Raining
Pelted windows
Gurgling down the drainpipes
Fast flowing rivers in gutters
Flooded gardens
Water pooling in the rosebeds
Settling on the bin lids
Suburbia
On sea.
We've had a few hard downpours lately...
Hope is in the air
Confidence building daily
A shot in the arm
My wife and I both had our first vaccine doses this week. I had AZ whilst my wife had Pfizer today. I had a day or so of fever and a general fluey feeling but supposedly Pfizer has few side affects. It remains to be seen what difference the vaccines actually make against covid, but we will find that out in time I'm sure.
It's hard not to feel the general vibe of confidence in the air though I'm not sure how much the warmer weather has to do with that. I took the baby out for a walk at the weekend and was stopped a couple of times for a chat by some of our elderly neighbours. Their attitudes were almost childlike and they seemed thrilled to be outside and interacting with others. I can understand where they are coming from.
I do hope that this is not a false dawn, and that even though future outbreaks are likely, they remain short and flat.
Also added are a couple of photo's from my walk at the weekend, from Frank's Park, near Belvedere.
I've been watching the closing stages of the World Snooker, and its marvellous to see crowds back in to watch. I don't think I realised, until now, how much a difference it can make to an atmosphere, even watching it on TV. It would be lovely to think that this marked the beginning of things getting back to normal, at least in some capacity. We shall see. But greatest of all is to see the man who always sits in the corner, at the front, is back in his seat again after a year away.
And now for our final (still optional!) prompt. Today’s prompt is based on a prompt written by Jacqueline Saphra, and featured in this group of prompts published back in 2015 by The Poetry Society of the U.K. This prompt challenges you to write a poem in the form of a series of directions describing how a person should get to a particular place. It could be a real place, like your local park, or an imaginary or unreal place, like “the bottom of your heart,” or “where missing socks go.” Fill your poem with sensory details, and make them as wild or intimate as you like.
It was tricky really finding the inspiration within one day for this and I've probably ended up with something a little generic at least in terms of concept, but I hope the rhythm is interesting. I apologise for the length:
Today's prompt:
And now, for our prompt (optional, as always). This one is called “in the window.” Imagine a window looking into a place or onto a particular scene. It could be your childhood neighbor’s workshop, or a window looking into an alien spaceship. Maybe a window looking into a witch’s gingerbread cottage, or Lord Nelson’s cabin aboard the H.M.S. Victory. What do you see? What’s going on?
Having read about Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins death last night, this was the first thing that popped into my head when I read this prompt, and it made me think of the view of the Earth from the window of the spaceship. I also recently watched the film Stowaway which also has scenes of Earth seen from space, providing a bit more inspiration:
The website was all back to normal today. So here's the prompt:
Our prompt today (optional, as always), is to write a poem that poses a series of questions. The questions could be a mix of the serious (“What is the meaning of life?”) and humorous (“What’s the deal with cats knocking things off tables?”), the interruptive (“Could you repeat that?”) and the conversational (“Are those peanuts? Can I have some?”). You can choose to answer them – or just let the questions keep building up, creating a poem that asks the reader to come up with their own answer(s).
As a parent of young children it was easy to come up with some questions for this poem, as the whole day seems to be an exercise in fielding questions. Especially one's related to food:
The NaPoWriMo website has been down and the Day 27 prompt hasn't updated properly as far as I can tell, so I'm having to go by what's on Twitter:
...get in touch with some minor, haunting feelings
With little to go on I've interpreted this as best I can, so here's today's poem and I hope it provides a haunting feeling:
Today's prompt:
And now for our (optional) prompt. Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a parody. Besides being fun, writing parodies can be a great way to hone your poetic skills – particularly your sense of rhyme and sound, as you try to mimic the form of an existing poem while changing the content. Just find a poem – or a song – that has always annoyed you, and write an altered, silly version of it. Or, alternatively, find a poem with a very particular rhyme scheme or form, and use that scheme/form as the basis for a poem that mocks something else.
