Reinventing the Life of a Poet in the Modern World

Tag: NaPoWriMo 2020

NaPoWriMo 2020: The Final Set

Baddass

Yesterday was the end of NaPoWriMo 2020. I’m sure coronavirus made these poems bleaker than normal. I’m also sure my zapped energy levels made some of the poets a bit Wallace-Stevensish and too vague on certain days.

The month sped by however. Each year feels like it's a shorter time span of work.

Notes on my process this year: the only thing I researched ahead of time were the list  of self help topics. Each morning around 8 am I began to work out a poem with some raw notes. Then I’d log onto my computer and draft the thing out, polishing it as much as I could before I ran out of time and had to start work.

Here is the full set:

The Death of Self Help

  1. Mastering the Wheel
  2. Nobody Else Is Their
  3. Setting Goals
  4. Take It Easy
  5. MessyVerse
  6. The Magic of PPT
  7. Ten (Contextually Snarky) Words to Improve Your Vocabulary
  8. Mouse in the Maze
  9. Sinkhole
  10. Time Boss
  11. Good Habits are Rice Cakes
  12. Dealing with Grief
  13. Preach
  14. Good Boy!
  15. Identity Politics
  16. Vulnerable 
  17. Syns of the Self
  18. Treasure Island
  19. Electric Fence
  20. Fresh Start
  21. Something Is Happening
  22. Self-Help Workbook
  23. Side One: Furtiveness
  24. Side Two: Assertiveness
  25. Restaurants
  26. Scaffolding
  27. Range of Motion
  28. The Great Love
  29. Mount Catharsis
  30. The End

 

NaPoWriMo 2020: The Death of Self Help Halfway!

Half

I'm halfway through National Poetry Writing Month for 2020. It's been quite a struggle to do these poems this year for some reason, maybe because the topic is kind of cerebral or maybe it's Coronavirus. Yeah, that's surely making the set a bit darker this year. Not just the virus itself but the politicization of the situations by people who are the primary victims of self-help mythologies.

Yeah, that doesn't help. 

Read the poems here: https://www.marymccray.com/napowrimo-2020.html

Haikus End & NaPoWriMo Beginning

I finally came to the end of 52 Haiku. Here is the full sequence. Many thanks to all the visitors to that year-long project.

In a few days I’ll be starting NaPoWriMo 2020 and this week I’m working on a sequence called The Death of Self Help (none too soon either considering coronavirus, which I predict will signal the end of the era of narcissism). I’m switching from the site Hello Poetry as it’s not a good fit anymore. Last year the bot-censors there did some strange re-editing of my poems around innocuous words. I’ll be posting the poems on a dedicated page at marymccray.com. Stay tuned.

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