National Poetry Writing Month! NaPoWriMo is here!

It's National Poetry Writing Month! I've spent the last eight weeks encouraging people in the poetry class I've been teaching to take part in NaPoWriMo so I can hardly not take part myself this year!

I've not officially signed up though and won't be sharing all my poems here or on social media. That would make them 'published' and would mean that I couldn't get them published elsewhere, which is what I may well want to do.

The idea is to write a poem a day during April. You don't need to share the poems though you are encouraged to do so. Mostly it's a way of generating a lot of drafts that you can then work on and make into well formed poems. It's an inspiration and motivation tool! If you want to take part, then there are three sites I know of that are sharing daily poetry prompts to inspire NaPoWriMo participants:

The NaPoWriMo website.

Poetry Superhighway.

Found Poetry Review. 

There are more helpful sites listed on Trish Hopkinson's blog here.

If you don't want to have to write any poetry, you can still take part, there are some suggestions here on the website of the Academy of American Poets.

The first poetry prompt on the NaPoWriMo site is to write a lune, which is a variant on the haiku (three lines with 5 / 3/ 5 syllables). So here's my lune, written in response to this morning's sunrise:

morning sky on fire
blackbirdsong
in the city streets