Happy April 1, the first day of National Poetry Month, and for those who participate, National Poetry WRITING Month, or NaPoWriMo for short. I find myself in a little bit of a pickle. If you’ve been reading my almost daily work here on the blog, you will know that I am writing poem-like-things about each artist in my record collection as I go through the challenge of listening to almost every album I own, from A to Z. I started in October of 2025, have been in the habit of listening to records almost every day, and composing these long skinny essays that kind of look like poems. Today, I conclude the letter H with an Irish singer-songwriter named Hosier. But here’s the pickle. I want to be writing some poetry during the month of April that does not have to be about music, while at the same time, continuing to make progress on the listening/writing challenge. I would really like to proceed by writing and publishing here two things every day, a poem-like-thing about music, and an “actual” poem about any other thing that occurs, possibly inspired by the daily prompts at NaPoWriMo.net. All this is just to say that I will try to post twice a day–with the understanding that there may be days when that is just not in the cards.
So here is my first effort at a poem for NaPoWriMo 2026. It follows the prompt on the website that asks us to write a tanka. A tanka is a poem a lot like a haiku, only two lines longer. And, like the haiku, one must count syllables in this pattern: 5, 7, 5, 7, 7. Enjoy.
Tanka on April 1st, 2026
We interrupt this
regularly scheduled first
day of National
Poetry Month to show you
an unboxing video.
michael jarmer 