For today’s post, I’m just going to break down some final thoughts about NaPoWriMo and go over some stats. After this, I’ll shut up about it and we can focus on May stuff.
Some interesting Hattie trivia: this is my eighth year doing NaPoWriMo, and my fourth year in a row finishing all 30 days. This year has the highest concentration of rhyming poems (you are welcome Momma!!!!) and a lot of “firsts” for me.
This is the second time my first poem of the year includes me wearing furs (the first was 2021). There’s a nice bookend happening in this year’s poems that might not be visible to anyone but me. The first poem was written at the end of a day out, for my friend Rosa’s birthday/bachelorette; the 29th poem was written during another day with Rosa, on our way to see the same group of friends. At Penn Station, we ate Panda Express and Rosa’s fortune cookie provided the title for this poem. Now: why wasn’t this the FINAL poem of the series?
The 30th poem is, per tradition, reserved for my friend Molly, who wrote a truly special reversal/palindromic poem this year. In homage to that poem, and to her, I wrote my annual “Molly Poem” as a casual palindrome. She wrote a poem for me, too. It’s interesting to see which references she and I keep coming back to in these. Specific Walgreens locations. Musicians and other friends, fights we’ve had, foods we’ve eaten. As we get older, and still live so far apart, we’re tethered by the writing we share; every time we do NaPoWriMo it’s like we’re eagerly renewing our friendship lease.
Here are some more stats about this year’s poems.
Shortest poem: 29 words, including the title (An Editorial Note About The Last Poem)
Longest poem: 531 words (Sixteen)
One translation poem (Parakeet in Translation)
One blackout poem (Flight Plan)
One poem formatted like a resume (Relevant Experience - thanks again to Rebecca for this idea)
Two poems that are responses to previous poems (Flight Plan is a response to Fear of Flying, and The French Lesson (Deux) is a sequel to The French Lesson, both from 2022)
Two in the third person (Hattie, On The Porch With Animals and Hattie, Waiting For The Crosstown Bus)
FOUR rhyming poems!!!! (An Easter Egg Hunt With My Family, Jovan White Musk, The French Lesson (Deux), For a Decade)
Let’s talk about those rhyming poems, shall we? I experimented with forms this year. Two of these are standard ABAB rhymes: An Easter Egg Hunt With My Family, and The French Lesson (Deux). Now, at first glance, TFL(D) isn’t rhyming, but then – a-ha! You remember to speak French. My mom always teases me because my poems “don’t even rhyme.” She’s right, of course, they usually don’t. That’s probably why I wrote two of my rhyming poems while I was home at Easter this year.
The second of those, Jovan, is a reference to Jovan White Musk, my mom’s perfume, and the poem itself is a tribute to her. It’s also an attempt at a Petrarchan sonnet, which has a more complex rhyme scheme/syllabic structure. I have an abba-abba-cdcdcd rhyme scheme1 but I’m unsure if the mood/content is correct. There’s a complicated emotional rotation around a volta in the center of the two rhyming sections, and I’m not convinced I got it right on my first try. But that’s why this is a draft!
For a Decade is a dizain, or dizain stanza, which is ten lines of ten syllables, and the rhyme scheme? WILD. Figuring out this abab-bc-cdcd rhyme was my writing challenge of the month, but I feel like I pulled it off.
In the end, I wrote 5,283 words of poetry this month. That’s a lot! If every word in my poems were a foot2 we would have over one mile of poetry. Now, I set to work revising them. I hope you'll see lots of these poems, cleaned up and repackaged for individual sale, in lit journals and magazines soon. In the meantime, thank you so much for reading my messy first drafts. I always try to keep a dedicated journal about my poetry process, and having you all reading this year helped me stay accountable.
If you need me I’ll be revising.
When I typed in “ABBA-ABBA-CDCDCD” on Google I got a bunch of “best of ABBA CD” results which is not a bad outcome!
The imperial measurement “foot,” not the poet “foot” we use in meter. Sadly.