If you’d like to get some inspiration, you might consider some of the poems that Lewis Carroll included in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which parody the moralistic verse of Isaac Watts. For example, “The Crocodile” is a send-up of Watts’ “How Doth the Little Busy Bee,” while “Tis the Voice of the Lobster” is a parody of Watts’ poem “The Sluggard.” Or, for a briefer and more whimsical poem, consider “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Bat,” which is a parody of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”
I have to admit that inspiration came very quickly for me today. I'm not sure it's parody, I think it's more satire, but you have to go with what's in your head. I taken as my basis the song Waking Up by Elastica, which is a song I really like, and changed the lyrics to concern Boris Johnson and all the latest sleaze that's been going on:
Today's prompt:
Our prompt for today (optional, as always) is to write an “occasional” poem. What’s that? Well, it’s a poem suited to, or written for, a particular occasion. This past January, lots of people who usually don’t encounter poetry got a dose when Amanda Gorman read a poem at President Biden’s inauguration. And then she followed it up with a poem at the Superbowl (not traditionally an event associated with verse!) The poem you write can be for an occasion in the past or the future, one important to you and your family (a wedding, a birth) or for an occasion in the public eye (the Olympics, perhaps?).
On the face of it this seemed like quite a good prompt but I really struggled finding a subject that I knew much about or even inspired me. I've written poems like these before, but I like to read up on things and churn a few ideas in my head for a few days, so writing something in a day for this was hard. Also the kids have been pretty hard work today too, so most of my mental energy has been focused on that.
Anyway, I managed to write a poem in the end, based around the Swedish Midsummer celebration. It's kind of important to me as it's when I first met my wife to be, not that the poem really reflects any of that however:
The prompt:
Today’s (optional) prompt is a fun one. Find a factual article about an animal. A Wikipedia article or something from National Geographic would do nicely – just make sure it repeats the name of the animal a lot. Now, go back through the text and replace the name of the animal with something else – it could be something very abstract, like “sadness” or “my heart,” or something more concrete, like “the streetlight outside my window that won’t stop blinking.” You should wind up with some very funny and even touching combinations, which you can then rearrange and edit into a poem.
To be honest I struggled following the meaning of today's prompt, so I've gone a little off prompt, although I have taken on the animal theme. Since last Autumn we've been seeing squirrels go back and forth through our garden, especially after the girls left some acorns out for them, plus it seems that one of our neighbours has been leaving out peanuts too. All three kids love to see the squirrels and watch them as they dart about. So my poem has been inspired by them:
Today's prompt:
And now for today’s prompt (optional, as always). One thing that makes me want to write poetry is reading poetry. Sometimes, reading another poet’s work gives me an idea or image. And sometimes I read a poem that I want to formally respond to – whether because I agree with it, or disagree with it, or just because it starts a conversation in my head that I want to continue on the page.
Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem that responds, in some way, to another. This could be as simple as using a line or image from another poem as a jumping-off point, or it could be a more formal poetic response to the argument or ideas raised in another poem. You might use a favorite (or least favorite poem) as the source for your response. And if you’re having trouble finding a poem to respond to, here are a few that might help you generate ideas: “This World is Not Conclusion,” by Peter Gizzi, “In That Other Fantasy Where We Live Forever,” by Wanda Coleman, “La Chalupa, the Boat,” by Jean Valentine, or “Aubade: Some Peaches, After Storm,” by Carl Phillips.
This prompt troubled me to begin with. There are so many good poems and I don't think I really have a favourite or one that really speaks to me, at least I have to be in the right mood for the right poem. So I decided to take a different tack, and came here for the Poetry Foundation poem of the day to see if it could give me inspiration. And it did. It was a poem called Earth Day by Jane Yolen. Here is my response poem:
The prompt:
Finally, here’s our (optional) prompt for the day. It comes to us from Poets & Writers’ “The Time is Now” column, which provides weekly poetry prompts, as well as weekly fiction and creative non-fiction prompts.
In a prompt originally posted this past February, Poets & Writers directs us to an essay by Urvi Kumbhat on the use of mangoes in diasporic literature. As she discusses in her essay, mangoes have become a sort of shorthand or symbol that writers use to invoke an entire culture, country, or way of life. This has the beauty of simplicity – but also the problems of simplicity, in that you really can’t sum up a culture in a single image or item, and you risk cliché if you try.
But at the same time, the “staying power” of the mango underscores the strength of metonymy in poetry. Following Poets & Writers’ prompt, today I’d like to challenge you to write a poem that invokes a specific object as a symbol of a particular time, era, or place.
