Monday Poetry Post: The Final Countdown! NaPoWriMo Check-In #4
We're in the very last stretch now!
Hi, everyone! We have just one more week of NaPoWriMo left. I caught up on poems this weekend and am trying to keep myself focused for this last week of daily writing.
A handful of people have reached out to tell me they’re using my Monday poetry prompts to get through this month. I am so, so, so glad they’ve been useful! And I’m going to be trying a few of them myself this week, along with inspiration from A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon and PoemCrazy, two books I’ve mentioned previously.
I’m surprised to say this: I’m excited for May 1st, because I’ll be going back to normal Monday posts, and sharing new prompts with you each week. But I think I’ll probably mix it up on Thursdays, and alternate readings of other writers’ poems with close looks at my own. It’s been fun and enlightening to investigate my own work that way.
This year has also been extra-special for me because I’m writing more than I usually do during NaPoWriMo. In years past, I’ve let other writing fall to the wayside as I focus on poems all April long. But this year, I haven’t had the chance to do that – I’ve got a newsletter to put out, dammit!
I hope that you’ve been writing. I don’t care if it’s every day. If you have not written a single thing all April long, remember: it’s not too late. You can start now and have a whole week of poems by May. Or, start now, finish one poem by Sunday, and then you can honestly say you participated in NaPoWriMo.
I picked up Mary Oliver’s beloved little reference text, A Poetry Handbook, and flipped it open to this “note of caution,” which is where I’ll leave you.
“Language is a vibrant, malleable, living material. In the writing of the poem, nothing, if it is done well and works to the desired effect, is wrong. This is true concerning all matters of technique, and it is true also concerning diction and tone and voice…We can know a lot. And still, no doubt, there are rash and wonderful ideas brewing somewhere; there are many surprises yet to come.”
Paid subscribers: we’ll do a draft dump on Wednesday, and another on Sunday.