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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 23rd: In Dialogue / Places

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Escapril prompt #23:  "Mask.” Angelea Lowes'   prompt  #23:  "You love me better than I love myself.” Napowrimo : Welcome back, everyone, for Day 23 of Na/GloPoWriMo. Our featured participant for the day is  Moment of November , which inverts Emily Dickinson’s “My Nosegays are for Captives” into a lovely verse that takes roses as its starting point. Our daily resource is  African Poems , a website devoted to presenting poetry from Africa, with an emphasis on making oral poetry available to a wide audience through recordings. Finally, here’s our optional prompt for the day! Start off by reading Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s “ Lockdown Garden .” Now, try to write a poem of your own that has multiple numbered sections. Attempt to have each section be in dialogue with the others, like a song where a different person sings each verse, giving a different point of view. Set the poem in a specific place that you used to spend a lot of time in, but don’t spend time...
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April 22nd: Newly Broken Dickinson

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Escapril prompt #22:  "Out the window.” Angelea Lowes'   prompt  #22:  "Can you tell me when the growing pains stop?” Napowrimo : Happy Saturday, all, and happy twenty-second day of Na/GloPoWriMo. I just couldn’t choose one featured participant for the day, so we have two, both providing responses to Day 20’s “abstraction” prompt. First up is  Salovie , with a mysterious meditation on the desert, and second,  Christine Smart , with a brief lyric centered on spring blooms. Today’s featured resource is the  Open House  poetry radio program. On each program, hosts  Cornelius Eady  and  Patricia Spears Jones  interview poets about their new and recent work. You can listen online, or live every Friday on  NYC’s WBAI . Today’s prompt (optional, as always, and taken from our archives) is a variation on a teaching exercise that the poet  Anne Boyer  uses with students studying the work of Emily Dickinson. As you may...
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April 21st: *Sustenance Day* Kenning or Short-Lined Poem w/ Invented Word

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Escapril prompt #21:  "An average day."  Angelea Lowes'   prompt  #21:  "Every other night is an existential crisis." Sustenance:   Our optional prompt for today is to write a poem that contains at least one  kenning . Kennings were metaphorical phrases developed in Nordic sagas. At their simplest, they generally consist of two nouns joined together, which imaginatively describe or name a third thing. The phrase “whale road,” for example, could be used instead of “sea” or “ocean,” and “sky candle” could be used for “sun.” The kennings used in Nordic sagas eventually got so complex that you basically needed a decoder-ring to figure them out. And Vikings being Vikings, there tended to be  an awful lot of kennings  for swords, warriors, ships, and gold. But at their best, they are surprising and evocative. I hope you have fun trying to invent your own. Happy writing! For inspiration, read Franny Choi's  Second Mouth  or  The Oven ...
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April 20th: Object in Retrospect

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Escapril prompt #20:  "Radio.” Angelea Lowes'   prompt  #20:  "There's a girl in me that misses us.” Napowrimo : As of today, we’re 2/3 of the way through Na/GloPoWriMo. I hope you feel like you’re on the downhill slope, coasting towards thirty days of successful poetic endeavor! Our featured participant today is  Catching Lines , where aliens and bears are only some of the remembered terrors provided in response to Day 19’s prompt. Today’s poetry resource is a little discussion about poetry in bookstores. There are plenty of bookstores around with good poetry sections (two of my favorites are  Bridge Street Books  in Washington, DC and  Gulf of Maine Books  in Brunswick, Maine). But did you know that there are also a handful of bookstores that only sell poetry? Check out Boston’s  Grolier Poetry Bookshop ,  Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop , and Seattle’s  Open Books . And now for our (optional) prompt, once more taken from ou...
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April 19th: What Haunts Us

