NaPoWriMo is gaining steam since the Day 1 prompt of triolet. On day 3 it has over 700 registered participants. That might be outpacing Poetic Asides for prompt-followers. Be braced. all you journal editors, for an onslaught of epithalamium poems.
Like the CV2 causes a wash for years of poems marked by the CV2 bump as people write to accommodate their challenge of arcane words, I predict the NaPoWriMo will too. Poetic Asides doesn’t affect the tide so with generic concepts as prompts, “communication”, “visitor” and “apology/apologetic”. Those would be indistinguishable from normal poetic fodder I would think.
Prompts can give you a password to an inward motivation, dislodge something by the effort of making that you wouldn’t normally due and an external deadline gives you pressure to finish. A heck of a lot of dreck is a by-product too.
This is not a new problem. In the spring of 1692 Matsuo Basho wrote in a letter to his friend, “Everywhere in this city, I see people writing poetry to win prizes or notoriety. You can imagine what they write.” [via Hans Jongman in Haiku Canada Review, Oct 2011.]
Part of the art is learning what to drop and what to pursue and not wanting to press to get back the time invested by compensation of publication. Anything can be published. Someone will like most anything. Higher goal of self-enrichment, listening to culture, conduiting, adding value to culture, those make any means to the ends worth attending to.
Putting more poor grist thru the mill doesn’t make for better bread. Insisting you will give the mill no wheat worthy enough doesn’t keep anyone in business, mill, farmer, baker and no one’s fed.
But knowing what to select and having more to select from so you don’t settle for best of ok, but have a decent set to choose favourites from makes a difference.
Case in point, the Boston Review has a few very fine poems from Mary Austin Speaker. She wrote poems daily, one for each subway ride to and from work. Over 6 months, that’s 4 rides x 5 days a week x 24 weeks to yield, give or take, 480 kicks at the can. 25 poems from this manuscript were published in a chapbook called The Bridge (Push Press, 2011)