I’ve decided to tackle a new writing challenge in April: NaPoWriMo. April is National Poetry Month, which means it’s also National Poetry Writing Month. I don’t write poems. Ever. Except I wrote several for the March Slice Challenge. I couldn’t quite bring myself to call them poems. They were “kind of sort of poems.” They were poem-like or poem-ish. I had to add some kind of qualifier or diminutive as an apology.
A few days ago, I realized I wanted to keep writing every day in April. There is momentum from the March Slice Challenge. I am living as a writer every day. I don’t want to lose that.
I was intrigued when I read about NaPoWriMo on several of my favorite Slicers’ blogs. But I don’t write poetry. I wasn’t in.
But then I read these lines this morning at Sharing Our Notebooks from Stacey Dallas Johnston: “Do anything in your notebook that you wouldn’t normally do.”
Poetry. I would never write poetry.
Maybe I should write poetry?
Writing prose is diving into a pool and settling into a comfortable stroke.
Writing poetry is trying to swim in the ocean. And not one of the nice swimming oceans either. One of the cold, choppy ones with riptides.
I’m not planning to publish poetry on my blog every day in April. I want to get back to my regular blogging schedule, and I don’t want to overwhelm my readers with poetry. I don’t write poetry. Really.
Except, apparently, in April.
I do plan to write a poem a day this month, drawing inspiration from The Poem Farm and NaPoWriMo. Mostly I will work in my notebook, but at least once a week, I’ll post some of my attempts at poetry along with reflections about my writing process and learning.
Today, I experimented with lunes, a form I’d never heard of. From NaPoWriMo’s prompt today:
This is a sort of English-language haiku. While the haiku is a three-line poem with a 5-7-5 syllable count, the lune is a three-line poem with a 5-3-5 syllable count. There’s also a variant based on word-count, instead of syllable count, where the poem still has three lines, but the first line has five words, the second line has three words, and the third line has five words again.
I wrote seven lunes about a college Creative Writing course I took.
Here’s my favorite of the seven:
Sought inspiration
Killed a fly
Wrote a short poem
I wrote several drafts of a longer piece about this Creative Writing class (the last time I ever wrote a poem on purpose).
the dirigible plum 
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