April 2025 NaPoMo

I know I haven't been on here for a while, because like many people I know, I feel like I've just been trying to conserve my energy, trying to find spaces to breathe and recover from the onslaught of difficult things in the world.

But on the last day of March, I was invited to participate in a really fun conversation with Angela Dribben and Caren Stuart on their new collaborative effort, Great Goodness. It's a series of YouTube interviews they're doing with writers/artists/creatives of all sorts, to celebrate the idea of goodness in all its forms in the world— something we all need so much,

Because Angela and Caren are also into astrology, they open the show with a tarot card- or oracle card-drawing; we get to talk about the images on the card a little, and then at the end of the program, they offer it as part of a writing prompt to viewers. Today the card they picked was "Fork in the Road," and it depicted a white reindeer standing in front of a crossroads, in winter. There were signs pointing in many different directions. It had a tether around its neck, but on closer inspection, the tether was not actually attached to anything. A little snowy owl was perched on the reindeer's back, and a string of bright pennants hung above them.  In the distance, a glow came from beyond a forest. I'm also mulling over the images, and wondering whether they'll turn up in a poem...

Speaking of poems, just like that, another April NaPoMo is upon us!

As I've done for several years now, I offer writing prompts for the entire month of April. I'll put them here in weekly batches— so please come back to read. 

Happy Writing!

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NaPoMo 2025 Writing Prompts

April 1 - 7

- Poets often talk about trusting one’s intuition and taking that “leap” into the as yet undiscovered territory of the poem. This is the basis of all metaphor,  from the Greek metapherein, which means to carry over.
Write down a metaphor, and let your intuition lead you from there into a poem/poem draft.

- It feels like the beginning of spring. In our back yard, our beloved fig tree which was just pruned three weeks ago, is pushing out small leaves that look like little green flames. Look for signs of spring in your own, immediate surroundings. Write about beginnings, or about starting over.

- I am always so grateful when I come across a line of language— it can be poetry, it can be words from a song, from a letter, something overheard in a conversation or on the radio or something someone has said to me— that, when it "arrives," makes me sit up as if I was given an epiphany.  Keep an eye or an ear out for something like this, and when you find it, take it and turn it into/make it part of a poem. 

- Write a poem in which you address a “you” in an unusual or unexpected time and/or location (interpret freely). You can address a familiar character or be inspired by someone who’s done something audacious or atrocious, or imagine a time and addressee in a future of your imagining. 

- Write a letter poem to someone who you've wanted to talk to for a while, but might have been unable to (perhaps because you've been separated by time or distance).  Write a letter even without hope of a response.

- I read about how in the UK, there is a shop called a Poetry Pharmacy— one can walk in and receive a poetry prescription for anything. I would love to visit that place! Anyway— write a poem as a prescriptino for some condition of your choosing/imagining.

- Look through poems, essays, or stories, or even through news or feature articles— and find a question that calls to you. The question should be one that's not just answerable by a simple yes or no — it should have interpretive possibility. Write a poem in response to the question.

April 8 - 14 

- I just came across a thoughtful reminder: it may be true that we've inherited a host of trauma— personal, familial, historical— but it is also true that pain is not the only thing that has been passed down from our ancestors to us. We also have their wisdom, their grace, the beautiful, unique, and specific ways in which they viewed the world and learned to make or grow or fix things to ground and sustain themselves— and that we also have the ability to tap into, to help us keep moving forward. What are some of these things you've inherited? Write a poem about one or a few of these gifts, and how you use them in your daily life.

- Once, at a poetry program, Richard Jones read a poem whose title was, he said, the name of his late mother's all-time favorite lip color: "Cherries in the Snow." And indeed, sometimes the interesting descriptions of color can be found in places like the drugstore cosmetics aisle (nail polish: "Half Past Nude," "Golden Hour"), or at a paint store (I've seen "36 Hours in Marrakesh," even "Dead Salmon").  Pick one such product name, and use it as the title of your poem (which doesn't have to be about that product at all).
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- Write a poem as a postcard to your future self, but use a specific date/season/time of the year. Where are you, and how are you?

- What would you be, if you could be a plant? Write a poem exploring that, or creating a new plant identity.

- Write a poem in which something that is conventionally viewed as small or meek, takes on a fierce and powerful persona.

- I recently got and put together (with the help of my daughter) a corner bookcase which is already helping to reduce and organize the book "clutter" in our living room. Pull down two or three books at random from your own stash, turn the pages, and take down a sentence or a line from each. See if you can use one or all of them in a poem. Let the lines lead you.

- What makes you giddy? Write an ode to giddiness.

April 15 - 21

- Write a poem in the voice of a character from inside a myth/mythological world of your choosing, but make this character talk about contemporary realities.

-  Make a list of 50-100 words that appeal to you because they are vivid, textured, appeal to the senses, sparkle with some kind of energy (emotional, intellectual, physical - their shape or sound). Look through this list and write a poem using the words you are most drawn to.

​- Write an abecedarian but in the form of a prose poem. That is, your prose poem will be made up of 26 lines in total, with each line beginning with a letter of the alphabet (as you work down through it).

- Write a poem modeled after Natasha Trethewey's "Myth," in which the lines of the second part of the poem repeat the lines in the first part, in reverse order. There will be a middle line that acts as a kind of hinge. 

​- Write an erasure poem based on your choice of source document. (One example is Tracy K. Smith's "Declaration," whose source text is the U.S. Declaration of Independence.)

- Write an ode to a part of your body that you usually take for granted.

​- Write a poem which incorporates a line from a poet you like (you'll put this line in italics, and refer to it in your title in some way); or, as a variation, write a poem in which you argue against a line written by another poet.

​April 22 - 30

- Write either an ode or an elegy for the weeds that you pulled out of the yard, or for the wasp you aimed bug spray at, or for the loaf of bread you forgot on the corner table and that grew mold (or for some other seemingly small or inconsequential thing).

- Write a poem in which you build a Museum of ____.

- Use these lines as a starter for a poem:
   The stones mouth words
   in a language I used to understand.

- We talk about the craft of poetry, of craft in poetry— but how do we really come to know what we know? Write a poem about something you've learned/something you were taught, but in an organic and experiential way (that is, not out of books or "schooling").

- Use these lines in the middle of a poem:
   Historians say such cataclysms
   happen every eighty years.

- Use these lines at the end of a poem:
   It sifted like fine flour, forming
   a mound at the bottom of the bowl

- Write a prose poem that is just one, continuous sentence— you may use punctuation anywhere in it, though — as long as it's not a period or a hard stop (think commas, semicolons, colons, long dashes).

- Write a poem from the point of view of a persona sometime in an unspecified future, looking at a fact or event from our time (this time)— what would be perplexing about this? or fascinating? or repugnant? or admirable?

- Write a poem that is a recipe for a literary cocktail in tribute to a poet you admire.

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