April 30th: Palinode

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Escapril prompt #30:  "Do you hear that?” Angelea Lowes'   prompt  #30:  "I saw your ghost on a train downtown.” Napowrimo :  Well, we knew it would come to this, what with the inexorable march of time and all. Today is the final day of Na/GloPoWriMo. Thank you all for joining the challenge during this, its twentieth year! We’ll be back tomorrow with our final featured participant and some housekeeping information, as we prepare to go back into our long sleep (like   Robert Frost’s woodchuck ) until next spring. But for now, here’s our daily featured participant is  Farah Lawal Harris , who responded to Day 29’s food-based prompt with a paean to Nigerian cooking. Our final daily resource is a pair of podcasts:  Wacky Poem Life , sponsored by the Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry (yes, there is a Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry!), and  Haiku Chronicles , a podcast focused on haiku and related poetic forms. And now for our last prompt of the year...
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April 2nd: Celan's Surrealist Q & A

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Just a note here, friends. Today, the comments should be using Intense Debate, so it may prompt you for a login or to create an account. The purpose of using that comment platform is so we can reply to replies! which is not something Blogger allows on its own. Please let me know if you have any trouble with it. I can revert to the original template code as needed. 

Also, I'm going to continue adding the Escapril prompt at the bottom (thank you, Marisa, for that reminder!), as well as Angelea Lowes' NaPoWriMo prompts in case you want more options. 

                -- Amanda

Welcome back, all, for the second day of Na/GloPoWriMo. We hope the first day has only increased your appetite for poems.

Today’s featured participant is What Rhymes with Stanza?, where the book-cover poem for Day 1 takes us through all of recorded history and into the future, through the lens of the moon.

Our poetry resource for the day is Jacket2. This online magazine features a wealth of podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and other uncategorizable writings about contemporary poetry.

And now for today’s (optional) prompt! The Romanian-born poet Paul Celan once wrote a series of surrealist questions and answers. Here are a couple of examples:

                What is forgetting?

                                An unripe apple stabbed by a spear.

                What is a tear?

                                A scale awaiting a weight.

Today’s prompt asks you to begin by picking 5-10 words from the following list. Next, write out a question for each word that you’ve selected (e.g., what is seaweed?)

owl
generator
fog
river
clove
miracle
cyclops
oyster
mercurial
seaweed
gutter
artillery
salt
elusive
thunder
ghost
acorn
cheese
longing
cowbird
truffle
quahog
song

Now for each question, write a one-line answer. Try to make the answer an image, and don’t worry about strict logic. These are surrealist answers, after all!

After you’ve written out your series of questions and answers, place all the answers, without the questions, on a new page. See if you can make a poem of just the answers. You may find that what you have is very beautifully mysterious, and somehow has its own logic.

Happy writing!

Escapril #2 prompt: "Eavesdrop."

Angelea Lowes #2 prompt: "Walking on Eggshells."

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April 30th: Palinode

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