National Poetry Month / NaPoWriMo / Poem-a-Day 2024

Welcome, friends. I suspect there may be new visitors to the blog today because of my recent appointment as Poet Laureate of Iowa. Greetings to all, readers old and new. I should begin by telling you what I do here in April. I participate each April in the Poem-a-Day Challenge and NaPoWriMo (which stands for "national poetry writing month"). In these projects, the poets Robert Lee Brewer and Maureen Thorson provide prompts to help people write a poem each day in April. My modus operandi is to compose a poem that arises from (and satisfies) both prompts. I have done this every April since 2012, so this will be my 13th year. My poetry collection The Coolest Month is made up of April poems written this way. More on that book at the end of this blog post. One change from recent years . . . for almost every April since 2014, my friend Thomas Alan Holmes has also participated, similarly merging prompts and then letting his poems be featured in the blog. This month, Alan has to bow out. His duties as an associate dean at East Tennessee State University will keep him too busy. We'll miss you, Alan. I hope you can join me next April. Okay, here we go. For the first day of NaPoWriMo Maureen Thorson’s prompt is “[W]rite – without consulting the book – a poem that recounts the plot, or some portion of the plot, of a novel that you remember having liked but that you haven’t read in a long time.” Robert Lee Brewer’s Poem-a-Day suggestion is “[W]rite an optimistic poem.” Grendel —curtal sonnet One of my favorite novels from undergrad was John Gardner’s Grendel, the story of the monster in Beowulf, told by the monster himself. The plot was preordained by the poem: Grendel had to die. He saw himself not as a monster but as a poet “brachiating with a hoot from rhyme to rhyme.” He was an optimist of sorts — “I am mad with joy” — until his mother shook his glee with a word not understood: warovvish — beware of fish. Her gist?                                 The skies warn of your death. —Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] Emil Antonucci, illustration from Grendel, first edition. I think I was successful here in melding the two prompts, but there was quite a lot to squish into the small space of the curtal sonnet form. Without giving too much away, in case you haven't read Grendel, the chapters of the novel are linked to the signs of the zodiac, which might begin to make sense of the fish reference. Grendel's mother is seen in the novel as a dumb, hulking, wordless brute, as perhaps you might have seen Grendel himself in the context of the Beowulf poem, but her prescient word warovvish argues otherwise. I'll stop there. Go read the novel . . . I guarantee you'll love it. For those who might not know the curtal sonnet: this poetic form was invented by the 19th-century poet Gerard Manley Hopkins to be 3/4 of a 14-line sonnet, thus 10.5 lines. The rhyme scheme is abc abc dbcdc. I'm using pentameter — five-beat lines — rather than the sprung rhythm that Hopkins employed. I write curtal sonnets quite often, actually. I find the poetic challenges of the form enjoyable. I mentioned above my most recent collection The Coolest Month (2019). This chapbook's "spine" is the April calendar, with a poem for each day in April, where that poem was written on that April day in the previous eight years. For example, for April 13, the poem is "Sestina: Dragon," originally written on April 13, 2014, merging two NaPoWriMo and Poem-a-Day prompts. Here is an interview about that book in the website of the publisher, Final Thursday Press. The book is available on Amazon, but if you would like a signed copy, you can get one for $10.95 via check to “Final Thursday Press,” 815 State St., Cedar Falls IA 50613. Friends, won’t you comment, please? Love to know what you’re thinking. Thanks! Ingat, everyone.  ヅ

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