Two for the Show
on APRIL 2, 2013
Hello and welcome back. I hope your first day of NaPoWriMo went swimmingly and that you’re ready for more.

But now, let me draw your attention to a few links. The good folks at wordpress gave us a shout-out on their blog yesterday. Huzzah! And if you’re looking for a little inspiration, I invite you to check out Pulitzer Remix, a project sponsored by the Found Poetry Review, in which 85 different poets are daily creating found poetry remixed from Pulitzer Prize-winning books. Wow!

Our featured blog for today is Right, Write, which brings us a poem for Day 1 that I find rhetorically very compelling, as it moves from the idea of a voice to windows and brings the intimate, inside idea of a voice outside into the world, and vice versa.

And now, the prompt! Today’s prompt is drawn from an idea that Kelsey Howard gave me — that of a poem that tells a lie. I think you could have a poem that’s all lies (that could be very funny — full of things like “the sun is the size of a nickel”) or a poem that steadily builds to telling one big whopper. I can imagine these being very poignant, or very much like goofy shaggy-dog stories. I suppose it all comes down to what you want to lie about!

It Begins!
on APRIL 1, 2013
Hello, all. NaPoWriMo is finally here. Let the writing begin!

Our poetry-related link today is to the Best American Poetry blog, where they are celebrating National Poetry Month with links to — yes! — NaPoWriMo, as well as many other wonderful events that will be happening this month, both online and off.

Our featured blog for the day is Robert Lunday’s Cleaning My Attic. Robert was the first person to sign up for NaPoWriMo this year, so I thought I would point out his blog on this, the first day of NaPoWriMo. Robert also participated in NaPoWriMo last year, and made it to 26 poems, which is pretty darn good.

And now, our prompt! (The prompts are totally optional, by the way — use ‘em or ignore ‘em as you see fit.) Continuing with the theme of firsts, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem that has the same first line as another poem. You can use a favorite poem, pick up a random book of poetry and get a first line that way, or perhaps use one of the following:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

She walks in beauty, like the night

Slowly, silently, now the moon

anyone lived in a pretty how town

I have written some poems of this type in the past, and it can be fun to take a well-known first line and do something totally different with it! But if it’s hard for you to shake the original, maybe using a first line from a random poem would be best for you.