That’s a Wrap!

I had a blast once again this year celebrating National Poetry Writing Month!

This year, the folks at NaPoWriMo centered their prompts on art and music. As a fan of both, I found most of the daily challenges to be a true pleasure. I got the chance to peruse the digital collections of countless museums worldwide for inspiration, learn about new-to-me artists, and see many examples of how other poets incorporate musicality into their written works.

This year’s prompts also presented several opportunities to play with various forms. I struggled through an emotionally taxing ballad and a complicated sonnet, a form with strict rhythm, rhyme, and meter. I had fun with my first acrostic poem since elementary school. I also went off-prompt for a day of haikus, wishing my father a happy birthday in heaven.

There were some fun wordplay prompts, including one that provided several words for poets to choose from to create a poem. This led to one of my most random poems ever, which entailed the protagonist being feasted on by a group of vampires. Another allowed me to riff on a few lines from my favorite hip-hop song (“Lovelife” by Atmosphere).

Compared to last year, it is evident how much my skills have improved. But I also devoted much more time each day to working on edits. I involved AI in the editing process for the first time ever, which was interesting. I was a late adopter of AI; my resistance owed much to the conflicts many creatives have with these dang robots. However, I had careful boundaries around how I would and would not allow the AI to get involved and found myself developing a fairly refined approach for working with it throughout the editing process.

Some days, NaPoWriMo was invigorating; other days, it was exhausting. The 24-hour turnaround certainly puts a fire under me, but given the length of my pieces, it’s not a realistic timeframe to get anything to a polished state. Next year, I will consider limiting myself to poems that are only one page or less, or perhaps deprioritize maintaining my daily streak.

In regards to that daily streak, I am delighted to say that I only missed a single day this year. And even that day wasn’t “missed” per se. Rather, I felt too shy to share that day’s poem with the person it was written about, so I didn’t feel comfortable publishing it.

That secret poem wasn’t the only one written in honor of a person. As I mentioned, there were haikus for my dad. I also had the pleasure of expressing poetic gratitude for my mom getting me into piano lessons, celebrating a body-positive artist I met recently, a heavy and sad tribute to a young autistic man who was recently gunned down by police in Idaho, and a tribute to the late Buddy Hackett and Sergei Rachmaninoff.

In addition to all the written works, I enjoyed reading a few of my poems to a live audience in Wooster, Ohio, at The Lyric Theater‘s first-ever Open Mic Night. I was the only poet on the roster of talented locals, so I decided to mix in some comedic storytelling. Sandwiching a poem about being hit by a bus in between jokes about that unfortunate event was much easier than I expected, and it garnered some laughs, which bodes well for my future forays into comedy!

Overall, it was a wonderful and poetic April! If you didn’t get a chance to check out the daily shares on Facebook or Instagram, the webpage where I was publishing these works-in-progress will continue to be viewable for the foreseeable future. Since many of these drafts were coming along well, I expect to keep polishing many of them in the months ahead, so morphed renditions will likely be circulated.

Thanks to all who read my work and cheered me on. It’s vulnerable to share creative work of any kind, even more so when it was created hastily and does not feel “done,” so the encouragement from so many of you this past month has been immensely appreciated!