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Escapril prompt #19:  "Muscle memory.” Angelea Lowes'   prompt  #19:  "A lot of texts I never sent.” Napowrimo :  Happy Wednesday, everyone, and happy nineteenth day of Na/GloPoWriMo. Today’s featured participant is  Elizabeth Burnam Poetry , where the abecedarian poem for Day 18 goes all the way down the alphabet and then all the way back up, while mocking corporate discourse.  For today’s daily resource I’d like to share this article about  poetry and TikTok . When I first started writing poetry seriously, blogs were the big thing. That was twenty-five years ago, and now there’s  poetry Twitter and  poetry on Instagram  and, yes, as new technology builds atop the old,  poetry on TikTok . And without further ado, here’s our daily (optional) prompt. For this challenge, start by reading Marlanda Dekine’s poem “ My Grandma Told Stories or Cautionary Tales .” One common feature of childhood is the monsters. The ones under the bed ...
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April 18th: Abecedarian / Being Playful

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Escapril prompt #18:  "What's ____ got to do with it?"  Angelea Lowes'   prompt  #18:  "Leaving the door open" Napowrimo :  Welcome back, everyone, for Day Eighteen of Na/GloPoWriMo. Today, our featured participant is  words & words , where you’ll find a lovely reminiscence on reeds and the wind in response to Day 17’s prompt inviting you to play with repetition and with correspondences between human life and the natural world. Our daily resource is the YouTube channel of Harvard’s  Woodberry Poetry Room . Here, you can check out more than 100 videos of poetry readings, lectures, and discussions. There’s much to explore! Finally, here’s our prompt for the day, once again taken from our archives and, as always, optional. Today, I’d like to challenge you to write an abecedarian poem – a poem in which the word choice follows the words/order of the alphabet. You could write a very strict abecedarian poem, in which there are twenty-six words in alp...
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April 17th: *Sustenance Day* Replacement & Precision

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Note from Amanda: Hi friends, I got some bad news about a week ago and am leaving early Tuesday morning to see a family member in the hospital with my brother in Texas. It's a quick trip that was scheduled very last minute, and I may be more quiet than usual in this space over the next few days, but I did just manage to log in from my iPad, so it’s coming with me, and I’ll post with it from the hotel. Anyway, just wanted to warn y'all. If there are any issues, I’ll be tagging Miranda in. <3  Escapril prompt #17:  "The Horror!"  Angelea Lowes'   prompt  #17:  "apple tree blues." Sustenance:   Let's read this   poem   by Chen Chen to warm up.  Now, today’s (optional) prompt is a “replacement” poem. Pick a common noun for a physical thing, for example, “desk” or “hat” or “bear,” and then pick one for something intangible, like “love” or “memories” or “aspiration.” Then Google your tangible noun, and find some sentences using it. Now, rep...
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April 1st: Poets, Start Your Engines

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April 1 is finally here, and with it comes Na/GloPoWriMo. Huzzah! Our first featured participant is  Flipped Serendipity , where the “fun fact” early-bird poem draws attention to something many of us experience when starting a challenge like NaPoWriMo — even if you feel very enthusiastic about the project, it can be hard to push yourself out of your rut and really get writing. But the first step to shaking the rust off your verse is to get something down on the page. And having done these thirty-day-challenges many times, I can say that it does get easier as you go. Speaking of featured participants, one of the ways we find them is through the comments on each day’s post. Don’t know where to find those? Just click on the title to the day’s post, and it will take you to a new page featuring just that post, and a comment section. Many folks paste links to their daily efforts there, or if they don’t have websites, copy out the poems themselves. The conversation between participants in...
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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 9th: Sonnets

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Escapril prompt #9:  "Advertisement."  Angelea Lowes'   prompt  #9:  "Everywhere I go, I bring the rain." Napowrimo: Welcome back for the ninth day of Na/GloPoWriMo, fellow poets! Our daily participant is  To Create . . .  where Day Eight’s “twenty projects” prompt resulted in a breathtakingly claustrophobic family memory. But I also want to give a shout-out to all of you who stuck with the prompt! I know that it was a lot. Today’s poetry resource is  UbuWeb,  a vast repository of the avant-garde. You could get lost for days among the films, audio recordings, PDFs of small press publications, and other oddities here. If you’re looking to have the top of your head screwed off (figuratively), check out the “ 365 Days Project .” Finally, here’s our prompt for the day (as always, optional). We’re calling today Sonnet Sunday, as we’re challenging you to write in what is probably the most robust poetic form in English. A traditional sonnet is 14 li...
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