NaPoWriMo 2010 has officially begun!
Good luck to all those taking part. Feel free to put a link to your daily efforts in the comments section of this post.
For those of you who feel the need for a writing prompt to get you started, here’s one of my favourites. Bon voyage!
A Journey into Morning.
based on Cleopatra Mathis’s exercise ‘An Emotional Landscape’,
from Behn and Twitchell’s The Practice of Poetry.
- Select a poem from the list below that you don’t know – ideally by a poet you’ve not encountered before. (Or use an audio file from somewhere else – up to you.)
- Click the link – this will take you to another page with an audio recording of the poem. Don’t read, just listen. And a second time.
- Close the window, and write down all the words, phrases and images that you remember from it.
- Spend five to ten minutes freewriting about the things you’ve written down – anything they call to mind, anything that feels related. You’re moving away from the original poem now.
- One more thing – from the time the pen touches paper until the end of your freewriting time you may not stop, edit, correct, erase or scribble out anything: just write.
- Now take what you’ve written and use it to construct a poem about being in a strange city – real or imagined – just before sunrise.
- Go to it!
A Dark Feathered Art 
Read the NapoWriMo 2010 page and other goodies at http://www.gregoconnell.com.
Sexy Isles
New Zealand:
The Sexy Isles
a fleshy peninsula here
a broad smile of beach there
muscular mountains
taking the field
rivers bending & stretching
in full view of the hormone-driven sun
coastal trees flaunting their limbs
waves that can barely contain themselves
these spunky isles so eye-catching
as to turn the head of the wind.
Greg O’Connell © 2010
Hi Greg,
lots of fun! Keep it going!
Nice prompt, but it doesn’t work so well for a poem constructed in my head on the walk to work which is how I have to work most days in order to produce a poem a day for a month. I may use it later in the month though. (I have my first poem up.)
Feel free to use, abuse, confuse or lose the prompt, as you see fit.
But two years in a row, Catherine? Mad woman!
Thanks Joanne – great encouragement for those of us launching ourselves into the NaPoWriMo challenge. I have written my first poem for the challenge. You can find it here – http://andbottlewasher.blogspot.com/
(I didn’t see your wonderful prompts until after I’d written it though). Maybe I can use the prompt for another poem.
Glad you like the prompt – it’s one I use a lot (as my students will tell you …)
Have tried to leave comments on your poems a couple of times now, but (as with Marisa) I keep getting an error message when I try to submit my comments. (Maybe Blogger remembers that I used to be with them, but left?)
Greg already found it..Mr Sleuth 🙂 My blog: http://poetrybymarisa.blogspot.com/
Gorgeous Marisa. Have tried to leave comments, but keep getting error messages instead. Never mind. Just know that I am watching you … 😉