April is National Poetry Month. I have been writing and reading a honkin’ lot of poetry lately – more than any time in my life except my angst-ridden teenage years and the first years I spent in Wyoming in the late 90’s.
To keep challenging myself and develop new mad skills, I signed up for PoMoSco. This is a month-long project sponsored by The Found Poetry Review. As a participant, I get to call myself a Poetry Scout, and I pledge to complete at least 50% of their 30 poetry prompts during the month of April. This means I gotta write at least 15 poems. And not just poems, but found poems – crafting them from outside texts or audio sources into word collages, using erasure, white-out, clippings, overheard conversations – it’s pretty wild, man. And not something I have ever done before. For every prompt I complete with a poem, I post my work on the PoMoSco site and earn a badge. It’s like being a Girl Scout again!
So I’ll keep you posted about the ups and downs of hardcore poem generation. I am hoping to create at least a few good’uns. You can read all my poems as I post them (hopefully daily) by going to my profile page.
In the meantime, go read lots of poetry!
“Sonnet TP and dedication 1609” by William Shakespeare, Thomas Thorpe – Shake-Speare’s Sonnets, quarto published by Thomas Thorpe, London, 1609. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons
