Writing

National Poetry Writing Month 2018, Day 20

2018/04/20 — 3 Comments

The Napowrimo.net prompt for Day 20 is ‘to write a poem that involves rebellion in some way.’ Since part of my writing practice is to regularly find ways to rebel against my own natural tendencies, this required some extra thought.

What I came up with is to take a poem I recently wrote (but haven’t posted anywhere) and simply list all its words in alphabetical order, with each new letter of the alphabet starting on a new line. I’m referring to this version of the poem (in this case, Bookstore Poem #220) as the ‘build-it-yourself’ version—but really you can approach it in a couple of different ways. One is on its own merits (as such) as an oddball poem that may or may not make sense. The other is to treat it as though it were a piece of build-it-yourself furniture, with all the available parts (words) listed; from those parts (words), you can build your own poem.

Let the weirdness begin!

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National Poetry Writing Month 2018, Day 19

2018/04/19 — 3 Comments

The Napowrimo.net prompt for Day 19 is to write a paragraph about something, then either ‘[erase] words from this paragraph to create a poem or, alternatively, use the words of your paragraph to build a new poem.’ I opted for the latter. The resulting poem feels incomplete, but I didn’t want to turn it into an exercise in name-dropping. Plus I have an unusual day ahead of me, and thus not enough time to try something else.

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National Poetry Writing Month 2018, Day 16

2018/04/16 — 13 Comments

For Day 16, I again deviate slightly from the Napowrimo.net prompt, which is to ‘write a poem that prominently features the idea of play.’ Although there is mention of chew toys and football, I went more with playful than play.

Earlier, I was looking up information about presidential pets, because it had occurred to me that I had never seen anything about whether or not the current occupant of the White House has any pets. As it turns out, he is the first US president since Polk (1845–49) to have no pets (although, according to Wikipedia, Andrew Johnson had no pets, but fed white mice he found in his bedroom).

Of course, I started off by reading about Socks Clinton (in part because writer Ijeoma Oluo’s 2016 DNC live tweet, Fun Fact: Socks Clinton is probably dead now, happened to pop into my head unexpectedly). When I read that he never liked the Clintons’ dog, Buddy, it wasn’t hard to imagine a White House staffer being given instructions to keep them apart during some official gathering. I then extended the idea to a reunion of former First Pets…

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