This poem is based on the Napowrimo.net prompt for Day 11—a poem that addresses the future, answering the questions “What does y(our) future provide? What is your future state of mind? If you are a citizen of the “union” that is your body, what is your future “state of the union” address?” [sic]
Okay, it’s no State of the Union, and it’s undoubtedly a lot farther into the future than was intended, but…
This little monster, based on the Napowrimo.net prompt for Day 10—a lot of things happening at once—is a bit of a hybrid, combining bits of actual conversation or correspondence with sarcastic interjections by me. All of this is framed by the news that my desktop computer’s hard drive is beginning to fail. Is this really a poem? Whether it is or not, I’m going with it…
The prompt given by Napowrimo.net for Day 9 is to write a poem in which something small and something big come together…
Another detour from the prompt given by Napowrimo.net for Day 8. I’m not much interested in ‘mysterious and magical things’ in the traditional sense. However, lately I have been falling asleep to the American Splendor DVD, which has a looping menu featuring Harvey Pekar walking along an R. Crumb-drawn street. It is done really well, so the point where it loops back to the beginning is not obvious unless you’re paying attention. Anyway, this morning, as I woke up here and there to the loop still going, it was as though I were looking to see if something (my dream? uninterrupted sleep? something else?) had landed in just the right spot. I made that feeling the basis of this poem.
I detoured somewhat from the Day 7 prompt given by Napowrimo.net. The idea of a conversation between different identities felt a little too similar to the other day’s prompt about different voices. I didn’t abandon it completely, though; I took my memory of a birthday party I went to (and left) about five years ago, and, with a few embellishments, recast it as a poem…
The Day 6 prompt from Napowrimo.net felt sort of safe, and the examples of different types of line breaks didn’t seem all that unusual. Even the Amiri Baraka poem, while starting a new sentence at the very end of lines here and there, didn’t go as far as to make sentences span stanzas.
For a while towards the end of high school, and on into college (until I stopped writing for a few years), I used very short lines, with three words being my unofficial maximum per line. A couple of years ago, when I was exploring specific forms, I found that some forms led me to write very long lines. Most of the time, I try to break lines somewhat logically, based either on where one might mark the end of a phrase when diagramming linguistically (though I don’t consciously approach it that way), or on where I would otherwise use a comma or semi-colon.
For this poem, I opted to create an exaggerated contrast between long(ish) and short lines—with the short lines, going so far as to break at the ends of syllables…
The Day 5 prompt from Napowrimo.net is not one I’ve ever liked. I did start with a photograph, but the use of a poem written in another language required so much attention that I paid almost no attention to the picture.
The prompt from Napowrimo.net for Day 4 is to write about something abstract using ‘relentlessly abstract nouns.’ The result of my stab at this is one of the stranger poems I have ever written—and, quite possibly, one of my more successful attempts at ‘show, not tell’.
Today’s poem is a variation on the prompt from Napowrimo.net. Instead of a list poem of fake band names, I came up with a list of fake band names (not wanting to take the time to go through social media and find all my old ‘that would be a good name for a band’ posts), then wrote a poem incorporating them.
The list I started with:
The Abandoned Typewriters
Blue Whale Guilt Trip
The Ex-Lepers
The Outpatients
Jasper’s Fine-tooth Comb
Cellular Level
The Expired Tabs
The Public Option
Sandwich Shoppe
Regular Guys
Not So Much
The Embodiment of the American Dream
Using the prompt from Napowrimo.net—to ‘write a poem that plays with voice.’ Adopting one of the suggestions, I took an earlier poem and imagined the other side of the conversation (as such)…
Ordinary Average Thoughts 