Tag Archives: National Poetry Writing Month

NaPoWriMo April 2, 2016 FPR Impromptu Living Like Wrinkles

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FPR Prompt for Day 2 by Collier Nogues

“This prompt is modeled after that project. You can start with any piece of junk mail or advertising, or any legal document or bureaucratic form (it’s tax time!). Choose a few sentences. Remove the nouns. Replace them with:

  • words from a poem you’ve abandoned
  • words from one or more poems you love (by anyone, yourself included)
  • any other source that works

From there, work what you’ve got into a poem. This prompt can be a throwaway prompt to generate a few lines, or it can become the engine for a situational poem”  http://www.foundpoetryreview.com/blog/impromptu-2-collier-nogues/

Here’s my attempt:

Living Like Wrinkles

 

Invisible reached epidemic proportions April 1st,
11 million people living down the street with blank eyes.
Another diagnosed every three faces.

English: Teme-bozu (the ghost of a blind man, ...

Teme-bozu (the ghost of a blind man, with his eyes on his hands) from the Hyakki-Yagyō-Emaki (Wikipedia)

Every blank eye needs a needle-prick and many others.
Skin is a member of that team, registering with every old lady
cast down to count cracks. As well as they possibly can,

many people live like wrinkles in old skin, play metal on metal.
A critical grind the cornerstone of crooked smile.
Each day people need invisible knowledge of the smaller mind.

Carol A. Stephen
April 2, 2016

 

Sources: excerpt from an article, World Health Day focus on diabetes encourages taking charge to live well.  http://www.diabetes.ca/newsroom/search-news/world-health-day-focuses-on-diabetes?feed=CDA-Latest-News-RSS

and

remix with words from the poem Invisible, Carol A. Stephen, first published in Arborealis, A Beret Days Book, by the Ontario Poetry Society, Feb. 2008

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NaPoWriMo April 1, 2016 FPR Impromptu – Remembering Cement

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Still working on April 1st, from the Found Poetry Review prompt generator provided by Patrick Williams.  His generator takes stacks of books he has compiled (as a librarian) and suggests a random prompt to be applied to the located text.  Link to the site: http://www.foundpoetryreview.com/blog/national-poetry-month-2016/

My first prompt:  Write a poem on the first memory encountered in “these two pages” from the generator.  That gave me this:  an article on concrete, with the following text actually readable:  concrete stone in brushed-out surface, used in military academy buildings.  The building is the Northwestern Military and Naval Academy at Lake Geneva Wisc.  My memories of concrete come from childhood, rather than go the cemetery statuary route :

 

Remembering Concrete

 

I was six or maybe seven the day we went walking while
they changed the electric cycle from sixty to one-ten.
Grey grit still draws its dark scar across my knee, in memory
of where I fell along the cinder walk.

Soon after, we kids were happy when great lumbering trucks
arrived with workmen dressed for spreading cement: new sidewalks
over the cinder bits. We no longer needed to walk awkwardly
on steel wheels of roller skates that wouldn’t skate over grit.

photo: C. Stephen

A year or two after that, I’d remember the concrete road outside our house,
where I first learned to ride my electric blue two-wheeler.  Rainbow streamers
and fancy reflectors did nothing to keep me stable and I went down hard,
no scars but these days — my back aches when it rains.

 

Carol A. Stephen

April 1, 2016

Line art drawing of a roller skate.

Line art drawing of a roller skate. (Wikipedia)

NaPoWriMo April 2016 Day 1

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Today’s the first day of National Poetry Month, and the first prompt I’m tackling is from NaPoWriMo.net Here’s the prompt from that website:  ” Today, I challenge you to write glopo2016button1a lune. This is a sort of English-language haiku. While the haiku is a three-line poem with a 5-7-5 syllable count, the lune is a three-line poem with a 5-3-5 syllable count. There’s also a variant based on word-count, instead of syllable count, where the poem still has three lines, but the first line has five words, the second line has three words, and the third line has five words again. Either kind will do, and you can write a one-lune poem, or write a poem consisting of multiple stanzas of lunes. “

 

I might even get away with saying that the first lune fits the Poetic Asides prompt to write a foolish poem for April Fool’s Day.  Almost.

My attempt at this one:

Day 1 April 2016

 

Lunarversity

English: Ventnor: looking down on the beach Ve...

Ventnor seafront from the shelter above Rene Howe Gardens Wikipedia)

First April day
weather fit only for fools:
sunny with rain.


Embed from Getty Images

Cat paw syncopation:
does he wear tap shoes
chasing those balls?

 

Stubborn as rams
no April showers
douse the fire sign Aries

 

Fol. 34v Aries

Fol. 34v Aries (Wikipedia)

 

NaPoWriMo Prompt for Day 30

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Technically, it is the last day of National Poetry Month, and the last day of the prompts. As for me, I ‘m still working to catch up, and will likely go part way through May to feel like I’ve completed the challenge. But I thought I would at least attempt one of the Day 30 prompts on the right day. Here it is!

The prompt for Day 30 over at NaPoWriMo goes like this: “And now our final (and still optional) prompt! I know I’ve used this one in prior years, but it’s one of my favorites, so bear with me. Find a shortish poem that you like, and rewrite each line, replacing each word (or as many words as you can) with words that mean the opposite. For example, you might turn “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” to “I won’t contrast you with a winter’s night.” Your first draft of this kind of opposite poem will likely need a little polishing, but this is a fun way to respond to a poem you like, while also learning how that poem’s rhetorical strategies really work. (It’s sort of like taking a radio apart and putting it back together, but for poetry). Happy writing!”

I chose the poem I wrote for Day 18, which was to begin and end on the same word. Here is the original:

The Note that Anchors You

La-A

La-A (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

End on the note that anchors you
to your life, to the electric hum,
buzz and inhale. Dance
to the tune in your head
on the tip of waves,
at the end of airplane wings, as you fly
to the corners at the ends of the world.

When you stroke off the last entry
on your not-yet-done list, take
one last journey, go
with a banging of drums. Ignore
the whimper of what you didn’t try:
This is the way your story should end.

Here is my “opposite” poem, more or less:

The Song that Sets You Free

Begin the song that sets you free
from your death, from the static,
buzz and exhale. Walk away
from the discordance in your bones
in the valleys of wake
at the stern of your ship, as you fall
from the centre of the world.

English: An illustration from the Encyclopaedi...

English: An illustration from the Encyclopaedia Biblica, a 1903 publication which is now in the public domain. Fig. 21 for article “Music”. Image of a Babylonian Harp – which had only 5 strings. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When you set down the first entry
on your list of things accomplished, make
the first journey, arrive
to the strum of harp strings. Pay attention
to the wail of what you tried,
This is the way your story should begin.

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