Tag Archives: NaPoWriMo

#259: Thirteen Views of Listening to A Song

I With my eyes closed, the lyrics become more vivid– like icicles in my fingers. II Bouncing up and down on a pogo stick, the drummer has all of my limbs and I have hers. III I watch that wave come up, a shimmering, a crescendo: some nonsense makes me cry a little. IV A man and a womanContinue reading “#259: Thirteen Views of Listening to A Song”

#258: Waiting for the Leaves

(after Mary Oliver) I’m sitting in the office space that adjoins my classroom while my student teacher is wrangling with a group of freshmen, and I am thinking about my oak trees. In this stark, small, white room, lit with florescent tube lights, desk littered with papers, student work to grade, a stack of booksContinue reading “#258: Waiting for the Leaves”

#257: What’s Hidden In This Poem

I have poet friends who hate poems about writing poetry and I think that’s all right, they can go ahead and hate that, but poets will continue to write poems about writing poetry until the cows come home and even after the cows come home because cows don’t give a shit, I mean they understand thatContinue reading “#257: What’s Hidden In This Poem”

#247: An Elegy for Spring Break

Goodbye to you, a week’s worth of mostly rain with a stretch of dry weather at the end, taunting us, forcing me out into the garage on Sunday night to fire up the grill. Even if I had nothing to cook, and even if it had continued to rain, I would have fired it up anyway, outContinue reading “#247: An Elegy for Spring Break”

#246: A Recipe

A Recipe Mix together in a bowl the following invisible things: Ad no alcohol, zero grains, absolutely no sugar, no beans, no milk, butter, or cream, and no other artificial anything. I have a bad feeling about this. Someone in the house wants to go healthy and I have agreed to play along. The partContinue reading “#246: A Recipe”

#245: The First Poem Written at the End of Spring Break

Here we go, full steam ahead, into my fourth consecutive year of celebrating National Poetry Month by writing a poem on every single day of April. If you are new to these parts, you might be wondering about the number in the title, in this particular case, #245. I’ve participated so far in three years of napowrimoContinue reading “#245: The First Poem Written at the End of Spring Break”

April’s Greatest Hits: Audio Poems

So it was that during all of April I wrote poems, 32 of them to be precise, in celebration of National Poetry Writing Month. And they all, or most of them, turned out to be about this guy, or at least inspired by this guy, the Bard from Stratford Upon Avon, because, as you mayContinue reading “April’s Greatest Hits: Audio Poems”

#221: Some Silly Translations for the 30th Day of the Month of April

I’m not really proud of my efforts here, only because it seems rather slight for a culminating poem.  I don’t speak Spanish, but my son and his school buddy Gracie are 4th graders in a bi-lingual immersion program, and they’re hanging out together on this last day of the month of April, so I enlistedContinue reading “#221: Some Silly Translations for the 30th Day of the Month of April”

#220: A Poem for Janine on the 29th Day of the Month of April

Do you remember, Janine, when we were not yet out of grade school, how we used to play at movie-making? We had no cameras or camcorders or iphones, only our minds to record the scenes conjured from unbound imagination, uninhibited and improvised, film stars in a film no one was watching nor would ever. SometimesContinue reading “#220: A Poem for Janine on the 29th Day of the Month of April”

#219: A Backwards Story Framed as a Lesson on Fiction Writing for the 28th of the Month of April

The resolution might be that there is no resolution. Let’s say for example that she can never be reconciled with her sister. In the crisis moment we reach a turning point, a confrontation, perhaps, or a situation from which there is no turning around or escape and must ultimately change things forever. Let’s say thatContinue reading “#219: A Backwards Story Framed as a Lesson on Fiction Writing for the 28th of the Month of April”