The Napowrimo.net prompt for Day 24 is to write an elegy. This is always tricky for me, at least when it comes to prompts. These last five years or so, I have used poetry to mourn all sorts of things in my life—but this almost always came about as a natural response to an event or a memory. So, I opted for optimism with this poem.
prompts
National Poetry Writing Month 2018, Day 23
The Napowrimo.net prompt for Day 23 posed a bit of a challenge for me, since I spend a lot of time alone. So, as I have done a few times these last few weeks, I turned to the movie American Splendor for inspiration. I borrowed a couple of lines from the film, but mainly I adopted some of the speech patterns from both the film and the comic, and combined them with things I have either thought or said…
National Poetry Writing Month 2018, Day 22
The Napowrimo.net prompt for Day 22 brought out the contrarian in me…
National Poetry Writing Month 2018, Day 21
The Napowrimo.net prompt for Day 21 is one of those I’m not really keen on. The idea is to base the poem on the myth of Narcissus. I made the protagonist of my poem the opposite of Narcissus. The form of my poem is a modified rimas dissolutas. Normally, the corresponding line of each stanza rhymes (though the stanzas themselves do not); here, the first lines do not rhyme.
National Poetry Writing Month 2018, Day 20
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!
National Poetry Writing Month 2018, Day 19
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.
National Poetry Writing Month 2018, Day 18
The Napowrimo.net prompt for Day 18 was easy to follow. The poem I used for my line-by-line backwards response was ‘Ophelia’ from Janée J. Baugher’s book Coördinates of Yes.
National Poetry Writing Month 2018, Day 17
Unfortunately, I can’t follow the Napowrimo.net prompt for Day 17, which is to ‘write a poem re-telling a family anecdote that has stuck with you over time.’ The explanation for this is the poem.
National Poetry Writing Month 2018, Day 16
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…
National Poetry Writing Month 2018, Day 15
For Day 15, I again deviate slightly from the Napowrimo.net prompt, which is to write a poem ‘in which a villain faces an unfortunate situation, and is revealed to be human (but still evil).’
I was going to try to work with it, remembering a bit Robert Klein once did about how even the worst Nazi could still have a soft spot for a puppy—but then I read that Hitler had his people test the cyanide Eva Braun eventually took on his German shepherd (her dogs were subsequently shot), so I gave up on that idea, instead looking at a more contemporary variety of villain…
Ordinary Average Thoughts 