Poets, Start Your Quills! It's NAPOWRIMO!!!!!

Inspired by National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), in April, 2003, poet and Big Game Books publisher Maureen Thorson started writing a poem and posting them on her blog. Thus, National Poetry Writing Month, or NaPoWriMo, was born.

This year, NaPoWriMo has 430+ participating sites, and Maureen will be ladling out writing prompts every morning.  For seven years, I’ve been positing with my BFFs, Ada Limon and Jason Schneiderman, over on Ada's blog. It was a ball to see what each of us came up with every day—the posts that came in at 11:55 p.m. etc.

This year, I’m taking a break. The first six years were fantastic, and generated several first drafts that I later turned into some of my favorite poems, including a poem that was later published in the New Yorker. But there’s a season for everything, and mine's currently not so much the generating of spring, but more the tending of autumn. Wait, is autumn about tending, or just plain death? I'll consult the almanac. Ada & Jason will be carrying the torch.

I recommend NaPoWriMo to everyone—poets and laymen alike. Last year, my old college roommate, Pete Roberts, got in on the act. Pete’s a ceramic engineer, glass blower and master mason, and does lots of crazy stuff up in Alfred, New York, where he lives on a farm with a dog and his own cannon. Last year, I bet Pete he couldn’t handle the NaPoWriMo challenge. He not only did he do it, he did it well, and posted the poems on his blog about masonry. Now I owe him one million dollars.

For those of you who worry that people will steal your work off the internet, let me just say: c’mon. You think we’re writing jingles for Pepsi?

How to do it.

1) Get yourself a blog, or use a friend’s blog.

2) Go to the NaPoWriMo site and register your blog. That way other people can see it. If you don’t want other people to see your work, don’t register your site. You should probably not do this at all, actually.

How to enjoy it: stroll around the participating blogs at the NaPoWriMo site. For the week that I’m blogging here, I’ll be posting NaPoWriMo poems that catch my eye. If you have a Tumbler site and you're on Maureen's list, make it visible to people who aren't signed in, then I can see it.

Good luck, drinks lots of water, and bend your knees.