Wow! Three weeks down, and just a week and some change left to go in this year’s National/Global Poetry Writing Month.

Today’s daily featured participant is Hazhapard’s Na/GloPoWriMo, where the response to Day Twenty’s mythic prompt involves a small brown owl. (And here I thought “morpork” was just a part of a silly name the late Sir Terry Pratchett made up for an imaginary city . . . though now I suppose the owl in the coat-of-arms ought to have been a clue).

Our resource for the day is this short essay by the poet Kimiko Hahn on senryu, the haiku’s comic cousin.

And here’s today’s prompt (optional, as always). In her poem, “Names and Nicknames,” Monika Kumar reminisces over various nicknames she has been given, the actual name her mother gave her, and the way both names and nicknames indicate a claim and an intimacy at once. In your poem for today, we challenge you to write your own poem in which you muse on your name and nicknames you’ve been given or, if you like, the name and nicknames for an animal, plant, or place. For example, I’ve always been amused at the fact that red trillium (a rather pretty wildflower that grows in the woods near my house) has several other common names, including the bizarre “stinking benjamin.” The plant grows very short and close to the ground, so I’ve never actually leaned over far enough to get a whiff and see how merited that sobriquet is!

Happy writing!

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!

Happy Sunday, everyone, and happy nineteenth day of National/Global Poetry Writing Month.

Our featured participant for the day is Chronicles of Miss Miseria, where the response to Day 18’s dramatic/operatic prompt goes for pedal-to-the-metal levels of palace intrigue, incipient danger, and rebellion. All it wants is a tenor to sing it as an aria.

Today, our featured resource is Yale University’s free, online Modern Poetry course. The recorded lectures take you though lessons on various American modernist poets, with a couple of swerves into Ireland and Britain. Transcripts and audio files of each lecture are also available.

And now for today’s (optional) prompt. The word florilegium refers to a book of botanical illustrations of decorative plants and also a collection of excerpts from other writings.  In her poem, “Florilegium,” Canadian poet Sylvia Legris gathers together many five-lined stanzas that describe flowers but also play with the sounds of their names, their medical (or poisonous) qualities, and historical aspects of herbalism. Today, pick a flower or two (or a whole bouquet, if you like) from this online edition of Kate Greenaway’s Language of Flowers. Now, write your own poem in which you muse on your selections’ names and meanings. If you’re so inclined, you could even do some outside research into your flowers, and incorporate facts that you learn into your work.

Happy writing!

Welcome back, everybody, for Day Eighteen of Na/GloPoWriMo.

Our featured participant today is My Fresh Pages, which brings us an Emily Dickinson-inspired response to Day 17’s “favorite poem” prompt. I love the use of an automotive simile to describe the wren in the poem!

Today’s resource is the Faber Poetry Podcast. During its three seasons, the podcast’s presenters interviewed poets on issues ranging from fatherhood to ecology to teenage crushes.

Finally, here’s our prompt for the day (optional, as always). When I was growing up, there was a book of poems in my house (I believe it was The Best Loved Poems of the American People) that was heavy on long, maudlin, narrative poems with lots and lots of rhyme – the sort of verse that used to be parodied on Bulwinkle’s Corner. As the twentieth century rolled in, poems like this were relegated to the status of stuff-schoolkids-were-forced-to-memorize, and they plummeted even further into our cultural memory-hole as learning poems by heart fell out of educational currency. But while some work in this style is extremely cringeworthy (I’m looking at you, “Bingen on the Rhine”), they can also be very fun to read. Take, for example, Sadakichi Hartmann’s “The Pirate,”  or Alfred Noyes’s “The Highwayman.” The action is dramatic, there’s lots of emotions, and the imagery is striking.

Today, we don’t challenge you to write all of a long, dramatic, narrative poem, but we invite you to try your hand at writing a poem that could be a section or piece of one. Include rhyme, include unlikely and dramatic scenes (maybe a poem about a bank robbery! Or an avalanche! Or Roman gladiators! Or an enormous ball held by mermaids, where there is an undercurrent (hee) of palace intrigue!) Basically, a poem with the plot of an opera (evil twins! Egyptian tombs! Star-crossed lovers! Tigers for no apparent reason!)

Happy writing!

Happy Friday, all! I hope you find that writing poetry is a great entry-way into your weekend.

Today, our featured participant is Adam J Scarborough, who brings us a wonderfully disorienting haiku in response to Day 16’s prompt.

Our resource for the day is The Walt Whitman Archive, where you’ll find all manner of material related to Walt Whitman, one of America’s most celebrated and — let’s be frank — unusual poets.

And now for our (optional) prompt! Sergio Raimondi’s poem, “Today Matsuo Basho Cooks,” plays on the following haiku by (you guessed it), Matsuo Basho:

Crimson pepper pod!
Add two pairs of wings, and look—
darting dragonfly.

For today’s challenge, write a poem in which you respond to a favorite poem by another poet.

Happy writing!

Happy sixteenth day of National/Global Poetry Writing month, everyone!

Our featured daily participant is klara laurenzia linden, who brings us a bilingual response to Day Fifteen’s unusual-love-poem challenge.

Today’s resource is Copper Canyon Press’s “Line/Break” interview series, which brings you half-hour-ish episodes featuring eight contemporary poets.

And last but not least, here’s today’s optional prompt. In “Ocean,” Robinson Jeffers delivers an almost oracular, scriptural description of the sea not just as a geographical phenomenon, but a sort of being – old, wise, profound, and able to teach those who want to learn. Today, try writing a poem in which you describe something that cannot speak, and what it has taught or told you.

Happy writing!

Welcome back, all! As of today, we’re halfway through another Na/GloPoWriMo.

Our featured participant today is kellysteller, who brings us an Instagram-inspired response to Day Fourteen’s technology prompt (I think I saw that post about the Japanese insect called the “thorny thornless thorn thorn” myself…)

Today’s resource is the Poetry Unbound podcast. Hosted by Pádraig Ó Tuama, each episode guides you through a single poem.

And now for our prompt (optional, as always).  K. Siva Reddy’s poem, “A Love Song Between Two Generations,” weaves together repetitions, questions, and unexpected similes with plain language. The overall effect is both intimate and emotional, producing a long-form meditation on what love is, what it means, and how it acts.  Today, we’d like you to write your own poem that muses on love, but isn’t a traditional love poem in the sense of expressing love between romantic partners.

Happy writing!

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!

Here in the Land of Na/GloPoWriMo, the thirteenth day of the month isn’t ominous — not when it means another chance to write poems!

Today, our featured participant is verlie burroughs, who brings us a bittersweet response to Day Twelve’s memory-of-a-relative prompt.

Our resource for the day is the Poets House blog, where you’ll find tons of interviews with contemporary poets.

To get started with today’s prompt, first read Walter de la Mare’s poem “A Song of Enchantment.” Then, John Berryman’s poem “Footing Our Cabin’s Lawn, Before the Wood.” Both poems work very differently, yet leave you with a sense of the near-fantastical possibilities of the landscapes they describe. Try your hand today at writing your own poem about a remembered, cherished landscape. It could be your grandmother’s backyard, your schoolyard basketball court, or a tiny strip of woods near the railroad tracks. At some point in the poem, include language or phrasing that would be unusual in normal, spoken speech – like a rhyme, or syntax that feels old-fashioned or high-toned.

Happy writing!

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!