Happy NaPoWriMo!
Hi again, everbody! That's right, Stupid Poetry two days in a row?? And the third post in a row that is celebrating something? A hat trick of consecutive post titles starting "Happy" and ending with exclamations? Wow. Unbelievable.
Against all odds, April has once again befallen us. If you didn't know, April is National Poetry Writing Month. Every April, thousands of poets challenge themselves to write a poem every single day. That's 30 whole danged poems. How are you supposed to write that many poems? How are you supposed to have 30 ideas??? Well, the good news is you don't have to!
The official NaPoWriMo blog posts a prompt every day (maybe sometimes multiple?) to get you started. They are usually pretty good prompts, and as far as I know, NaPo is not a weird and bad org like the late, evidently not-so-great, NaNoWriMo.
But it doesn't stop there. Because, just like Snoopycember, I will be posting seven prompts every week on Stupid Poetry so you can write along with me and my (sometimes good, sometimes bad) ideas. I am excited for NaPo this year, because I am in the homestretch of the generative phase of a new manuscript, and so if I keep up, by May 1st, I should be much, much closer to having An Book to Edit. As such, a lot of these prompts are one way or another based on or inspired by said manuscript, but I did try to generalize them to keep them from being too specifically about like, I don't know, getting kicked out of a Hardee's for playing KoRn ringtones too loudly. As a heads up, a lot of them are going to be about clowns though.
I know it is coming in a bit late, but today's prompt celebrates April fools with a nice bait and switch. Today, your job is to write a poem that starts at a Chuck E. Cheese and ends at a funeral. My entry is below, and then make sure to check out the next 6 days's prompts below that. I'll be back next week to give the next few prompts and to share a couple of my daily poems. See you then! Happy poetry-month-ing!!
chuck
i won a fake moustache and glasses and knew
I was too old for all of it the last time I visited Chuck E Cheese
14 and too strong for whack a mole, i got strange looks
for what i insisted on forcing below the surface, for how hard
i swung. i heard the metal frame crack. my tickets never came out.
the animatronics creaked and scraped. chuck e was busy with another kid.
my plastic facial hair hovered over rapidly growing peach fuzz. I warn my younger
brother not to waste his 50 tickets on the same thing, but it doesn’t stop him.
we were on our drive home from family we’d never visit again--we didn’t know that
yet but I learned early there are rooms you don’t get to come back to.
I shaved my beard when we buried my grandmother, and when I paid
my bill for the repass, a fake ID from Chuck E Cheese fell, wearing
my fake moustache, my forced upon years. the card says
I’d become an astronaut. it got the distance right.
Prompt Madness!! April 2-7
- Imagine your town’s most famous and beloved landmark is getting torn down. Write a poem as your goodbye to it.
- Find a family photo (or otherwise meaningful-to-you photo) and imagine it’s getting hung in a museum. You get to choose what kind of museum, if it matters. Write the placard that would accompany it as a 1-2 paragraph prose poem.
- Write a haiku or series of haiku about your favorite pizza parlor.
- Write a poem about your town’s dead mall. If your town’s mall isn’t dead, look up a dead mall tour on youtube and write about that.
- Imagine you are stuck in a 10 foot deep hole in the ground. Someone you know has a ladder, but you have to write them a poem to convince them to lower it. I know, wack as hell, huh.
- Imagine yourself as a literal clown who can never break character and you are back working the worst job you have ever worked. Write a poem about it.
