Guest blogger, Kathleen Kirk
It’s National Poetry Month, and, like so many poets in the USA, I am writing a poem a day to celebrate. There are poem-a-day prompts at numerous poetry websites, literary magazine sites, on Facebook, and in poets’ personal blogs, and, by request, I am posting, daily, at my own blog, the prompts I gave to my real-life poetry workshop, and, of course, doing those myself. Sometimes I combine my own prompt with another prompt out there, and get something altogether wacky, which is the wonderful risk we take, along with creative fatigue, when writing a poem a day.
Sigh… Those of you who are doing it know what I mean, and so do those of you who work on a novel every year in the month of November. It is a great way to generate new work alongside an annoying buzzing in the brain.
On April 9, I gave out the prompt “the significance of the number nine.” There is huge significance to the number nine—mathematical, numerological, biblical, occult—and all I could manage was a tiny 9-syllable poem, not even reminiscent of Sylvia Plath’s nine-line-nine-syllables-per-line poem about pregnancy, “Metaphors,” which I had at the back of my buzzing brain. Evidently, I was not very pregnant with a poem that day.
But I have indeed generated new work, as I always do in April. I generally get 30 drafts, some that disappear forever, some that get tweaked or deeply revised, and some, the “gift” poems, that fall out whole. I am always amazed to realize how many of my published poems actually originated in April during this very celebration.
Riskily, I read a couple of the new poems aloud to an audience as part of a group reading at Woman Made Gallery in Chicago on April 10, in a wonderful community of women poets, surrounded by art by women, and in a particular section of the gallery in which the Indian artist, Priti Gulati Cox, had created a series of embroidered works on Stree Jaati, or Community of Women. Of course, I came home and wrote my poem-a-day inspired by images from the art I had just seen!
May you be inspired by whatever is at hand as you write your poem a day! And may you feel the support of a community of poets doing the same risky, buzzing, wonderful thing!
Kathleen Kirk blogs eight days a week at Wait! I Have a Blog?!, which she created accidentally, while trying to comment on somebody else’s blog. You can click on some of her online poems there, or find them online or in print at Eclectica, Common Review, Greensboro Review, Poems & Plays, and blossombones. She has been on the editorial staff of Poetry East and RHINO Magazine, and she is currently the Poetry Editor for Escape Into Life. Her books can be had via Babbitt’s Books, Amazon, Goodreads, and Finishing Line Press.
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About Melissa Corliss Delorenzo
happy belated national poetry month – I love the look of your site, very pro like. I’ve been surfing for many types of poetry sites and this seems to be one of the cleanest.. Thanks and keep up the great work!!
Thanks, Melissa! Today’s prompt at my blog was “well gone dry,” which has been happening for some, I hear. But I do have 19 poem drafts so far on April 19! We’ll see…. Drinking a lot of coffee!