NaPoWriMo

NaPoWriMo 2023 (Day 4)

I write many poems. But I’m a lazy poet. Nowadays, I lean heavily on free verse, simply because it is easier.

My Day 4 NaPo (I pronounce, ‘nay-poe’) assignment was to write a triolet poem. It is a short, but strict form of eight lines, some repeating (verbatim), with a strict meter (iambic tetrameter) and rhyme scheme (ABaAabAB).

Except for NaPo, I would not have written this today. I seldom post on Tuesday. I confess to being inspired and influenced by the Bard’s Julius Caesar (3.1. 273), at least thematically. And yes, it did happen on a Tuesday. I changed my lines so as not to use exact lines from Shakespeare.

Love’s Rath

He said, “Let loose the dogs of war.”

Let Hell be sent for you, dear friend.

Caesar lies there! Dead on the floor!

He said, “Let lose the dog of war.”

Let gods avenge my angry scorn.

Unsheathe my sword, my soul to mend.

He said, “Let lose the dogs of war.”

Let Hell be sent for you, dear friend.

Look both ways.
Forgive some, not all.
Mind the gaps and pitfalls along the road to vengeance.

 

Click on the NaPo button to see the challenge and more poems (not all are on prompt).

Monday’s Rune: NaPoWriMo 2023 (Day 3)

Today’s Napo assignment was for me to find a short(ish) poem I like and to rewrite each line. I was to replace as many words as possible with words of opposite meaning (antonyms, perhaps). Then, polish and publish. Done! Right? (Sure.)

Since I’m caught up, I’ve made this Monday’s Rune (likewise the next three Mondays), so only one post per day for the remainder of April (except Saturdays, maybe, I hope). I may try to add other touches, like voiceover or videos, but I prefer my blog page relatively clean.

I chose two very short poems from Favorite Inspirational Poems (A Revell Inspirational Classic). My rewrites are italicized following the originals. I took the additional step of using a poetic theme opposite of the original poem. My voiceover is all four poems.

 

I Never Saw a Moor
by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

I never saw a Moor —
I never saw the Sea —
Yet know I how the Heather looks
And what a Billow be.

I never spoke with God
Nor visited in Heaven —
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if the Checks were given —

you always knew his name
by bill

you’ve seen many deserts
you’ve seen the wilderness
never will you know how sand feels
nor how the wood-gnomes dress.

we’ve spoken to dark angels
and had our time in Hell
then still we don’t know shit
clearly, I’ve lost my fucking will.

***

The Steps of Faith
by – John Greenleaf Whittier

Nothing before, nothing behind, the steps of Faith.
Fall on the seeming void and find the Rock beneath.
Nothing before, nothing behind,
Fall on the void and find the Rock beneath.
Nothing before, nothing behind.

ambles of atheism
by bill

everything behind, everything before, the ambles of atheism.
rise from below in clarity and lose the slip above
everything behind, everything before
climb to the valid and forget the void above
everything behind, everything before.

***

Look both ways to see what the poet says.
Mind the gaps in both the literal and ironic.
It’s Monday.

 

Click here for the napowrimo dot net and more poems.

NaPoWriMo 2023 (Day 2)

This is why I refer to these (optional) “prompts” as assignments. But I do them and I learn from that—sometimes about poetry, often I learn about me. I’m realist to the core, but I tried. This poem is a weak-bunt attempt and might be more weird than surreal.

I was supposed to pick words from a list and write questions. I did. Then, for each question, I was to write a one-line (image/surreal) answer. Finally, I was to place all the answers, without the questions, on a new page and make a poem of just the answers. I did that, too.

Words I picked: thunder, generator, river, artillery, cowbird, quahog, and song. I did not use every word, directly or explicitly, in the poem.

Click on the napo button to link up with the page and read about features, resources, prompts, and to read poems by other participants.

The Question to the Answer

When he saw her, he was thunderstruck.
She wasn’t. Thus, rain.

Generators take over worlds
by growing resentments in simple expectations.

Rivers replenish, carry, produce, flood, and feed.
Women, too. So yeah.

Heavy birds with bullets and blivits
—Boom-boom!

White members of the blackbird family watch
as catbirds sit and
the shitbirds go –
somewhere leaves are falling.

