Hello, everyone. Today marks the halfway point of NaPoWriMo. I hope your writing is going well!

Our featured link for the day is the Adademy of American Poets’ portal on poetic schools and movements. Don’t know your Russian Acmeists from your Imagists or Metaphysicals? This page will help you sort it all out.

Our featured participant’s blog is Lips and daggers, where Libby Loucks is working on a series of 14-word poems — often she posts four or five a day! It’s sort of like NaPoWriMo Plus.

And now our (again — totally optional) prompt! Today, I challenge you to write a pantun. Not a pantoum — though they are related. The pantun is a traditional Malay form, a style of which was later adapted into French and then English as the pantoum. A pantun consists of rhymed quatrains (abab), with 8-12 syllables per line. The first two lines of each quatrain aren’t meant to have a formal, logical link to the second two lines, although the two halves of each quatrain are supposed to have an imaginative or imagistic connection. Here’s an example:

I planted sweet-basil in mid-field.
Grown, it swarmed with ants,
I loved but am not loved,
I am all confused and helpless.*

The associative leap from the first couplet to the second allows for a great deal of surprise and also helps give the poems are very mysterious and lyrical quality. Try your hand at just one quatrain, or a bunch of them, and see how you do!

* It’s been pointed out that the example doesn’t rhyme, and its syllable count is suspect. All I can say is that it is a translation from a poem in Malay. A transliteration of the original is below–

Tanam selasih di tengah padang,
Sudah bertangkai diurung semut,
Kita kasih orang tak sayang,
Halai-balai tempurung hanyut.

As you can see, in the original, the abab rhyme is present, and the syllable count is right. Our translator appears to have been more concerned with substance than style! At any rate, I apologize for any confusion.

We’re two weeks into NaPoWriMo. I hope it’s going well for you!

Our featured link for the day is From the Fishouse, an online audio archive of readings by emerging poets.

Our featured participant’s blog is Matt Walker, where the poem for Day 11 makes leaps and turns that recreate the thought process, the process of coming together and fading away.

And now, our prompt. Today’s should be fun — I hope. I challenge you to write a persona poem — that is, a poem in the voice of a particular person who isn’t you. But I’d like you to choose a very particular kind of person. How about a poem in the voice of a superhero (or a supervillain)? Comic book characters are very much like mythological characters — they tend to embody big-picture values or personality traits. Good or bad. Loyal or disloyal! (Heck — some comic book characters are mythologial characters — think of Thor). And like mythological characters, superheroes and supervillains let us tap into deep-seated cultural tropes. So go for it. Whether you identify with Batman, Robin or – gulp – the Joker, let’s hear your poems in another voice. Happy writing!

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 13th day of NaPoWriMo!

Our featured link for the day is Rhymezone. Mostly my poems don’t rhyme, but when they do, I often rely on Rhymezone to help me across those tricky lines!

Our featured participant’s blog is Frances McCue’s Blog, where the poem for Day 11 is vaguely threatening and alluring all at once. All I know is, I’m glad I’m not a fictional helpful raccoon.

And now our (totally optional) prompt. Yesterday’s prompt of saying what you’d never say was sort of a doozy — rather emotionally intense, I think, for a lot of you! So for today, let’s relax. Your prompt for today is simply to take a walk. Make notes — mental or otherwise — on what you see on your walk, and incorporate these notes into your poem. A bit more serene and observational than yesterday, and hopefully a nice, calming poem to begin your weekend with. Happy writing!

Welcome to Day 12, everyone!

Our featured link for the day is to NPM Daily, where they are hosting a post by a new poet each day for the month of April.

Our featured participant’s blog for the day is realiction, which took on intellectuals as the target of the “unlovely” poem for the tenth. Hey, I resemble that remark!

And now, the prompt. (Again, the prompt is totally optional). Today’s offering comes to us from Charles Bernstein’s list of poetry experiments. In particular, today I challenge you to “write a poem consisting entirely of things you’d like to say, but never would, to a parent, lover, sibling, child, teacher, roommate, best friend, mayor, president, corporate CEO, etc.” Honesty is the best policy, after all, so get it off your chest! And if you’re interested in the complete list of experiments, you can find them all here.

Happy writing!

Hello, all. We’re now more than one-third of the way through NaPoWriMo, and our we’re up to 1845 participants. Wow!

Our featured link for today is to UbuWeb, which hosts a vast archive of pdfs, sound, and visual files relating to avant-garde poetry. If you’ve never heard any of Christian Bok’s work, go do yourself a favor and check out poetry-as-music-as-beatboxing-as-poetry.

Our featured participant for the day is The Caged Murmurs. The poem for Day 9 wasn’t written in response to yesterday’s prompt, of course, but it really fits the theme! Overall, the poems here display great imagery and attention to emotional detail.

And now, our prompt! Today I challenge you to write a tanka. This, like the “American” cinquain, is a poem based on syllables, with the pattern being 5-7-5-7-7. They work best when those final two 7-syllable lines contain a sort of turn or surprise that the first three lines might not wholly anticipate. You can string a bunch of them together to make a multi-stanza poem, or just write one!

