And now for our prompt, which takes us from 2015 back to the 1700s. After all, it’s the eighteenth of April, which means that today is the 240th anniversary of the midnight ride of Paul Revere! Today, in keeping with the theme of rush and warning, I challenge you to write a poem that involves an urgent journey and an important message. It could be historical, mythical, entirely fictional, or memoir-ical.

I had to think long and hard about an urgent journey and an important message – eventually I chose to go to the southern hemisphere in 1916.

Endurance 1916

the small boat that twists
through mountains and deep valleys
of restless, green waves

holds six men whose hands
grip weathered wood, their faces
pale, furrowed, salt washed

after sixteen days
black, sharp peaks of South Georgia
and one final push

to reach lights of hope,
rescue for those who remain
stranded on ice floes

far from battle fields
of France, this small miracle
where all men survive

Today, I want you to try to write a “social media”-style poem. Namecheck all of your friends. Quote from their texts, tweets, FB status updates, twitter accounts, and blogposts, and the back of the cereal box on your breakfast table. The poem is about you and you are about what you say, think, talk, eat. You might end up with a poem that seems bizarrely solipsistic (like the internet itself, maybe?), but there might also be a spark there of something live and fun and present (like the verbal equivalent of a really great animated cat)

My poem today is a quick blast and a complete contrast to yesterday’s carefully crafted terzanelle. ‘Facebook Friday’ is based on consecutive Facebook posts at 6 pm on Friday 17th April. I’m not sure if it is ‘like the verbal equivalent of a really great animated cat’ but, interestingly, there are some linked themes.

Facebook Friday

Weekend mode on
about to burst into Roll Out the Barrel
avoid six foods too cruel to eat
drink sugar free and skinny caramel frapuccino
a lost gold pen at Sainsbury’s Craigleith
can we find the owner?
good news baby April’s missing mother found
Panama canal and wildlife highlights
a lovely day on the South Bank
poets read at Hebden Bridge
I am so drinking vanilla lattes from now on
happy Friday.

Here we go with Prompt 15.

Today, I challenge you to write a poem that addresses itself or some aspect of itself (i.e. “Dear Poem,” or “what are my quatrains up to?”; “Couplet, come with me . . .”) This might seem a little meta at first, or even kind of cheesy. But it can be a great way of interrogating (or at least, asking polite questions) of your own writing process and the motivations you have for writing, and the motivations you ascribe to your readers.

A poem speaks

I want to be a stream of consciousness
play around
vary
the length of
lines
and just
take whatever comes
instantly
without thinking

Sometimes I’m shaped
so that I come out
with a regular pattern
of lines and verses.

Sometimes they try to make me rhyme
it’s hard to do this all the time
because I find they’ve tried so hard
I sound just like a greetings card.

Mostly I shape myself
nudge the poet and
show the way
I want
to go.

Today, I challenge you to write a poem that takes the form of a dialogue. Your conversant could be real people, or be personifications, as in Andrew Marvell’s A Dialogue Between the Soul and the Body, or Yeats’ A Dialogue of Self and Soul. Like Marvell, and Yeats, you could alternate stanzas between your two speakers, or perhaps you could give them alternating lines. Your speakers could be personifications, like those in Marvell and Yeats’ poems, or they could be two real people. Hopefully, this prompt will give you a chance to represent different points of view in the same poem, or possibly to create a dramatic sense of movement and tension within the poem.

This is my take on a dialogue we’ve probably all had:

Edited Highlights

I see her mirrored behind me,
scissors pointing, hair spiky,
anonymous in black.
We talk to our reflected selves.

OK and Hello: A magazine while you wait?
Going somewhere nice tonight? Just home?
Capuccino? Or did you say Americano?
Can’t hear for that drier.

Booked your holidays yet?
Harris? I thought you said Paris!
That’ll be cold. Tenerife for me,
warm, all-inclusive.

Show you the back?
The final flourish of the mirror
to reveal the dark side of the moon
now highlighted.

Questions and answers
reflected from a thousand mirrors:
cutting to essentials,
colouring our days.

In keeping with the mysterious quality of the number 13, today I challenge you to write a riddle poem. This poem should describe something without ever naming it. Perhaps each line could be a different metaphor for the same object? Maybe the title of the poem can be the “answer” to the riddle. The result could be a bit like our Day One poems of negation, but the lines don’t need to be expressed in negatives.

So it’s another riddle poem.  I decided not to make the title the precise answer!

Companion

You are always there
growing with me,
increasing each year:
I can’t stop you.

Once I liked you,
so proud of you that
I measured you in halves
or even quarters.

Now I hesitate, ignore how
you creep up behind me
with your carpe diem
tapping on my shoulder.

Oh, but every ten years I’m
more open about you:
we bond in champagne moments
when a milestone ends in zero.

You give wine mellowness,
and cheese distinction:
if you make three digits
I’ll smile, respect you.

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.