NaPoWriMo #30: Not With a Bang but a Whimper

So - April 30 and I am really, really tired. Not so much due to the effort of writing a poem a day, but due to all the other stuff that I have been fitting the poetry writing around.

The April 29 prompt at Readwritepoem (which is April 30 here), was to be inspired by newspaper headlines. So, I looked at our local newspaper and found the headlines very uninspiring. So I went online to New Scientist instead - I have a subscription - and at least I got to catch up with some reading, something I've done little of this month. I jotted down quite a few of the headlines, and just strung some together, more or less, with a very small number of additional words of my own, to come up with this bit of nonsense. Given enough time to collect more headlines, and some more thought, the idea may even have possibilities - there are some pretty strange headlines there.

Not my favourite of the month, but I didn't want to stop one day short of the end.

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NaPoWriMo #29

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The prompt at Readwritepoem was Intuition. This poem may or may not be on prompt - it is something that came to me in an intuitive way as I was arriving home from work.

NaPoWriMo #28: Acrostics

At Readwritepoem, Carolee asked us to write an acrostic poem. I'm not a big fan of acrostics - they are the sort of thing that many teachers here seem to have children do in school, always using the letters of their name, and using each letter to start a line describing themselves eg "good friend of James", or "fast runner" etc. I find them indescribably dull.

The problem I have with acrostics is that I always feel that the poem itself has to describe the word that is used to provide the initial letters of the lines. Whatever word I could think of seemed rather limiting, until I thought of "emporium" - one of the two words I didn't use from the Day 22 Wordle prompt (my own prompt).

So, here it is - I doubt I'll bother to do anything with this when the month is out, but at least I haven't missed a day yet.

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NaPoWriMo #27: Scraps from my Notebook

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NaPoWriMo #26: Overheard Conversations

Today I used the Readwritepoem prompt which was to take the first thing said to me after reading the prompt and use it to spark a poem. Except that I was at the computer, and when I did later join the rest of the family for dinner, I forgot to note the conversation. When I remembered, the first two things that I noted were "It's a post-extinction burst" (a psychology term that the speaker later admitted was slightly mangled) and "What shall I do with my hair?" References to both these phrases turn up in the last stanza.

The form of this poem owes something to the ghazal, although once again I have taken it rather loosely.

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NaPoWriMo #25: A Sort of Villanelle

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The prompt was to take a phrase from the Phrase Finder website and use it to spark a poem. The quote I used is in italics at the head of the poem. This comes apparently from Shakespeare's Henry VIII and is alluded to on Keats's tombstone (which in turn is alluded to by me). Inspired by Joseph, I decided to attempt a villanelle, though I am one stanza short, and I was pretty free with the repeated lines, altering them so much that the repetition consists mostly of the final word.

Nevertheless, I find trying to write in form absorbing - a bit like crossword puzzles or sudoku - even if I'm not often satisfied with the results.

NaPoWriMo #24: Odd Companions

Sage Cohen's prompt at Readwritepoem was to imagine someone in a place they wouldn't normally be, and use that to write a poem.

At this stage of the month, I am feeling all poemed out. And also, I have a lot of magazines to send out this weekend, and before I get together with the other helpers, I need to prepare a bunch of mailing labels, renewal notices etc., which is keeping me pretty busy. However, when inspiration totally fails to strike, I find the best thing to do is stick with the prompt if possible, otherwise I spend all my time sifting through and discarding too many different ideas.

So, I imagined the ringmaster of a circus in Parliament. Actually, it strikes me that Parliament is pretty much a three-ringed circus anyway, so perhaps this is not as unlikely as it seems - at least metaphorically.

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NaPoWriMo #23

The latest prompt at Readwritepoem was a Wordle - it was my turn to contribute a prompt and I had been careful to do my best to "forget" the words I supplied, so that they would come to me fresh.

Given that they included words like "fierce" and "flinch" I thought my poem would tend towards the dark side. However today I attended my sons graduation, and much to my surprise I realised I could write a poem about the event and work nearly all of the words into it. (I missed out "emporium" - although I did use "auditorium" which sounds similar to me - and "dizzy". Perhaps I could have worked those in too, but I didn't want to force it).

As you will see, it is autumn here.

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(Words I used: squall, fierce, crow, pepper, rust, saffron, reverberate, flinch, tendril, tomorrow)

NaPoWriMo #22: Perfectly Flawed

For the prompt at Readwritepoem

(This piece doesn't have a title yet. It's a little bit of word play incorporating grammar jokes and science jokes among others, and also the fact that averaging out the features of human faces produces a composite that is judged more beautiful than any of the individual faces.)

