April is NaPoWriMo, or National Poetry Writing Month – the poetic equivalent of NaNoWriMo. This project is a marathon challenge to write a poem every day throughout April. By the end of April, participants should have 30 poems.

Kate Larsen, director of Writers Victoria, wrote an article about NaPoWriMo for ArtsHub, which I came across this morning.

Image source: Flickr / Pankaj
Image source: Flickr / Pankaj

Recently a poem came to me when I was walking down the street. It struck me in that “sent by the Muses” way that infuriates me, because it goes against my everyday sit-down-and-do-the-things approach. It frustrates me that I put in hard work and get nothing sometimes, though most of the time it’s just fine. It’s both upsetting and a blessing that sometimes the universe just hands you exactly what you need. What I needed was a piece of paperbark on a city footpath. From there came a line, and from that line a stanza. I thought about distance between paperbark near a main city road and the paperbark I peeled from one of the many tea trees around my beachside home. I thought about all the trees around that place, and what they meant to me.

So I’m feeling inspired about NaPoWriMo. My writing seems stuck in a rut right now, and I’m unable to see things from the required angle to move forward. NaPoWriMo, while not related to the larger work I’m doing, might just be the injection of something new that I need to shake it up and get it all moving again.

So for the whole of April, I’m committing to read a poem each morning, and write a poem each day. I’ll experiment with form and themes, and hopefully at the end of the month I’ll have at least a couple of things I’m confident enough with that I can send them off to lit journals for publication. Sometimes I might share a poem, or at least the prompt that lead me to it.

Who’s with me?