Day 20 ... NaPoWriMo / Poem-a-Day 2019

Maureen Thorson’s NaPoWriMo prompt: “Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem that ‘talks.’ . . . Try to write a poem grounded in language as it is spoken — not necessarily the grand, dramatic speech of a monologue or play, but the messy, fractured, slangy way people speak in real life. You might incorporate overheard speech or a turn of phrase you heard once that stood out to you — the idea here is to get away from formally ‘poetic’ speech and into the way language tends to work out loud.” Robert Lee Brewer’s Poem-a-Day prompt: “For today’s prompt, write a dark poem. Cave poems, poems at night, and no electricity poems — these are all appropriate for today’s prompt. Of course, dark has several other connotations as well. An underdog is often known as a dark horse, a villain may have a dark heart, and Batman is known as the Dark Knight. Heck, when I was little, I thought Darth Vader was Dark Vader.” This weekend I'm at the North American Review's literary conference celebrating 50 years at the University of Northern Iowa (the magazine is actually 204 years old!). I served as editor of the NAR from 2000 to 2016. Today, I gave a workshop at the conference on writing from prompts (our usual April ones) and, in particular, mashing up the prompts. I asked the people who came to the workshop to write a poem merging pairs of prompts (I provided a list of recent NaPoWriMo and Poem-a-Day prompts, including today's) and then we shared them with the group. I had waited until that workshop to write my own poem for today, and here it is. Melded the two prompts again: a poem in everyday speech plus the dark. Joe the Plumber on the Mueller Report Jeez, can ya believe how Bill Barr blacked out the freaking Mueller report? Just last night, I was watching the news, and they had ginned up two big walls showing the pages of the two halves of the report splashed out like giant white sheets, collusion on one side and obstruction on the other, and you could clearly see the dark blotches redacted. There was a lot of it. Some of the freaking pages were totally dark. I think the whole damn thing stinks to high heaven. Seems to me like the dark is taking over. The dark is getting bigger and bigger. Like the rover said on Mars, “My battery is running low and it is getting dark.” It IS getting dark, folks. We’re all in the dark. We’re all dark horses. Dark is the coin of the realm. And dark is us, dark is us. —Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] Friends, won’t you comment, please? Love to know what you’re thinking. To comment, look for a red line below that starts Posted by, then click once on the word comments in that line. If you don’t find the word “comments” in that line, then look for a blue link below that says Post a comment and click it once. Thanks! Ingat, everyone.  ヅ

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