NaPoWriMo 2024: More, More, More, He Cried. With A Rebel Yell.

Well, that’s a nutty title–funny only for those familiar with the Billy Idol song, but appropriate for the year in the National Poetry Writing Month Extravaganza because I’m doing it again and I’m hoping to go big. Last year I vowed to write a sonnet every day for 30 days and I was, lo and behold, successful. I don’t know how successful the sonnets were, but, by god, there were 30 of them. So many, in fact, that I put together a chapbook for submission, a short version and a complete, unexpurgated version, and I did a fair amount of submitting to various chapbook competitions and publishers. No takers, yet, but I continue to feel pretty good about those poems. So good, that I thought maybe this year I could go for a complete book. And so I make the non-binding vow to once again attempt to write 30 sonnets in a month, and in the course of that endeavor, end up with enough sonnets for a “real” book of poetry, about 48 to 60 pages. But one of the things I missed last year was the practice of, more often than not, responding to the prompt of the day on the NaPoWriMo website. As many of those prompts were structurally specific, I could not always apply them to the composition of a sonnet. I felt a little bit like I was missing out on some of the reindeer games-which is ridiculous, obviously, because the real purpose of NaPoWriMo and NaNoWriMo and every other WriMo out there is simply to get people writing. Nevertheless, I want to play! So, for the 2024 year of NaPoWriMo, I make the non-binding pledge to write two, that’s right, you heard right, two poems a day, one of which must be a sonnet. T-minus one more day before we begin. Stay tuned. Wish me luck–or something.