Saturday, April 5, 2014

NaPoWriMo Prompt Poses a Challenge

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I won't get to writing my poem today until later, since I'm waiting at the CoLab in Port Townsend waiting for the writing workshop to begin. Today I get to write with Lidia Yuknavitch; tomorrow it will be with Pam Houston. You will be able to read the poem over at The Writing Vein Playground.

But, courtesy of NaPoWriMo, here is a prompt for today's daily poem.

Today’s prompt is a little complicated, which is why I saved it for a Saturday, in the hopes that you might have a little more time today than during a weekday. I think this is a very rewarding form, though, so I hope you’ll enjoy it! Today I challenge you to write a “golden shovel.” This form was invented by Terrance Hayes in his poem, The Golden Shovel. The last word of each line of Hayes’ poem is a word from Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem We Real Cool. You can read Brooks’ poem by reading the last word of each line of Hayes’ poem! (In fact, you can do so twice, because Hayes, being ultra-ambitious, wrote a two-part golden shovel, repeating Brooks’ poem). Now, the golden shovel is a tricky form, but you can help keep it manageable by picking a short poem to shovel-ize. And there’s no need to double-up the poem you pick, like Hayes did.

She goes on to give a few examples on the webpage, so make sure to hop over there to take a look.