Ideas to Consider as the Beginning Day of 30 Poems in 30 Days Approaches

As April 1st approaches and so also NaPoWriMo - National Poetry Writing Month - April 2013, with the goal of writing 30 poems in 30 days, I'd like to share a couple other links that I found helpful.

First, Poetic Forms and Techniques, provides descriptions and examples of 34 types of poems. I thought of using one per day, as a way to stretch my thinking and writing skills. You can find this page at: http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/197.

Another site that I found helpful has writing prompts for poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. You can find this page at: http://www.pw.org/writing-prompts-exercises and sign up for weekly prompts to be sent via e-mail.

I began reading a book, Finding What You Didn't Lose by John Fox, who says, "Poetry is within each of us. It's there waiting for you to find what you never really lost." (p. xv) I'll see if I can "find it" during the month of April 2013.

Whether you participate in the National Poetry Writing Month this April, formally or informally, or not, I hope you and I can enjoy the daily prompts sent by www.naporimo.net, or from other sources, and even from within our hearts and spirits and be encouraged to explore our creativity through writing.

Happy Writing and Creating!!

Ideas for Poems from Dr. T.

As I anticipate writing a poem a day during the month of April, I was happy to come across a site that gives 100 ideas for poems: http://www.dmturner.org/English/Writing/poemideas.htm. Perhaps others who plan to participate in this event will also find some of these ideas helpful. These prompts could also be used for future writings, even after the end of the upcoming event.

The first 25 ideas include:

Ideas for Poems

You can write a poem:

1. Describing a person by describing his or her belongings.
2. Speaking from the point of view of something you lost or misplaced.
3. In the shape of its subject (a concrete poem)
4. Telling about something that happened long ago, to you or to someone else.
5. As a conversation between two people, objects, ideas, or animals.
6. Defining words in strange and new ways
7. About something in the news.
8. As dialogue in a play
9. With assonance (repeating the same vowel sounds)
10. Using alliteration (repeating the same consonant sound)
11. About noisy things in words that sound like the noises they make.
12. In one loooooong sentence.
13. About your favorite sport
14. Pretending you are somebody else.
15. With the title acting as the first line of the poem.
16. Explaining what it's like to wake up in the morning, using sounds.
17. Imitating a poet or a poem you like.
18. Describing a person by describing his actions, using strong verbs
19. As an acrostic, using unexpected ideas. Mix long and short lines. Use your own name. Use a series of words. Put the acrostic word in the middle of the poem instead of at the beginning.
20. About a feeling, using color, shape, texture and size adjectives.
21. Repeating things you've overheard in the halls, fragments of conversation and statements
22. In stanzas with the rhyme scheme abba, cddc, and so on.
23. Using words from an entry in your classroom journal
24. Telling what a place will look like in a hundred years, or what it looked like a century ago.
25. Saying exactly the same thing over and over in completely different ways.

The above ideas are from:  http://www.dmturner.org/English/Writing/poemideas.htm.

Getting Ready

April 1st is quickly approaching and I am anticipating the beginning of 30 days of writing one poem each day. This is part of the National Poetry Writing Month for 2013. I believe this will stretch my writing skills and will be fun, too!

You can read more about this event at: http://www.napowrimo.net/. If you're interested, please join in, officially or unofficially.

I would like to thank Dale for letting me know about this event and for his enthusiastic encouragement to try it out. I look forward to seeing what he and others post, during this month of writing poetry.