I struggled with the idea of this prompt, in the sense that I felt uneasy about the ideas that objects end up just standing for a whole idea or place. I'm not sure I think too much in this way (although I could be wrong), and I just don't have enough time to think too deeply.
Instead I took it in a different way, and tried to think of something that evoked a very clear memory of place for me personally. When I went to University, we had a cinema on site which showed fairly up to date films. I used to go at least a couple of times a week usually. It was a way to get out and be around people without actually having to be with people. I ended up with a kind of ritual of always buying a cornetto before a film, that I could eat to pass the time before the film started. Now if I see a cornetto, I think of nothing else but that little cinema:
Today's prompt:
And now for our (optional) prompt. Have you ever heard or read the nursery rhyme, “There was a man of double deed?” It’s quite creepy! A lot of its effectiveness can be traced back to how, after the first couplet, the lines all begin with the same two phrases (either “When the . . .” or “Twas like,”). The way that these phrases resolve gets more and more bizarre over the course of the poem, giving it a headlong, inevitable feeling.
Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem that, like this one, uses lines that have a repetitive set-up.
This prompt very much appealed to me. The combination of pattern and rhythm is quite playful and I enjoyed having a think about it. I've been inspired by the difficulties of getting kids to sleep:
Here's the prompt:
Our (optional) prompt for the day is to write a sijo. This is a traditional Korean poetic form. Like the haiku, it has three lines, but the lines are much longer. Typically, they are 14-16 syllables, and optimally each line will consist of two parts – like two sentences, or a sentence of two clauses divided by a comma. In terms of overall structure, a sijo functions like an abbreviated sonnet, in that the first line sets up an inquiry or discussion, the second line continues the discussion, and the third line resolves it with a “twist” or surprise. For more on the sijo, check out the primer here and a long list of examples in English, here.
I had never heard of this poem form before so it took a little thinking to get my head around it. Thankfully I've been able to have that today as the kids have gone back to school after the Easter Holidays, so there's been some peace and some thinking space. It inspired my poem:
The prompt:
And last but not least, our prompt (optional, as always). Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a humorous rant. In this poem, you may excoriate to your heart’s content all the things that get on your nerves. Perhaps it’s people who tailgate when driving, or don’t put the caps back on pens after they use them. Or the raccoons who get into your garbage cans. For inspiration, perhaps you might look to this list of Shakespearean insults. Or, for all of you who grew up on cartoons from the 1980s, perhaps this compendium of Skeletor’s Best Insults might provide some insight.
This was a prompt that sounded interesting and something I may try in the future. I have written similar type poems in the past but I kind of have to have something to specifically be angry about first. I have written about something which has frustrated me in the news this week. It's about the story of the European Super League, and I just hope that nothing comes of it. The poem is in the form of a Tanka:
Today's prompt:
And now for our (optional) daily prompt! This one comes to us from Stephanie Malley, who challenges us to write a poem based on the title of one of the chpaters from Susan G. Wooldridge’s Poemcrazy: Freeing Your Life with Words. The book’s table of contents can be viewed using Amazon’s “Look inside” feature. Will you choose “the poem squash?” or perhaps “grocery weeping” or “the blue socks”? If none of the 60 rather wonderful chapter titles here inspire you, perhaps a chapter title from a favorite book would do? For example, the photo on my personal twitter account is a shot of a chapter title from a P.G. Wodehouse novel — the chapter title being “Sensational Occurrence at a Poetry Reading.”
I found a lot of potential inspiration in this prompt. The list of chapters was varied and I attempted poems from several of them. Most that I tried did not give me a poem fast enough that I could write it in a day - they may become poems in the future, but the heading 'Snowflakes and Secrets' did. I tried not to think too much about it and just let it flow from itself. I think the result is quite interesting:
Today's prompt:
And now, our (optional) prompt. I’ve seen some fairly funny twitter conversations lately among poets who are coming to terms with the fact that they keep writing poems about the moon. For better or worse, the moon seems to exert a powerful hold on poets, as this large collection of moon-themed poems suggests. Today, I’d like to challenge you to stop fighting the moon. Lean in. Accept the moon. The moon just wants what’s best for you and your poems. So yes – write a poem that is about, or that involves, the moon.
