For anyone who would like a somewhat different experience than what’s offered on the main National Poetry Writing Month website, I’m teaching an inexpensive course (US$10), “How to Write a Poem Every Day.” This is not to knock Na/GloPoWriMo (I’ll be doing it myself this year and am looking forward to the challenge – Maureen has done great work in putting it together and bringing it back year after year). It’s simply a suggestion that you may or may not want to take.
Why might you add this course to your April poem-a-day repertoire? Rather than simply providing a new prompt each day, it offers more support and resources for building a daily poetry writing practice. It covers what I’ve learned from several decades of writing and avoiding writing, as well as from maintaining a poetry practice while being the sole parent to a toddler: making time to write, mindset, and how to handle feeling discouraged. The prompts are simple and provide a lot of structure to start, and then gradually become less traditional, challenging you to see poetry in a new way and to reconsider what it means to write a poem. Rather than give you specific criteria that leads you towards a particular composition, each prompt is very flexible and just about all of them can be used again and again to produce many distinctly different poems. There are only 21 days of prompts in the class, but on Day 22 you’ll essentially have a bigger poetic toolbox, and likely have a good idea of what you want to do next. The sample poems you’ll read along the way range from widely beloved classics old and new, to pieces working at the frontier of literature. I aim to leave you with the feeling that poems are sprouting up everywhere, and that there are abundant paths to explore.
At the time of this post, there are already three people signed up and there’s the possibility of a small intimate group (though I can’t guarantee participation).
Finally, I’m offering the first 10 people who sign up by reading this NaPoWriMo invitation a free critique of a poem (while there’s opportunity to share your work with your classmates, the class isn’t exactly intended to be a workshop, so not a lot of feedback is built in). This will be a substantial response (500 words or more), focused on constructive feedback and understanding what your poem is aiming to do (I want to give you a new perspective to consider without feeling like you’ve been attacked by a red pen). To claim this when you sign up for the class, please mention NaPoWriMo in the “Where did you hear about this course” box (or you can tell me after the fact if you forget or don’t see the box). If this paragraph is still here, I haven’t hit 10 NaPoWriMo sign-ups yet.
You can learn more here or go straight to signing up at Eventbrite. Good luck with this April’s poems!