National Poetry Writing Month is a social version of the usual composing poems. At the NaPoWriMo site, they offer a prompt a day, a space to show results and featured poetry blog per day.
Yesterday’s prompt was from Kelli Russell Agadon’s “Write a poem of at least 40 lines that is a single sentence.” That’s from the Wompo Listserv’s 30 ideas.
Ideas galore everywhere. But it’s not the idea, but what you do with it, and it’s not the getting started, it’s the getting exercise and improving and the getting finished with something fully refined and realized.
I like to combine lists of prompts to make one poem from the constraint of 3 lists just to make it interesting. I’m not doing it daily this year tho because I’m in editing mode. If I were to, today would be:
Two for Tuesday: 1. Write a form poem. This could be a sonnet, pantoum, lune, or even something as sinister as a–dare I say it–sestina. 2. Write an anti-form poem.
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Kells’s: Take fairy tale and rewrite it from the viewpoint of another character. For example, use the wolf to tell the story of Little Red Riding Hood.
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Ekphrastic: examine an old photo and write from it.
= a process of mash-up that would yield somewhere you wouldn’t normally go by a route you wouldn’t normally venture on, thus pushing out your zone and needing you to call on more skills than your usual.
It doesn’t matter how you feel about the poem or its potential or its difficulty or where it is going. Just do. The constraints are the censor, not you. It’s just words not accountable to your pride or identity. Ego can go play with its toes for a while.
It’s a tricky thing for poetry to not be made unnecessarily hard, to get the bumps off without making it a pre-ordained interpretation chute. Cate Marvin has a poem up a the Boston Review about the “Poetry Machine” where extrusions of poems come out an assembly line, everything glossy and glazed as a metaphor, a a 2012 model year car under the gaze of the poet.
I hear her frustration. In the “poetic”, what about what is omitted? Does our word poetry shut out too much content of life? Which types and sizes of feelings or thoughts need not apply?
Conversely are we being hard to get along with, making our poetry some kind of qualifying round of being permitted to get to know the poet? If poetry is a communicative act between the poet’s usual round table of me, myself and I, is the harangue of words getting anywhere or just exacerbating self? Is the poem which refuses easy subjects for poetry and usual shapes for forms just a different consensus circle where no ideas at conflict are permitted to speak?
Dawdling in the opaque or dawdling in the straight out are indistinguishable acts. Clarity thru opaque or thru blunt straight likewise are the same.
A poem can be a word long and prove deliberated thought. Or be muddy and half-formed. Either may be formatted into a sonnet or free verse or spoken word. It doesn’t matter what form something takes. It is the shape of movement behind the words or images that make it distinct, not the ostensible subject.
Which is stating the obvious I suppose.