Happy National Poetry Month! Beginning tomorrow (this is no April Fool’s joke), I will attempt for the second year in a row to participate in the NaPoWriMo challenge of writing a poem a day for the entire month and publishing each poem here on the blog site. I promise, no cheating; I will not be publishing poems I have written earlier, but only those poems I write on each day of April, 2014–the good, the bad, and the ugly.
I remember last year the challenge of squeezing out a poem every day, and squeezing out the time somewhere to get it done, and the rewards and pitfalls of writing fast, off the cuff, without time for revision, sometimes from prompts, sometimes from the mundane events of the day, and often inspired by what I was doing in my classroom. That last bit will prove a challenge this year; in both of the classes I teach we are studying the same material I looked at last year with a different group of students: the Chinese poets of the T’ang Dynasty, and American Romanticism. So, I’ve already got a whole series of poems about these things! Is there more to say? I’m sure I’ll find something! It is a cool coincidence (I swear I didn’t plan it this way) that in both my IB English class and my American Literature class we are studying poetry during National Poetry Month.
If you would like to help with the cause, you can. Feel free to send me suggestions for poems–subject matter, specific prompts, stylistic guidance, particular forms, special challenges. I’m up for almost anything, provided it’s not ridiculously hard, e.g. write an epic in 300 numbered quatrains about the Spanish American war entirely in iambic pentameter. You could also help by reading, commenting, and following, which I appreciate immensely. Otherwise, wish me luck. I hope you can check it out, if not every day, every once in a while.
Meanwhile, here’s a couple of cool related items of interest:
A great resource for poetry: http://www.poets.org
A place to play for free books of poetry: http://ofkells.blogspot.com
A place to learn about and play the poem a day for a month game: http://www.napowrimo.net
Cheers!
michael jarmer 
I write something, not sure what you call it but you can check it out if you like, “Blackest Black” and “Yellow Roses”. First grade kinda stuff. But stuff all the same.
Good Luck with your challenge.
Teela
Thanks, Teela!