Greetings! Happy April Fool’s day. Far be it from me, though, to play a prank on you, dear reader. So, I begin today holding true to the self-challenge of writing 30 sonnets in 30 days in celebration of National Poetry Writing Month. For this first one, I have decided to be faithful to the ShakespeareanContinue reading “#439: The poet Larry Levis said or wrote . . .”
Tag Archives: NaPoWriMo
NaPoWriMo 2023: A Sonnet Festival
Don’t ask me why, not just yet anyway, but I am moved this year as I anticipate the first day of National Poetry Writing Month to veer away from my annual practice–not by skipping it, or by doing something different, like working on prose, for example, like some fiction writers do in the fourth monthContinue reading “NaPoWriMo 2023: A Sonnet Festival”
#438: Human Nature (a cento on April 30, 2022)
As it is the very last day of April, hence, the last day of National Poetry Writing Month, I kind of wanted to go out with a bang–to do something ambitious. That’s the worst way, FYI, to begin a writing thing. “Today I am going to do something great” is a path to abject failure.Continue reading “#438: Human Nature (a cento on April 30, 2022)”
#437: Gifts and Curses (the penultimate poem, April 29, 2022)
“We are disabused of original giftedness in the first half of our lives. Then — if we are awake, aware, and able to admit our loss — we spend the second half trying to recover and reclaim the gift we once possessed.” Parker J. Palmer Gifts and Curses Parker J. Palmer asks us to reclaimContinue reading “#437: Gifts and Curses (the penultimate poem, April 29, 2022)”
#436: One More (I Promise, the Last) Metaphor Dice Poem on April 28, 2022
poetry. sacrosanct. midwife. Thirty days has the cruelest monthand thirty days in a row for nine yearsduring April I have written a poem.I try and mostly fail to communicateto my students the worth of such a thing, poetry in and of itself, yes, let alonewriting one every day for thirty days, but they don’t quiteContinue reading “#436: One More (I Promise, the Last) Metaphor Dice Poem on April 28, 2022”
#435: A Metaphor Dice Concrete Poem for April 28, 2022
I intended this month to write a poem inspired by Taylor Mali’s metaphor dice that would be suitable for submission to The Golden Die Contest, the deadline for which is two days away. This isn’t it. This isn’t the one, neither is the earlier one I wrote this month. But I’ve been sitting on thisContinue reading “#435: A Metaphor Dice Concrete Poem for April 28, 2022”
#434: Buying a Shed (a duplex on April 27, 2022)
Here’s a poem called a duplex, a sonnet variation developed by the poet Jericho Brown. It’s 14 lines long–and it follows a pattern of partial repetition in the first line of each stanza of the second line of the preceding stanza. Except that the first line and the last line must be the same. AContinue reading “#434: Buying a Shed (a duplex on April 27, 2022)”
#433: An Epic Simile for the School Year (a poem on April 26, 2022)
This school year is flying bylike a bullet train at lightning speed,its passengers securely buckled in, or, even, despite incrediblerates of acceleration, move freely inside the cabins as if they werestanding stock still, sipping theirdrinks, forking their hors d’oeuvres,oblivious to the fact that they are moving at 200 miles per hour.I think, but I amContinue reading “#433: An Epic Simile for the School Year (a poem on April 26, 2022)”
#432: Teaching Nightmares (a poem on April 25, 2022)
You would thinkthat after 33 yearsof classroom teaching,one would cease to have nightmaresabout teaching.You would be wrong to think that. Sometimes they comerandomly here and there, once or twice a year, and mostly they’re easyto shake off. But sometimesthey come, spawned, one imagines, by a real-lifeclassroom nightmarethat becomes obsessive, on which the educator-brain becomes stuck,asContinue reading “#432: Teaching Nightmares (a poem on April 25, 2022)”
#431: Don’t Want To Write a Poem on April 24, 2022
It took 24 days,but finally, I don’t wantto write a poem. It’s not unusualin a run of 30 daysduring the Aprilmonth to have such a feelingsooner or later. Nothing appeals: the prompt doesn’t interest, the mindis tired, or, in mycase, unsettled, distracted; What ISunusual, is the intensity of my resistance today. I just don’t wanttoContinue reading “#431: Don’t Want To Write a Poem on April 24, 2022”
michael jarmer 