So National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) is in full swing this April 2017 and I’m doing the daily prompts this year. You can read them at https://hellopoetry.com/mary-mccray/poems/. So far we’ve done Bop poems, 9-line poems, portraits, nature poems, repetition incantations, enigma poems, elegies, Kay Ryan poems and recipe poems. It’s only a third of the way through the month and my brain is totally fried. Every year this is a distance race.
One assignment was to do a poem around something lost or found. These were two very beautiful examples:
The Arm by Stephen Dunn
State of Grace by Elizabeth Boquet
Barrellhouse Magazine has also been doing 30 days of poems about pop culture. Some interesting examples:
And I've loved learning more about poet Monica de la Torre:
On Translation
View from a Folding Chair
Joan Didion the The Last Love Song
A few months ago a book club I'm in read Joan Didion's second novel, Play It As It Lays, a critique of Hollywood and Vegas. At the same time I decided to read Didion's new biography by Tracy Daugherty. It's full of stuff about her writing process. In one section, Daugherty quotes her in explaining the difference between being an intellectual and a writer:
A writer is “a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. ..one becomes a writer [this way]: ‘you just lie low…You stay quiet. You don’t talk to many people and you keep your nervous system from shorting out.’”
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