Today is the last day of this year’s National Poetry Writing Month. I’d actually stumbled upon it quite by accident. I no longer remember how it was that I found out about it, but I know someone who has participated in National Novel Writing Month before, so I may have been initially attracted by the similarity of their obnoxious abbreviations, NaNoWriMo and NaPoWriMo—which I otherwise refuse to use. Continue reading
Month: April 2013
National Poetry Writing Month: Day #30 (April 30, 2013)
Today’s prompt: “Find a shortish poem that you like, and rewrite each line, replacing each word (or as many words as you can) with words that mean the opposite.”
For this particular exercise, I chose to work with “Nagarkot“, a poem by David Sylvian, from his book Trophies: The Lyrics of David Sylvian (1988, Opium (Arts)). Continue reading
National Poetry Writing Month: Day #29 (April 29, 2013)
Today’s prompt is to write a poem using at least five words from other languages. I spent five years living in Tokyo after college, so I decided to just try writing something in Japanese. Continue reading
National Poetry Writing Month: Day #28 (April 28, 2013)
Today’s prompt is to write a poem based on a color. I chose yellow… Continue reading
National Poetry Writing Month: Day #27 (April 27, 2013)
Think of a common proverb or phrase — something like “All that glitters is not gold,” or “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” Then plug the first three words of the phrase into a search engine. Skim through the first few pages of results, collecting (rather like a poetic magpie) words and phrases that interest you. Then use those words and phrases as the inspirations (and some of the source material) for a new poem.
The first two things that came to mind proved to be useless, since the first three words could be completed only by the next two or three words in the phrases. Then I found something much better, much more open-ended—and every line comes from the search results… Continue reading
National Poetry Writing Month: Day #26 (April 26, 2013)
Had more important things today than whether or not to utilize a writing prompt…
National Poetry Writing Month: Day #25 (April 25, 2013)
Today’s prompt is to write a ballad. I can do that… Continue reading
National Poetry Writing Month: Day #24 (24 April 2013)
I hate today’s prompt: use anagrams from my name. The suggested anagram generator came up with a bunch of crap, half of which didn’t resemble actual words (the other half seemed to rely inordinately upon the word “jinn”). So, I winged it. I hate the results—but there it is… Continue reading
I Almost Saw Kurt Russell Play Baseball Once
I almost saw Kurt Russell play baseball once. Continue reading
National Poetry Writing Month: Day #23 (23 April 2013)
Today’s writing prompt: triolets. Eight lines; iambic tetrameter; lines 1, 4, and 7 the same; lines 2 and 8 the same; ABaAabAB rhyme scheme.
Not sure how closely I hewed to the particulars of the form, but I gave it a shot—several shots, actually. (The second one starts with a line from a poem by Emily Dickinson.) Continue reading
Ordinary Average Thoughts 