Poem a Day Challenge

April is National Poetry Month. My writer friend, Beverly, and I just finished a month long poem writing marathon. Every morning Robert Lee Brewer, on his Poetic Asides blog, sent a poetry prompt our way and we were to see what we could come up with. We both finished the month with thirty or more poems, but it wasn't as easy as you would think.

On the first day he told us to write a new arrival poem. I racked my brains trying to come up with something. I ended up writing about the new boy in school. The next day was Tuesday, and he always had a Two-for-Tuesday prompt. April 2 prompts were write a bright poem or write a dark poem or write both. I ended up doing both, since I didn't have too much trouble coming up with ideas for them.

Some of the prompts were quite challenging. The tentative poem, the post poem, an infested poem (interesting). The infested poem turned out to be one of my favorites. We had to write a sonnet, a sevenling, a senryu, and a shadorma. These are all form poems and I had fun with them. April 30 was a Tuesday, so we got a two-for: a finished poem or a never finished poem. I wrote about my high school graduation.

The one that stumped me the most was day five. Write a plus poem. I couldn't think of anything so I took out my trusty thesaurus and looked up "plus." One of the synonyms was "lagniappe." Voila! I researched "lagniappe" and found the original meaning: a cheap present, such as parsley or shallots, given to good customers of street criers selling produce. Here's my attempt at a plus poem.

Lagniappe

Black-berrieeees! he sings
I got blackberries
I got greens and cabbages
Come and see
Buy my potat-ohs, lady
Dime a bucket, lady

She comes to the door
Turban on her head
Basket on her arm
He fills it with his wares
On top, a sprig of parsley and a shallot---
For free

If we want to we can send five of our favorites to him for a contest he'll be judging. I got mine off on Friday. Fingers crossed.

Someone once called me a professional student. Maybe it was because after graduating from high school in 1954 it took me the next fifty years to finally walk down the aisle and receive my Masters degree in English. That's right. Got that puppy in 2004 at the tender age of 67. Unfortunately I won't be around to join my fellow grads from the class of '04 when they get to sit down at the front in their golden robes in 2054. Be that as it may, that  education is something I wouldn't trade for anything in the world and it's something no one can ever take away from me.

And guess what? I'm still at it. Last week I made my way out to McNeese not once, but twice. Poetry class on Tuesday and Flash Fiction on Thursday. I've been seriously blocked since the first of the year. Hadn't written anything new since January. I left Poetry class with two poems and Flash Fiction class with one very short story. Got my mojo back. These are Leisure Learning classes, so there's no pressure to do anything. I have two excellent mentors. Connie, a retired teacher, is the poetry instructor, and Rachel, an MFA grad student is our fiction teacher. We only have three in the poetry class, but that's okay. Quality, not quantity. We have a few more, maybe eight, in the fiction class, but still quite manageable. 

So go ahead and call me names. I'm going to keep at it as long as the old brain lets me.

P.S. If you do the math you can even find out how old I am. I don't do math. I'm an English major.


FLEX YOUR MUSCLES
Writing Prompts
Anthony Burgess suggested taking a page from a dictionary and seeing if the words on the page can build up a scene or a description.