Author’s Note: This poem was supposed to post yesterday, April 12, but my blog somehow ate it.

Today’s prompt from the NaPoWriMo site is to write an index poem. I didn’t do that. Instead, I did what I think of as a modern technological equivalent:

A Google Search poem.

I chose several words, arranged them in the order I wanted, and entered them one-by-one into the Google search bar (technically, each search was the word followed by “is”). Google offered up between three and five auto-suggestions to complete each search. I limited myself to use a maximum of three of these suggestions per search term, in the order they appeared. Eh, voilà! A poem.

Continue reading “Google Search Poem (NaPoWriMo 2016)” →

Today’s NaPoWriMo challenge is:

[T]o write a poem in which you closely describe an object or place, and then end with a much more abstract line that doesn’t seemingly have anything to do with that object or place, but which, of course, really does.

I’m not sure what I wrote for today is quite what they have in mind but it’s where the prompt took me.

I also want to make it clear: This poem does not describe my current workplace. It describes several previous places where I’ve worked.

Continue reading “The Office (NaPoWriMo 2016)” →

Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt is to write a poem about a flower. It didn’t quite go as I hoped. So I wrote about that, instead.

Continue reading “A Poem about a Flower (NaPoWriMo 2016)” →

Once again, I decided to try today’s prompt from the official NaPoWriMo site: write a tritina. To make it even more challenging, I used an online random word generator to come up with three words. (From another perspective, this could be seen as avoiding the work of thinking up three words for myself.) With three words randomly generated, writing this poem became mostly an act of galumphing.

I should probably note that this poem isn’t autobiographical. While my heritage is mixed (but overwhelmingly northern European), I don’t have any particular rage connected to it, nor do I yearn for an ancestral sky.

Continue reading “The Heritage of Rage (NaPoWriMo 2016)” →

The official NaPoWriMo prompt for today is a challenge to “write a poem about food. This could be a poem about a particular food, or about your relationship to food in general.”

Given the importance and prominence of food in all our lives, you’d think this would be a fairly easy task. Instead, I found my mind circling around the topic, jumping from one aspect of food culture to another, thinking about food in a variety of contexts. So rather than try to focus on one isolated idea, I used that jumping-circling itself as the jumping off point for my poem.

Continue reading “Food (NaPoWriMo 2016)” →

Let’s say we make a game:
We create a field,
Assign positions,
Agree on the rules.

You pick your spot,
I pick mine,
Each according to
Our individual talents.

We all play our game
As best we can.
We follow the rules.
We play fair.

But the game doesn’t work.

Continue reading “Fair Game (NaPoWriMo 2016)” →

The official NaPoWriMo prompt for today is to “write a poem in which you explore what you think is the cruelest month, and why.”

Continue reading “The Cruelest Month (NaPoWriMo 2016)” →

Waiting for my Muse
to strike (the capricious tease).
Still I wait. I wait.

April is National Poetry Writing Month and I’ll be participating. I won’t promise a poem a day, and I won’t always be following the daily prompts on the official NaPoWriMo site, but I do plan to write at least two or three new poems a week for the rest of this month.

Here’s my first NaPoWriMo poem:

Continue reading “For Addison, With Love (NaPoWriMo 2016)” →