Patrick Widdess
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NaPoWriMo: Mixing and matching prompts

4/11/2016

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It's been an interesting NaPoWriMo so far. I've been using a few sources for prompts and often find the poems I write come from a combination of two or more prompts. On the first day the NaPoWriMo site prompt was to write a lune – a form similar to haiku with a 5-3-5 syllable count. Turning to Robert Lee Brewer's Poetic Asides the prompt was to write a foolish poem. These prompts resulted in:

Their words seem foolish
because we 
never taught them ours.


On the Found Poetry site Collier Nogues set a prompt that involved creating a poem from a few sources by taking a document adding lines of poetry, yours or other peoples and turning the whole thing into a poem. I took a letter from the tax office, some lines from poem's in Simon Armitage's collection Zoom and some of my own to produce this:

Acknowledgement

Thank you for the crumbs, staples and eyes of potatoes you have supplied. We have sniffed, chewed, dissected and incinerated them and can confirm we will not be asking for anything more as you head into perfect darkness in boxer shorts and bare feet.


I've also engaged in some completely new forms like Woody Leslie's wordblock poems. I had an interesting time piecing this together:
Picture
Other poems have come from simply being out and about, such as this one that I wrote on a coach trip:

Long distance coach trip

Not long after we depart the woman sat next to me yawns, lets her head sink onto my shoulder and clutches my arm murmuring 'Frank.' I haven't the heart to tell her I'm not Frank. The man in front reaches for the armrest. He grabs my leg and pulls it up next to him. Instead of realising his error he digs his elbow in as he continues watching Lethal Weapon on his laptop. It's late when we reach the next stop and no lights come on when the door opens and more passengers embark. The last is a fat man peering through thick glasses. He stops at my seat and flops down on top of me. He pulls my right arm across his chest and inserts my slender fingers in the seatbelt lock. As the coach drives on I fall asleep to the slow muffled beat of his heart.


If you need some inspiration for your poetry check out my book Poetry Non-stop available now on Amazon.
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