If you’re hungry
do that sort of thing
when nobody’s watching.
Just clam up.

Old is forever but
not young time,
so sleep well.
That’s the way I’ve always heard it looked to be.

Look both ways when searching for answers.
Find your tribe but mind the gaps as you live into the questions.

NaPoWriMo April 2022 (Day 30)

Click for prompt page and more poems.

My final 2022 NaPoWriMo challenge was to write a cento. This is a poem made up of lines taken from other poems. For my cento, I took lines from various poems in Donkey Gospel and What Narcissism Means to Me, both books of poems by Tony Hoagland.

Heavy Humor

We were drinking beer with the sound off
Greg said that things were better in the sixties
when I was pale and scrawny

and we soar up into the summer stars
but I admit that in the dark
(where a whole life can be mistaken) cavern of that bar

where men throw harpoons at something
costly, beautiful, but secret
jockstraps flew across the steamy

rickshaws gliding through the palace gates,
an act of cruelty which we both understood
the dreams rising from the sleep of children

far out from the coastline of America
a ten-foot sign says, WE WILL NEVER FORGET.
which makes us wonder if Time loves Memory back.

Look both ways (forward to May, back at April) and wonder.
Mind the gaps for those chores left undone.

NaPoWriMo April 2022 (Day 28)

Click for more.

Today’s prompt was to write a concrete poem. I wanted to do all 30 prompts.

What I did instead was intended to be a black out poem in lieu of the prompt, I’ve done concretes before. Not today.

I decided that rather than black out unused text to create the poem, I would extract the lines from the first few paragraphs of a longer story. If I had more time, I might have attempted some art to overlay the blacked-out area.

If I included the entire narrative, it would have been too long with entire paragraphs blacked out. So, I extracted the parts/words/sections that made up the poem.

I selected the first few paragraphs from the titled section, “On the Rainy River” from the book, The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien © (published in 1990 by Houghton Mifflin).

Drafted

one story I’ve never told,
it would only cause embarrassment,
a confession…
makes me squirm,
I’ve had to live with it, feeling the shame,
it’s a hard story to tell.

if evil were evil enough, if good were good enough
I would simply tap a secret reservoir of courage…
Courage, comes in finite quantities,
it offered hope and grace to the repetitive coward.

I was drafted to fight a war I hated.
(You can’t fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can’t make them undead.)
…I assumed that the problems of killing and dying did not fall within my special province…

The draft notice arrived on June 17, 1968.
I was too good for this war.
Too smart, too compassionate, too everything.
I was above it. A mistake, maybe…I was no soldier.

Look both ways for reasons why and why not.
Mind the gaps. That’s where the booby traps hide.

NaPoWriMo April 2022 (Day 27)

Click for prompt and more poems.

Today, I was to write a duplex poem, a variation on the 14-line sonnet form (also echoes ghazal and blues) developed by Jericho Brown. While I did not make the last line the same as the first, I think it still fits the form near enough.

Look Both Ways

In my seventh decade I can sense
How the shortened horizon stimulates me.

As near horizons power my desire
I feel impatient and curious.

Curious about much, impatient to learn
As my memory seeks its own beginning.

Like flashing movie trailers of memory
I feel a revival of haste when I see

Time is not long, and my need is urgent.
Reality has broken though my dreams

And my dreams bow to stark reality.
From this end I see better my beginning,

My story told from beginning till now.
My seventh decade has finally arrived.

Look both ways regardless of how near or far the horizon is.
Mind the gaps because memory is tricky business.

NaPoWriMo April 2022 (Day 26)

Click the NaPo button above to open today’s prompt page with links to more poems.

For my twenty-sixth daily, prompted, voluntary assignment, today I was challenged to write a poem that contains at least one epic simile. These (Homeric) similes extend and develop over multiple lines with decorative elements that emphasize the dramatic nature of the subject. As suggested, I chose to write a complete poem as one long epic simile theme (salted with some metaphor) to carry the poem.