This prompt had inspiration firing instantly, with all sorts of ideas popping around in my brain. I'm quite pleased with my poem, and I hope you enjoy it too:
The prompt:
And last but not least, our (optional) prompt. Because it’s Friday, today I’d like you to relax with the rather silly form called Skeltonic, or tumbling, verse. In this form, there’s no specific number of syllables per line, but each line should be short, and should aim to have two or three stressed syllables. And the lines should rhyme. You just rhyme the same sound until you get tired of it, and then move on to another sound.
This prompt suited me as I often write poems in this sort of style, even if I try and stick to a more regular rhyming pattern. I enjoyed this though, as it allowed me to put in more rhymes when they fitted and less when they didn't. It's my wife's birthday today, and like me she has a difficult relationship with birthday's. It always feels like you're supposed to be enjoying yourself much more than you really want to just for the sake of it being your birthday. We would rather enjoy ourselves just a little bit over a long period rather than have it all on one day. It also doesn't help that the kids get overexcited because they expect us to be as delighted as they are on their birthdays. Anyway, here is the poem:
The prompt:
And now for our prompt (optional, as always). Today’s prompt comes to us from Juan Martinez. It asks you to think about a small habit you picked up from one of your parents, and then to write a piece that explores an early memory of your parent engaged in that habit, before shifting into writing about yourself engaging in the same habit.
I struggled with this prompt at first, as I could not think of any real habits that my parents had, let alone one that I could pick up from them. It took a few hours of not thinking before I realised that something I share with my dad is the ability to come up with jokes or puns about pretty much anything and in any situation. So here's the poem:
Today's prompt:
And last but not least, our (optional) prompt for the day. Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem that delves into the meaning of your first or last name. Looking for inspiration? Take a look at this poem by Mark Wunderlich, appropriately titled “Wunderlich.”
This was a prompt I enjoyed. I have quite an unusual surname, or at least it is not common, and it is a corruption of the word 'Bezant'. This is the name given to Byzantine gold coins or to gold coloured roundels found on coats of arms, the name having been taken from the original coins.
My poem today, using this information, is much more playful with it however, and definitely not too serious. Hope you enjoy it:
The prompt:
And now, on to our (optional) prompt. Today’s prompt comes from the Instagram account of Sundress Publications, which posts a writing prompt every day, all year long. This one is short and sweet: write a poem in the form of a news article you wish would come out tomorrow.
A much more open prompt today which allows for a bit more leeway. I could have gone with easy ones like "World Peace", "End of Covid" etc, but I decided to go for something a little less serious. My eldest daughter is a massive dinosaur fan, so what would thrill her and in turn be something the rest of us would enjoy? Well, the discovery of a Stegosaurus! Enjoy:
The prompt:
Finally, our prompt (optional, as always). I’m calling this one “Past and Future.” This prompt challenges you to write a poem using at least one word/concept/idea from each of two specialty dictionaries: Lempriere’s Classical Dictionary and the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction. A hat tip to Cathy Park Hong for a tweet that pointed me to the science fiction dictionary and to Hoa Nguyen for introducing me to the Classical Dictionary.
I have to say this wasn't the most inspiring prompt for me, alongside working and dealing with kids at home for the holidays. Plus I have been feeling completely overwhelmed and stressed today, so all I can give is a little Haiku and hope for the best tomorrow:
Today's prompt:
And now for our (optional) prompt. This is a twist on a prompt offered by Kay Gabriel during a meeting she facilitated at the Poetry Project last year. Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a two-part poem, in the form of an exchange of letters. The first stanza (or part) should be in the form of a letter that you write either to yourself or to a famous fictional or historical person. The second part should be the letter you receive in response. These can be as short or long as you like, in the form of prose poems, or with line breaks – and of course, the subject matter of the letters is totally up to you.
At first this prompt struggled to get me going, but once I settled on who I might write to, then I got a bit more inspired. I couldn't really think of anyone real to write to...I'm not really one to be interested in celebrity or to have anyone as a hero, so I tried to come with someone fictional. The only character that really felt interested to me, was Buffy. So here is my letter and response from Buffy, the Vampire Slayer:
Today's prompt:
Finally, here’s our daily prompt (optional, of course!). It’s called “Junk Drawer Song,” and comes to us from the poet Hoa Nguyen.
