Progress: Terrible free verse with a few good lines today (of which the title of this post is one). Oh, well, I can’t be a genius all the time. I had an idea for tomorrow’s poem, which I’m going to sort of poke at nervously tonight in the hopes of getting some kind of start on it, since Wednesdays are bad writing days for me (bar trivia night – Barley House patrons, represent!).
Prompt for today: From the Speakeasy, “Write about being underwater.”
Mirrored at joannemerriam.com.
NaPoWriMo Inspiration: “Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing” by Margaret Atwood
Progress: Just finished a free verse piece called “White Girls,” inspired by a conversation with my friend Jennifer Romita about white privilege. I feel good about it, though I’m sure it will need more work (in May).
Prompt for today: Write a poem about something missing.
Mirrored at joannemerriam.com.
NaPoWriMo Inspiration: “delay; one of any number of perspectives on flight” by matt robinson
Progress: Just finished an intensely sexy pantoum inspired by this prompt. I’m still one poem behind (from Wednesday) and hope to catch up tonight when I get back from my afternoon errands. Edited 9:05 pm to add: I just finished a fairly silly little poem about Peeps, so I’m now caught up.
Mirrored at joannemerriam.com.
NaPoWriMo Inspiration: “Fear” by Dorianne Laux
Progress: Yesterday I wrote an incomplete first draft of a poem about a nightmare I’d had the night before, which involved this gigantic hairy spider leaping onto my head and laying her egg sacs in my hair. What I have of the poem is pretty good, I think, for a first draft, but there’s four or five little blank where I need a better image than what I have. I’ll come back to it in May and make it (I hope) brilliant. Today I’m planning to try my version of N+7, in which I replace nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs and only keep the sentence structure, and then use the resulting hot mess with its occasional serendipitous accidents as a springboard to write something that makes sense, on “Elegy for Sol LeWitt” by Ann Lauterbach, which is the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day poem for today.
Prompt for today: Join me. Pick a poem you like and do an N+7 and then craft something sensible out of it.
Mirrored at joannemerriam.com.
NaPoWriMo Inspiration: “Self-Portrait in Summer” by Kathleen McGookey
NaPoWriMo Inspiration: “God Loves You, and So Do I” by Michael C. Blumenthal
Progress: I wrote a fairly decent first draft of a poem about being one of my grandfather’s pallbearers.
Prompt for today: Write a poem about falling out of love. (I stole this one from the discussion over at the P&W Speakeasy.)
In other poetry news, Astropoetica published their Spring 2009 issue yesterday, which includes my poem “Northern Lights” as well as work by Deborah P Kolodji, Michael Meyerhofer and others.
Mirrored at joannemerriam.com.