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NaPoWriMo #21: Heroes

The muse was a bit slow in visiting me today, but late in the afternoon inspiration struck. The prompt was heroes. This poem is about three special women, and others of their kind. I'm really tired, and I suspect it doesn't do them justice, but it's a start.

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NaPoWriMo #20

I didn't use a prompt for this one as none of those on offer really inspired me. I took part in a pub quiz last night - a popular outing here in New Zealand - so I managed to come up with this, which I think may be promising with a little editing.

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NaPoWriMo #19: Cats

For the Day 18 prompt at Readwritepoem. (Yes, it looks as if I post my responses a day late. That's because of the time difference, when the Day 18 prompt went up, it was close to my bedtime for the 18th, even though it was probably around 12.01 a.m. in the US, so I use it for the following day.)

(I'm not sure what the title of this one is yet)

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OK, I'm writing this in a great hurry, although I have been thinking it over for a few hours, because I've been at work all day, then the supermarket, and am shortly going out for the evening. Usually I write on my coffee break but with a new staff member to show the ropes, I felt obliged to be sociable.

I'm not much of a cat person, but my daughter has a rather intelligent cat (actually, I think the cat has my daughter), and some of the details came from there.

I've been reading the poems of Linda Gregg and was struck by how short and simple many of her sentences were. I tend to write long complicated musings with lots of subordinate clauses, so I tried to simplify the grammar in this one.

NaPoWriMo #18: Elemental

For Neil's prompt at readwritepoem

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NaPoWriMo #17

Nothing like a Saturday with supposedly plenty of free time to write, to induce a bout of extreme procrastination. However, if I'm going to reach the end of the month with a poem a day, I have to get something up quickly, so here goes: (this one is for the readwritepoem prompt to write something inspired by "smells" - in my case, pine)

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Phew! Done, more or less, and it's not midnight yet. Only thirteen days to go. (And then it will be time for some serious revision)>

NaPoWriMo #16: A Song

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And yes, the rhyme breaks down a bit in the last stanza, plus there is a Jean missing so I need to add another stanza.
The prompt at readwritepoem was to look at poems that had not quite made it, find a line that called to us and to hum it - turn it into a stanza of a song, and add two more stanzas. But of course this poem really needed more than three stanzas.

The four Jeans are real, they are my great aunt and her three cousins. Traditional Scottish naming patterns means that four Jeans is not excessive. My great uncle David was one of six cousins named David - all the eldest sons named for their paternal grandfather. (Correction - the son of his aunt was the second son. The eldest son was named for the paternal grandfather, and second son for the maternal grandfather. With daughters, the order switched so that the eldest was named for her maternal grandmother and second for the paternal grandmother). Great Uncle David could have been one of ten cousins named David, except that his mother's sister had only daughters, and three of her brothers died before reaching adulthood. But that was just the cousins on his mother's side - he had another two cousins named David on his father's side. My own grandfather John had several cousins named John, and there were also quite a few Thomases, but not as many as the Davids.

In looking over my poems, I found the line "there were four cousins each named Jean" and it seemed made for this prompt.

NaPoWriMo #15

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I ignored the Readwritepoem prompt today, feeling it was a bit too challenging for the time available, and used one of the ideas I have queued in my head instead. I hope that I don't run out before the end of the month.

NaPoWriMo #14

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For Sarah's prompt at readwritepoem.

The first line (which was given) fitted quite well with some lines I had already jotted down. I think it's still a little incoherent - May is going to be a big revision month!

NaPoWriMo #13: Secret Codes

This one is written for Carolee's prompt, which was to think of a message, attribute it to an unlikely object, repeat at will and then use one of the lines to start a poem. Rather than just using one, I have used a number of different objects in my poem. Although it's autumn here, the poem ended up with a spring feel to it.
As always, this is a rough draft - it feels as if it needs a little more at the end, but I like the way it's heading.

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NaPoWriMo: Day 12

Today I went back to using the prompts supplied at Readwritepoem. The prompt, supplied by Angie Werren, was The One You Didn't Choose. Among the rules given were to choose something concrete - so, a thing, rahter than a path not taken. I was thinking of ignoring the prompt again and using another from my store of poem ideas, but then I remembered a travel incident and came up with the following (dashed down in my coffee break, so, it needs a little revision):

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NaPoWriMo #11

I suspect there are two sorts of poetry prompts: those that work as a test of ingenuity, which make you feel as if somehow you don't quite measure up, and those that work as an inspiration, drawing out all sorts of ideas that you didn't know you had. Any one prompt of course, can work as either sort for different people - or even for the same person on different occasions.

I've been feeling less inspired by most of the prompts provided at various sites for NaPoWriMo this year, and more as if my ingenuity is being tested. So I've decided instead to work on some of the other poems that are queuing up in my head to be written. Here's today's effort:

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