From the list, I chose “courage” because we all need so much of it everyday! Let’s hear it poets! Does it take courage to write a poem-a-day in April?
Prompt for Day 21 from Napowrimo: “Last but not least, here’s today’s (optional) prompt. Begin by reading Sarah Gambito’s poem “Grace.” Now, choose an abstract noun from the list . . . , and then use that as the title for a poem that contains very short lines, and at least one invented word.”
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To appease my grumbling muse, I decided to delve into a stanza pattern to write today’s poem. The “Terza Rima” (a poem with interweaving rhyming triplets or tercets) is a form that poets have used for long poems or as a stand alone short 3 line poem. One famous example of Terza Rima with three tercets and a final couplet is Shelley’s of “Ode to the West Wind.” It has a specific rhyme pattern that goes like this: 1,2,1; 2,3,2; 3,4,3;4,5,4 and the couplet uses the rhyme sound from the central line of the preceding triplet, so it goes 5, 5.
Shelley’s poem has five sections, however, and you may want to check it out here.
Below is my poem, “Found by a Future Scientist,” that responds to Napowrimo’s prompt “Have you ever heard someone wonder what future archaeologists, whether human or from alien civilization, will make of us? Today, I’d like to challenge you to answer that question in poetic form, exploring a particular object or place from the point of view of some far-off, future scientist? The object or site of study could be anything from a “World’s Best Grandpa” coffee mug to a Pizza Hut, from a Pokemon poster to a cellphone.”
Found by a Future Scientist
What thing is this,
a pendulum moving to and fro
in perfect rhythm, yet tedious?
The weighted piece—a rod of sorts—must go
ticking, tocking, ticking, tocking torture.
My science sees no purpose in this show.
Back and forth ticking I must endure
as I study this strange artifact.
In this task, my expertise looks amateur.
Yet, after hours, days, months—to be exact,
I warm to this past piece as treasured bric-a-brac.
I definitely got carried away with this poem as my idea took me on a long ride. I used gems in alphabetical order and then had to figure out a way to make a poem out of it, simply titled “Gems.”
And here’s the prompt: “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 alphabetical order, or you could write one in which each line begins with a word that follows the order of the alphabet. This is a prompt that lends itself well to a certain playfulness. Need some examples? Try this poem by Jessica Greenbaum, this one by Howard Nemerov or this one by John Bosworth.”
The Academy of American Poets defines “Erasure poetry” as “a form of found poetry wherein a poet takes an existing text and erases, blacks out, or otherwise obscures a large portion of the text, creating a wholly new work from what remains.” (poets.org)
It seems to me that erasure poem could be considered a form of “negation”–the challenge of today’s prompt explained by Maureeen at Napowrimo: “Today’s prompt is a poem of negation – yes (or maybe, no), I challenge you to write a poem that involves describing something in terms of what it is not, or not like.”
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Today’s prompt is another rewrite. Thorson says: “And now for our (optional) daily prompt. Hopefully, this one will provide you with a bit of Friday fun. Today, I challenge you to write a parody or satire based on a famous poem. It can be long or short, rhymed or not. But take a favorite (or unfavorite) poem of the past, and see if you can’t re-write it on humorous, mocking, or sharp-witted lines. You can use your poem to make fun of the original (in the vein of a parody), or turn the form and manner of the original into a vehicle for making points about something else (more of a satire – though the dividing lines get rather confused and thin at times).”
My attempt at the prompt on day 14 has an interesting twist. The poem is not so famous, but the poet is—Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In 1856, Barrett Browning published Aurora Leigh, a “novel in verse” that follows the title character, an aspiring poet, through several pot-boiling twists. In one revealing passage, Aurora’s cousin and would-be suitor, Romney Leigh, summarizes his attitude toward her and women writers of that era in a passage that I quote below. I rewrote that passage.
So, I rewrote the poem from a feminist perspective and titled it “Woman Poet Extraordinaire”
Woman Poet Extraordinaire
Therefore, this same world
that you understand and influence
with your strength and courage will
always be changed by you and
women of the world. Women brave,
strong, and at work in the world
will always change it by their very presence.
You are more than a doting mother and a wife!
You are more than a sublime Madonna ,
a seductress, or an enduring saint.
You are divine!
You are woman!
You are leader, artist, writer,
inventor, healer, builder.
You are poet extraordinaire!
Jacquelyn Markham (4/14/2023)
Here’s the original in which her cousin addresses her, knowing of her aspirations to be a poet:
Therefore, this same world Uncomprehended by you must remain Uninfluenced by you. Women as you are, Mere women, personal and passionate, You give us doting mothers, and chaste wives. Sublime Madonnas, and enduring saints! We get no Christ from you,—and verily We shall not get a poet, in my mind.
