWriMo!

As for today’s featured participant, well, I seem to be making a habit of having two featured daily participants, instead of just one. But that’s because you all are making it so difficult to choose! Today’s dynamic duo is Words with Ruth, where you’ll find a slightly jarring but very wonderfully observed sijo in response to our prompt for Day 20, and Smoke Words Every Day, which braids three sijo verses into a single poem.

Our featured daily reading is a live event that will take place tomorrow, April 22, at 7 p.m. eastern. It will involve poet Douglas Kearney giving the Bagley Wright Lecture at New York University.

And now for our (optional) prompt. Have you ever heard or read the nursery rhyme, “There was a man of double deed?” It’s quite creepy! A lot of its effectiveness can be traced back to how, after the first couplet, the lines all begin with the same two phrases (either “When the . . .” or “Twas like,”). The way that these phrases resolve gets more and more bizarre over the course of the poem, giving it a headlong, inevitable feeling.

Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem that, like this one, uses lines that have a repetitive set-up. Here’s an example I came up with after seeing this video of . . . a bucket of owls.

Bucket List

Several owls can fill a bucket.

Several buckets can fill a wheelbarrow.

Several wheelbarrows can fill a truckbed.

Several truckbeds can fill a song.

Several songs can fill a head.

Several heads can fill a bucket.

Several buckets filled with heads and owls

Sing plaintive verse all night long.

Happy writing!

As of today, we’re two-thirds of the way through Na/GloPoWriMo 2021. Like all good things, Na/GloPoWriMo must also come to an end – but we’re not there yet!

Our featured participant today is another two-fer, because, once again, I could not choose. First up is Lucky Cat Comics, which not only brings us a rhymed rant in the voice of a raccoon, but managed to teach me something I didn’t know about raccoons at the same time. Our second featured participant is Experience Writing, where you’ll find a rant not in the voice of an animal, but about an animal — namely, the perch.

Today, our featured reading is a pre-recorded one, so you can enjoy it whenever you have time. It’s a very recent reading given by American poet laureate Joy Harjo for Emory University (and don’t be surprised that the video begins with a song — it was written by the poet!). Before the reading, there are discussions of Harjo’s work by Craig Womack and Jennifer Foerster. If you’d like to skip these, go to minute 22 of the video.

Our (optional) prompt for the day is to write a sijo. This is a traditional Korean poetic form. Like the haiku, it has three lines, but the lines are much longer. Typically, they are 14-16 syllables, and optimally each line will consist of two parts – like two sentences, or a sentence of two clauses divided by a comma. In terms of overall structure, a sijo functions like an abbreviated sonnet, in that the first line sets up an inquiry or discussion, the second line continues the discussion, and the third line resolves it with a “twist” or surprise. For more on the sijo, check out the primer here and a long list of examples in English, here.

Happy writing!

Good morning, poets! I hope you are feeling fresh and ready to begin another week,  and to continue with your goal of writing a poem a day for the month of April.

Our featured participant today is Poem Dive, where the chapter title “The Answer Squash,” from Day 19’s prompt, led to a deliriously rollicking trip to the produce aisle.

Today, our reading is a live event that will take place tomorrow, April 20, at 6 p.m. eastern daylight time. It’s a tribute to the work of the poet John Godfrey, hosted by the Dia Art Foundation. Readers at the event will are Erica Hunt, Duncan McNaughton, Maureen Owen, and Anne Waldman.

And last but not least, our prompt (optional, as always). Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a humorous rant. In this poem, you may excoriate to your heart’s content all the things that get on your nerves. Perhaps it’s people who tailgate when driving, or don’t put the caps back on pens after they use them. Or the raccoons who get into your garbage cans. For inspiration, perhaps you might look to this list of Shakespearean insults. Or, for all of you who grew up on cartoons from the 1980s, perhaps this compendium of Skeletor’s Best Insults might provide some insight.

Happy writing!

Happy eighteenth day of Na/GloPoWriMo, everyone.

Our featured participant for the day is The Coffee, The Diesel, The Methamphetamine, which provides us with a haunting, rhyming poem in response to our moon-based prompt for Day 17. It reminds me of this poem by Walter de la Mare!

Today’s featured reading is pre-recorded, and can be enjoyed whenever you like. It’s the poet Eileen Myles, reading in 2015 at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Texas.

And now for our (optional) daily prompt! This one comes to us from Stephanie Malley, who challenges us to write a poem based on the title of one of the chpaters from Susan G. Wooldridge’s Poemcrazy: Freeing Your Life with Words. The book’s  table of contents can be viewed using Amazon’s “Look inside” feature. Will you choose “the poem squash?” or perhaps “grocery weeping” or “the blue socks”? If none of the 60 rather wonderful chapter titles here inspire you, perhaps a chapter title from a favorite book would do? For example, the photo on my personal twitter account is a shot of a chapter title from a P.G. Wodehouse novel — the chapter title being “Sensational Occurrence at a Poetry Reading.”

Happy writing!

Welcome back, all, for the seventeenth day of Na/GloPoWriMo 2021. I hope you are looking forward to writing some poetry this weekend.

Today, our featured participant is A Writer Without Words, who wrote a tale of rodential woe in response to our Skeltonic verse prompt for Day 16.

Our reading for the day is a live event that will take place tomorrow, April 18, at 4 p.m. eastern daylight time. The reading will feature poets whose books have recently been published by the press Lavender Ink/Diálogos, which is one of the founding organizers of the New Orleans Poetry Festival.

And now, our (optional) prompt. I’ve seen some fairly funny twitter conversations lately among poets who are coming to terms with the fact that they keep writing poems about the moon. For better or worse, the moon seems to exert a powerful hold on poets, as this large collection of moon-themed poems suggests. Today, I’d like to challenge you to stop fighting the moon. Lean in. Accept the moon. The moon just wants what’s best for you and your poems. So yes – write a poem that is about, or that involves, the moon.

Happy writing!