Today's prompt:
Our (optional) prompt for the day is to write a poem in the form of a “to-do list.” The fun of this prompt is to make it the “to-do list” of an unusual person or character. For example, what’s on the Tooth Fairy’s to-do list? Or on the to-do list of Genghis Khan? Of a housefly? Your list can be a mix of extremely boring things and wild things. For example, maybe Santa Claus needs to order his elves to make 7 million animatronic Baby Yoda dolls, to have his hat dry-cleaned to get off all the soot it picked up last December, and to get his head electrician to change out the sparkplugs on Rudolph’s nose.
Well, as I sit at my desk to work I see my 1 year old constantly walking up and down and getting into mischief. So that had to be my inspiration to go with today's prompt. I quite enjoyed this one, and it made me think a lot about how much toddler's repeat their actions during the day and how they flit from one thing to another. Here's the poem:
The prompt:
And last but not least, our (optional) prompt. I call this one “Return to Spoon River,” after Edgar Lee Masters’ eminently creepy 1915 book Spoon River Anthology. The book consists of well over 100 poetic monologues, each spoken by a person buried in the cemetery of the fictional town of Spoon River, Illinois.
Today, I’d like to challenge you to read a few of the poems from Spoon River Anthology, and then write your own poem in the form of a monologue delivered by someone who is dead. Not a famous person, necessarily – perhaps a remembered acquaintance from your childhood, like the gentleman who ran the shoeshine stand, or one of your grandmother’s bingo buddies. As with Masters’ poems, the monologue doesn’t have to be a recounting of the person’s whole life, but could be a fictional remembering of some important moment, or statement of purpose or philosophy. Be as dramatic as you like – Masters’ certainly didn’t shy away from high emotion in writing his poems.
I have to say that I struggled with inspiration for this prompt as I've never really come across any older people who weren't family. And so I decided to go a different way, and have a go at the Fib poem from yesterday's prompt and being somewhat inspired by the theme cemeteries and lost voices. Enjoy:
Today's prompt:
And now, for our (optional) prompt! There are many different poetic forms. Some have specific line counts, syllable counts, stresses, rhymes, or a mix-and-match of the above. Of the poetic forms that are based on syllable counts, probably the most well-known – to English speakers, at least – is the Japanese form called the haiku. But there are many other syllable-based forms. Today, I’d like to challenge you to pick from two of them – the shadorma, and the Fib.
The shadorma is a six-line, 26-syllable poem (or a stanza – you can write a poem that is made of multiple shadorma stanzas). The syllable count by line is 3/5/3/3/7/5. So, like the haiku, the lines are relatively short. Rather poetically, the origin of the shadorma is mysterious. I’ve seen multiple online sources call it Spanish – but “shadorma” isn’t a Spanish word (Spanish doesn’t have “sh” as a letter pairing), and neither is “xadorma,” or “jadorma,” which would approximate “shadorma” in sound. But even if this form is simply the brainchild of an internet trickster who gave it an imaginary backstory, that’s no reason why you shouldn’t try your hand at it. Every form was made up by someone, sometime.
Our second syllabic form is much more forthright about its recent origins. Like the shadorma, the Fib is a six-line form. But now, the syllable count is based off the Fibonacci sequence of 1/1/2/3/5/8. You can link multiple Fibs together into a multi-stanza poem, or even start going backwards after your first six lines, with syllable counts of 8/5/3/2/1/1. Perhaps you remember the Fibonacci sequence from math or science class – or even from nature walks. Lots of things in the natural world hew to the sequence – like pinecones and flower petals. And now your poems can, too.
I have tried Fibanacci poems before and enjoyed them, so I decided on a Shadorma today as I hadn't heard of them before. I enjoyed the form, probably more than a Haiku as there is more for you to work with, so I may do some more of these in the future. The poem probably speaks for itself, so here it is:
Hand drawn map
An Easter egg hunt
Excitement
Brimming kids
Overflowing emotions
House turned upside down
Joy; Delight
At uncovered eggs
Wrapping ripped
Melting bite
Faced smudged with chocolate
A brief calm descends