To get you going, here’s an anonymous example from the Japanese, translated by Kenneth Rexroth:

On Komochi Mountain,
from the time the young leaves sprout,
until they turn red,
I think I would like to sleep with you.
What do you think of that?

That one makes me laugh!

Welcome, everyone, to Day 10 of NaPoWriMo!

Our featured link for the day is to Poets House, a non-profit with a 50,000-volume poetry library and a full roster of events. Those of us (i.e, most of us) that are not in New York can still take advantage of their online video and audio archive.

Our featured participant for the day is lag weer, where the noir poem for Day nine has a particularly creepy finale!

And now, the (again, optional) prompt. Many of us have read and even written love poems. But have you written an un-love poem?

You Fit Into Me

You fit into me
like a hook into an eye

a fish hook
an open eye

–Margaret Atwood

An un-love poem isn’t a poem of hate, exactly — that might be a bit too shrill or boring. It’s more like a poem of sarcastic dislike. This is a good time to get in a good dig at people who chew with their mouth open, or always take the last oreo. If there’s no person you feel comfortable un-loving, maybe there’s a phenomenon? Like squirrels that eat your tomatoes. (I have many, many bitter feelings about tomato-eating squirrels). There’s lots of ways to go with this one, and lots of room for humor and surprise as well. Happy writing!

Hello, everyone, and welcome back!

Our poetry link for today is to Small Press Distribution. Many poetry publishers are small outfits, and don’t have the money or manpower to deal with large distributors. Sometimes it can even be hard to find their books on Amazon. That’s where SPD comes in — there’s hardly a small press volume of poetry (or fiction, or nonfiction) that isn’t available from them. They also publish a monthly list of poetry bestsellers, which is a great way to keep up with what is new and interesting.

Our featured participant for today is Questions and Canards, where the valedictions are based on Paul Celan and Game of Thrones, and the cinquains take their inspiration from tai-chi moves!

And now our (totally optional) prompt. I’m a sucker for a good mystery novel, especially the hard-boiled noir novels of the thirties and forties. There’s always a two-timing blonde, a city that keeps its secrets, and stuck in the middle, a man who just can’t help but rabbit after truth. Today I challenge you write a poem inspired by noir — it could be in the voice of a detective, or unravel a mystery, or just describe the long shadows of the skyscrapers in the ever-swirling smog. After all, “you know how to write a poem, don’t you, Steve? You just pick up a pen and you write.”

Hello, everyone. We’re more than a week into NaPoWriMo. Whether you’ve been here since April 1, or have joined us more recently, I hope you’re enjoying it!

Today’s featured poetry link is PennSound, which hosts a vast archive of recordings of poetry readings. It’s very cool stuff — you can search by poet, by reading series, and they even have an internet radio station, for all-day poetry listening.

Our featured participant’s blog for the day is The Dukkha Files. The internal rhymes in the poem for Day 6 are really effective, and the language is very fresh.

And now, the prompt (again — the prompt is optional!). Because it’s the 8th, I thought we might try writing in ottava rima — an Italian form that, in English, usually takes the form of an eight-line stanza of iambic pentameter, with a rhyme scheme of a-b-a-b-a-b-c-c. The most famous poem in English that uses the ottava rima form is probably Byron’s Don Juan. If you haven’t read it, it’s wickedly funny! It’s really amazing how contemporary Byron’s language is — it’s like he’s your mean-girl friend just gossiping at you in verse. But unlike Byron, you don’t have to write an entire epic in ottava rima! Just eight lines will do for now. Happy writing!

Hello all!

Today’s poetry link is The Rumpus, where they are posting a poem each day in honor of National Poetry Month, as well as links to readings and other poetry events around the United States.

Our featured participants’ blog is Little Learner, who has been following the daily prompts with much aplomb! I’m so glad the prompts are working out so well for so many of you.

Speaking of which, here is our optional prompt for this, the seventh day of NaPoWriMo. I challenge you to write a poem in which each line except the last takes the form of a single, declarative sentence. Then, the final line should take the form of a question. With any luck, this will result in poems that have a sort of driving, reportorial tone, but with a powerful rhetorical finish. Let’s hope so, anyway!

Hello, all, and welcome to the sixth day (and first Saturday!) of NaPoWriMo!

Our featured link today is the always reliable Verse Daily, where they feature a new poem every day. They tend to pick poems from recently published books so it can be a good way of finding new poets with new books that you might like!

Our featured participant’s site is ab chaos poesis, where A Quinlan and Alan Kleiman are posting their NaPoWriMo efforts. I really like A Quinlan’s poem for Day Five, with its shades of Mr. Rochester’s mad wife.

And now, our (completely optional) prompt for the day! This might seem like a bit of a downer, but I challenge you to write a valediction. This is a poem of farewell. Perhaps the most famous one is John Donne’s A Valediction Forbidding Mourning, http://truetone.com/2015/03/17/visual-sound-is-now-truetone/ which turns the act of saying good-bye into a very tender love poem. But your poem could say “good-bye” (and maybe good riddance!) to anything or anyone. A good-bye to winter might be in order, for example. Or good-bye to the week-old easter eggs in your refrigerator. Light or serious, long or short, it’s up to you!