Flying Like Dragons

Like unleashed frightening awesomeness,
like giant thundering flying dragons with
massive wings lifting us skyward, roaring, breathing fire;
my brain blends with this pestilent machine, as if I’m guiding
an iron plague with deafening noise to wreak death,
to pour vengeance down upon their wrongs, a bane
to my enemies, a scourge of fire-for-fire. Flying
at invisible heights, with a sharp stinging tail, breathing
radiation into electrons, as my stealthy flying monster
seeks annihilation of the unjust.

Like a beast, it sees over great distances,
it smells its enemies in total darkness; then skillfully, silently
we approach as offensive defenders with hidden talons;
without emotion or fear, as if by kismet we destroy our prey
with automatic, irreversible, unmerciful curses.

Look both ways to see what is nearby but accept the limits of sensory perception.
Mind the gaps and trust your dragon’s instruments.

NaPoWriMo April 2022 (Day 24)

Just click on this button for the prompt page and more poems.

For the final Sunday and to begin the last week of National Poetry Month, I’ve been egged on to the sunny task of writing a poem that describes using hard-boiled simile. The prompt suggested similes such as those used in detective stories featuring a tough unsentimental protagonist with a matter-of-fact attitude towards violence. I slipped in some horror genre.

The moon that night reflected light outlining everything and everyone with tarnished silver lines and a grayish tint covering, like the lining of an old vampire’s coffin. Our faces were puffed and molted like poisoned mushrooms on stems growing out of our jackets. The tree we hung him from looked like a dragon’s skull with dead, dried bones — fingers and hands protruding in all directions. It was as bleak and hopeless as a baby’s funeral. The smell was as if standing in an old open crypt exuding the musty odors of long dead flesh. Gravediggers’ shovels made rhythmic sounds cutting earth like piercing chunks of lead striking burned ashes of dead bodies. No one made another sound. Each wondered if we had killed him dead enough, or would he rise again like the devil’s undead corruption? It was our common thought, a fear that united our cause but shadowed our minds like a haunting nightmare’s gloom. We were men, but that night we were like the evil undead lamenting a hopeless mantle of some human hell.

Look both ways when identifying good and evil.
Each defines the other by its absence, yet the absence of one makes the other incomparable.
Mind the gaps when laying blame. Nothing is perfect.

NaPoWriMo April 2022 (Day 23)

Click the image for the prompt page and links to more poems for day 23.

 

Today, I was supposed to write a poem in the style of Kay Ryan, whose poems tend to be short and snappy – with a lot of rhyme and sound play, yet with a deceptive simplicity about them, like proverbs or aphorisms. I missed with the rhyme, but I ran out of time.

Make It Count

Beeves to the
cowboys were like
coal to the miner,
cargo to the trucker,
or jewels
to the jeweler.
Pilferage
for a price.
Unlike the horse,
pickaxe, truck,
or tweezers;
one’s identity
rests upon the
tools of the trade,
neither the deal
nor the gift
of the dollar
are we.

Look both ways at process and product.
Mind the gaps between important and precious.

NaPoWriMo April 2022 (Day 22)

Click this image to open today’s prompt page with links to more poems.

Today’s one-thirtieth of NaPo prompts challenged me to write a poem that uses repetition. I may repeat a sound, word, phrase, image, or any combination. I chose a name. (Note: published one day late because someone forgot to click on publish.)

When Nothing Else Can

Maybe Bukowski was right.
We are strange, we of the people.
Is someone’s world better
when we’re not in it?
Bukowski’s is gone.

Bukowski had a point
about hate’s self-sufficiency,
better to not care at all if love
needs so much help. Gratuitous
masturbation of the psyche
is all about Bukowski.

Bukowski was right when he said,
the world is full of boring, identical,
mindless people. They run from the
rain but revel in tubs of bubbles and water.
Where’s the glory here? said Bukowski.

Bukowski didn’t tell me to find what I love
and let it kill me, but I blame it on Bukowski anyway.
There is a loneliness in this world, wrote Bukowski.
Just drink more beer, more and more beer, now
that’s really Bukowski!

I think Bukowski was right when Hank said that
sissies have hard lives. And most important for me,
Bukowski said, nothing can save you except writing,
and equally important, a poem knows when to stop.
I think what Bukowski said is nuts, but also too true,
so it stops, but this is not the end of this Bukowski bit.

Look both ways when sampling the sweet and the sour.
Mind the gaps for clues of generations.