Apparently everyone found yesterday’s prompt really difficult, so NaPoWriMo are giving us an easy one today!

Describe in great detail your favorite room, place, meal, day, or person. You can do this in paragraph form.  Now cut unnecessary words like articles and determiners (a, the, that) and anything that isn’t really necessary for content; leave mainly nouns, verbs, a few adjectives.  Cut the lines where you see fit and, VOILA! A poem!

I like being high up in the mountains and this poem was inspired by a favourite scene in the Alps during the ski season. The title ‘tang of height’ comes from Nan Shepherd’s book ‘The Living Mountain’ about her walks in the Cairngorms.  

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-30277488

Tang of height

Live in blue and white
clutch safety netting
look afar, up and down;
see peaks stab thin air
below afternoon-blue sky
crossed by vapour trails
of travellers.

Touch sun, a misted lamp
whose light dusts glacier
in cold, crinkling air;
Hear creak of crevasses:
beneath white pillows
and snow blankets
glacier never rests.

Today I challenge you to write a palinode. And what’s that? It’s a poem in which the poet retracts a statement made in an earlier poem. You could take that route or, if you don’t have an actual poetically-expressed statement you want to retract, maybe you could write a poem in which you explain your reasons for changing your mind about something. It could be anything from how you decided that you like anchovies after all to how you decided that annoying girl was actually cool enough that you married her.

For this prompt I looked through some of my earlier poem drafts to find a statement to retract.  The  poem I chose was also written to a prompt, which was to write about a well-known work of art I didn’t much like.  My choice was Van Gogh’s Sunflowers.  I read about the story of the painting on the National Gallery’s website and wrote this.

To Van Gogh

Sunflowers, symbol of happiness
painted in a rare period of optimism
while you awaited your hero Gaugin,
now reproduced on cards, posters,
mugs, stationery, scarves. And yet
to me the painting is two-dimensional,
the yellow flat, dull, mustard,
hinting at future misery and failed friendship;
these sunflowers will turn from the sun.

For my palinode, I decided not to judge this painting, but to capture the joy of Van Gogh’s anticipation of Gaugin’s visit and give no hint of the misery to come. In this version, Van Gogh speaks – the line about the Marseillais eating bouillabaisse is his own!

http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/vincent-van-gogh-sunflowers

For Gaugin’s room

Sunflowers, whorls of happiness,
tints of chrome yellow, ochre,
pigments of ultramarine, viridian:
I paint sunflowers with the energy
of a Marseillais eating bouillabaisse,
touch the shades of their life cycle,
live in hope of joy, ideas shared
with Gaugin; mellow, russet days
in the yellow house of optimism.

And now our prompt: Wallace Stevens famously wrote that “money is a kind of poetry.” So today, I challenge you to write about money! It could be about not having enough, having too much (a nice kind of problem to have), the smell, or feel, or sensory aspects of money. It could also just be a poem about how we decide what has value or worth.

This was my take on a money poem:

Sides of a coin

Shell it out
spend it like water
have a good run for it
and see it as no object.

Spend it on old rope
pour it down a drain
fail to grow it on trees
and part a fool from it.

Spend an arm and a leg
put it where your mouth is
keep an eye on it
and pay through the nose.

Be made of it
have more of it than sense
bet your bottom dollar
it will burn a hole in your pocket.

Today’s prompt springs from the form known as the aubade. These are morning poems about dawn and daybreak. Many aubades take the form of lovers’ morning farewells, but . . . today is Monday. So why not try a particularly Mondayish aubade – perhaps you could write it while listening to the Bangles’ iconic Manic Monday? Or maybe you could take in Phillip Larkin’s grim Aubade for inspiration (though it may just make you want to go back to bed). Your Monday aubade could incorporate lovey-dovey aspects, or it could opt to forego them until you’ve had your coffee.

This poem started life as a long, thin, one.  Then I decided a potentially crowded day would be better expressed in longer lines with no punctuation.  Working Mondays are a memory for me now, but it’s still easy to feel overwhelmed by the rest of the stuff.  Choices have to be made …

Aubade – Dawn Chorus

You could get up spring clean dust wipe polish

check voicemail email texts bank balance

tweet post facebook status instagram selfie

watch news hear headlines read straplines

call friends make breakfast feed family

commute negotiate contribute to the team

or …

you could turn over and listen to the dawn chorus.

So, here’s today’s prompt from http://www.napowrimo.net/

Love poems are a staple of the poetry scene. It’s pretty hard to be a poet and not write a few – or a dozen – or maybe six books’ worth. But because so many love poems have been written, there are lots of clichés. Fill your poems with robins and hearts and flowers, and you’ll sound more like a greeting card than a bard. So today, I challenge you to write a “loveless” love poem. Don’t use the word love! And avoid the flowers and rainbows. And if you’re not in the mood for love? Well, the flip-side of the love poem – the break-up poem – is another staple of the poet’s repertoire. If that’s more your speed at present, try writing one of those, but again, avoid thunder, rain, and lines beginning with a plaintive “why”? Try to write a poem that expresses the feeling of love or lovelorn-ness without the traditional trappings you associate with the subject matter.

Here’s a quick poem of the day. I’ve used the word ‘love’, but not in the romantic sense, so I guess that’s all right …

Game

you made the first move
fifteen love
I made it fifteen all

one more step each:
we stand together
at thirty all

then locked at deuce
we wait for the advantage
and the game

Today’s challenge is to write a fourteener. Fourteeners can be have any number of lines, but each line should have fourteen syllables. Traditionally, each line consisted of seven iambic feet (i.e., an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, times seven), but non-iambic fourteeners also exist. The fourteener was popular in 16th and 17th century England, where it was particular common in ballads, but it also is the form in which “Casey at the Bat” is written. The form is versatile enough to encompass any subject matter, but as the example of “Casey at the Bat” shows us, it is particularly useful in narrative poetry, due to the long line and the step-like sense of progression created by the iambs.

I thought of doing a narrative poem based on last night’s political debate, but opted instead for a quick Easter fourteener.  The trouble with this sort of thing is that it begins to sound like a greetings-card rhyme …

Easter

Season of yellow greetings cards, a time to cook and bake,

the roasted lamb, the hot cross buns, symbolic simnel cake

a time of sunlit daffodils, of tulips pink and bright,

a time to gorge on chocolate eggs from morning until night.

And queues build up on motorways, and train lines have delays,

and we all try to cram too much into these precious days.

A visit to a garden centre makes a great day out

but not many people really know what Easter is about.