The Poetry Foundation explains: “As starkly sexist as the above passage might seem to contemporary readers, the idea that women and female experience were incompatible with poetry continued to hold sway for the next 100 years, until second-wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s brought a political and cultural watershed. Women fought for equal treatment and civil rights; meanwhile, women poets created structures to support one another while profoundly changing poetry itself.” (www.poetryfoundation.org)
We only have to look at the last two United States Poet Laureates to see “women poets extraordinaire”! Currently, Ada Limon and former, Joy Harjo. Two of my favorite poets.
I once wrote dialogues between the poet and the poem. This prompt is a little like that kind of dialogue, but even a bit more complicated. Here it is from Maureen at Napowrimo: “I challenge you to write a poem that addresses itself or some aspect of itself (i.e., “Dear Poem,” or “what are my quatrains up to?”; “Couplet, come with me . . .”) This might seem a little “meta” at first, or even kind of cheesy. But it can be a great way of interrogating (or at least, asking polite questions) of your own writing process and the motivations you have for writing, and the motivations you ascribe to your readers.”
So here we go. I could go on forever. . .
Whitehall Plantation Oak, painting by poet
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Maureen Thorson, the master mind behind Napowrimo says: “This prompt challenges you to play around with the idea of overheard language. . . Now, write a poem that takes as its starting point something overheard that made you laugh, or something someone told you once that struck you as funny.”
The overheard language around me today did not make me laugh or inspire me, so I dipped into a journal and found another one of those many prose practice writings and transformed it (I hope) to a poem.
Rain Again! Yes!
Rain Again!
“Oh no, rain again,” someone said.
Rain, Spain, main, shame, blame—
my mind reels. What rhymes
with rain? The rain I am grateful for
as it nourishes my flowers, my garden,
plants, trees, birds, fills the rivers.
A rain dance, my tarot card proclaims I can do
as an archetypal witch, so I claim the rain power.
The prompt for today, Easter Sunday, was to write a sonnet about love. Sounds easy, right? Not after the prompt for yesterday took all the creative juices, but the show must go on, so we poets keep writing as much as we can. I got the lines, the syllables, but not the iambic pentameter or the rhyme. Still, I am sharing this sonnet about love inspired by Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” quote.
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There are so many details to today’s prompt, I am going to post it below the poem. Or, you may refer to the prompt as presented by Napowrimo here. My poem was inspired by a freewriting I found in a journal using a Chagall painting as a prompt in Katherine Tandy Brown’s writing workshop. Thank you, Katherine!
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The prompt is called the “Twenty Little Poetry Projects,” and was originally developed by Jim Simmerman. And here are the twenty little projects themselves — the challenge is to use them all in one poem:
1. Begin the poem with a metaphor.
2. Say something specific but utterly preposterous.
3. Use at least one image for each of the five senses, either in succession or scattered randomly throughout the poem.
4. Use one example of synesthesia (mixing the senses).
5. Use the proper name of a person and the proper name of a place.
6. Contradict something you said earlier in the poem.
7. Change direction or digress from the last thing you said.
8. Use a word (slang?) you’ve never seen in a poem.
9. Use an example of false cause-effect logic.
10. Use a piece of talk you’ve actually heard (preferably in dialect and/or which you don’t understand).
11. Create a metaphor using the following construction: “The (adjective) (concrete noun) of (abstract noun) . . .”
12. Use an image in such a way as to reverse its usual associative qualities.
13. Make the persona or character in the poem do something he or she could not do in “real life.”
14. Refer to yourself by nickname and in the third person.
15. Write in the future tense, such that part of the poem seems to be a prediction.
16. Modify a noun with an unlikely adjective.
17. Make a declarative assertion that sounds convincing but that finally makes no sense.
18. Use a phrase from a language other than English.
19. Make a non-human object say or do something human (personification).
20. Close the poem with a vivid image that makes no statement, but that “echoes” an image from earlier in the poem.
Today is day 7 of the poem-a-day challenge and I’m following Napowrimo (National Poetry Writing Month), the site developed by Maureen Thorson, here’s her prompt for today, Day 7.
A summary of Maureen’s prompt: “Start by reading James Tate’s poem “The List of Famous Hats.” Now, write a poem that plays with the idea of a list. Tate’s poem is a list that isn’t – he never gets beyond the first entry. You could try to write a such a non-list, but a couple of other ideas would be to create a list of ingredients, or a list of entries in an index. A self-portrait (or a portrait of someone close to you) in the form of a such a list could be very funny. Another way into this prompt might be a list of instructions.”
Well, James Tate’s list of hats didn’t go far, but mine did as I wrote about my Grandma’s hats and as you see, she had many! This is a revision of an earlier version of the poem, and I have accompanied it with one of my “Legacy Collages” that features that navy blue hat with flowers and under the hat (not visible because it’s under the hat) is the story from the newspaper when her husband disappeared. What a story/legend it was is!
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