Two more to go! Here’s today’s NaPoWriMo prompt:

Poet and artist Joe Brainard is probably best remembers for his book-length poem/memoir, I Remember. The book consists of a series of statements, all beginning with the phrase “I remember.” Here are a few examples:

I remember the only time I ever saw my mother cry. I was eating apricot pie.

I remember how much I cried seeing South Pacific (the movie) three times.

I remember how good a glass of water can taste after a dish of ice cream.

The specific, sometimes mundane and sometimes zany details of the things Brainard remembers builds up over the course of the book, until you have a good deal of empathy and sympathy for this somewhat odd person that you really feel you’ve gotten to know.

Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem based on things you remember. Try to focus on specific details, and don’t worry about whether the memories are of important events, or are connected to each other. You could start by adopting Brainard’s uniform habit of starting every line with “I remember,” and then you could either cut out all the instances of “I remember,” or leave them all in, or leave just a few in. At any rate, hopefully you’ll wind up with a poem that is heavy on concrete detail, and which uses that detail as its connective tissue.

I remember

Shocking-pink knitting wool
behind a draper’s window covered
with yellow cellophane: my mother said
it was too bright for a jumper.

Shilling blocks of ice cream with
three stripes pink, brown and white:
they were wrapped in cardboard
which we peeled off and licked.

Glass bottles of limeade
standing on the shop floor
engraved with Bon Accord, Aberdeen:
we savoured green fizz at parties.

My brownie uniform and
the smell of its leather belt:
it was important to tie the yellow tie
with a reef knot.

Blue nylon party dresses
and sticky-out-petticoats:
they had to be worn with shoes
painted with Meltonian EasyWhite.

Shoe shops with
brown Start Rites and Clark’s Sandals:
they had an X-ray machine
that made your feet green.

The lash of skipping ropes
in the school playground and
the flash of a shocking-pink jumper:
I was envious of it.

This started with a recollection of the corner shop where I was sent as a child for a shilling block of Walls ice cream; I always wanted a jumper made from the bright pink wool in the window and never got one. I followed on with random recollections of that time, then shaped them into a poem where colours seemed to pop up in every verse. I remember in colour! In my first version, I began each stanza with ‘I remember’ but in my final version I decided it was better to trim it.

Here’s the prompt from NaPoWriMo:

Today I challenge you to write a “mix-and-match” poem in which you mingle fancy vocabulary with distinctly un-fancy words. First, spend five minutes writing a list of overly poetic words – words that you think just sound too high-flown to really be used by anyone in everyday speech. Examples might be vesper, heliotrope, or excelsior. Now spend five minutes writing words that you might use or hear every day, but which seem too boring or quotidian to be in a poem. Examples might be garbage disposal, doggy bag, bathroom. Now mix and match examples from both of your lists into a single poem. Hopefully you’ll end up with a poem that makes the everyday seem poetic, and which keeps your poetic language grounded.

Aubade

I will open the cupboard door
in the early light;
pack plates in wicker basket –
a caprice, this day
when sun rises mellifluous.
Our plans nebulous,
we will pack the car boot,
with tartan rug, food, drink,
drive to that moment of felicity
in the tree’s shade,
ephemeral,
special,
while the sun rises to its zenith.

This is the list of words that I came up with:

obeisance
aubade
felicity
halcyon
caprice
mellifluous
zenith
penumbra
nebulous
ephemeral

tree
food
drink
rubbish
tartan
get
car boot
shopping
soap
cupboard

With this I definitely felt ‘less is more’ and did not use all my words.  I could have got a more wacky poem if I’d gone for some more bizarre choices for the everyday words.  Perhaps I’ll try that another day!

Here’s today’s NaPoWriMo prompt – and oh, it’s a sonnet!

Today, I challenge you to write a sonnet. Traditionally, sonnets are 14-line poems, with ten syllables per line, written in iambs (i.e., with a meter in which an unstressed syllable is followed by one stressed syllable, and so on). There are several traditional rhyme schemes, including the Petrarchan, Spenserian, and Shakespearean sonnets. But beyond the strictures of form, sonnets usually pose a question of a sort, explore the ideas raised by the question, and then come to a conclusion. In a way, they are essays written in verse! This means you can write a “sonnet” that doesn’t have meet all of the traditional formal elements, but still functions as a mini-essay of a sort. The main point is to keep your poem tight, not rangy, and to use the shorter confines of the form to fuel the poem’s energy. As Wordsworth put it, in a very formal sonnet indeed, “Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room.”

That’s a lot to achieve in a day, especially a Saturday, so I’ve gone back and dabbled with one I tried earlier this year, iambic pentameter/Shakespearean. It probably needs more tweaking – but here’s today’s version.

Voyage

A ship in harbour, cradled, creaking, warm,
its ropes secured to twisted wooden staves –
we shelter from the darkening winter storm
and rock upon the whispering, slumbering waves.
A candle’s glow lights up the cabin walls
and flickers in the circle of our love;
as we link hands the evening shadow falls
and seagulls cry in rigging high above.
They cry that this is not their way to live,
that trackless ocean waits to show us more,
that danger, joy and sorrow it will give
when we set sail for distant, unknown shore.
The harbour gate yawns wide as we slip free
to seek adventure on the open sea.