National Poetry Writing Month 2017, Day 5

My fifth poem for National Poetry Writing Month uses the prompt from Napowrimo.net—who were seriously testing me with their prompt to ‘write a poem that is based in the natural world.’ When it comes to poetry, few things are duller to me than…a nature poem. Read Beowulf to me in the original Middle English. Make me listen to a poem that is so long it takes 43-and-a-half minutes to read if you’re rushing through it. Assemble our current president-inator’s tweets to date into an incoherent mess of writing that could be called a poem only in the loosest sense possible. But nature poems? Thank you, no. Fortunately, I was able to give myself enough leeway to have fun with it—and without any references whatsoever to fecundity Continue reading

National Poetry Writing Month 2017, Day 4

My fourth poem for National Poetry Writing Month combines the prompt from Napowrimo.net, which is to write a poem ‘with a word or idea or line it isn’t expressing directly’, with the prompt from the NaPoWriMo Facebook page, which is to ‘make use of Color [sic] as your theme.’ [Update: I moved the I have no need… stanza because it was bugging me. I will keep it where I moved it for now—but I suspect further revision will be necessary later on.] Continue reading