prompts

National Poetry Writing Month 2019 Day #2 (pt. 1)

2019/04/02 — Leave a comment

Here I use the prompt provided by poet (and bookstore owner) Chris Jarmick on his blog, POETRYisEVERYTHING.

This prompt is basically the same as last year’s Napowrimo.net prompt for Day 18. As I did then, the poem I used for my line-by-line backwards response was ‘Ophelia’ from Janée J. Baugher’s book Coördinates of Yes. This time, I stuck more closely to the line structure of the original poem while writing, though I edited and revised according to my sense of the internal rhythm of this new poem.

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National Poetry Writing Month 2019, early-bird poem

2019/03/30 — 6 Comments

For this early-bird poem, I followed the napowrimo.net prompt—sort of. Instead of a self-portrait as a historical or mythical figure, I made myself the figure in a photograph I took in January 2009 of a man standing in a graveyard.

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National Poetry Writing Month 2018, Day 30

2018/04/30 — 2 Comments

For Day 30, I went off-prompt, as they say. Instead of the Napowrimo.net prompt to engage with a strange fact, I opted to go with the prompt posted on Chris Jarmick’s POETRYisEVERYTHING blog, which involves writing a poem of 8 to 12 lines, with the odd-numbered lines being borrowed from poems I have written over the last 30 days, and the even-numbered lines being new lines written for this poem, with at least one of these new lines including something blue. I made three attempts at this; I couldn’t figure out which one I wanted to post, so I made this a three-part poem and used all of them.

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National Poetry Writing Month 2018, Day 29

2018/04/29 — 2 Comments

The Napowrimo.net prompt for Day 29 is to ‘write a poem based on the Plath Poetry Project’s calendar. Simply pick a poem from the calendar, and then write a poem that responds or engages with your chosen Plath poem in some way.’ I chose to work with ‘The Rabbit Catcher’. I applied the approach from the Day 18 prompt, going line by line from the last line of the poem to the first, responding to each line along the way. (Oh, and nobody should be concerned. Yes, things have been difficult, but the first stanza is about my feelings about wearing neckties.)

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National Poetry Writing Month 2018, Day 27

2018/04/27 — Leave a comment

The Napowrimo.net prompt for Day 27 is to pick a tarot card and write a poem about ‘the images or ideas that are associated with it’. My poem is inspired by the Two of Cups, and partly influenced by side 1 of David Sylvian’s Brilliant Trees album.

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