April is NaPoWriMo, or National Poetry Writing Month. More accurately, it’s Global Poetry Writing Month, but very few people seem to have adopted GloPoWriMo, so here we are, with NaNoWriMo’s more truncated cousin, where instead of an entire novel, people aim to write 30 new poems during the month of April - one for every day.
It can be pretty difficult to come up with something new to write poems about 30 times in a row, so the official
site posts prompts and inspiration every day, and various other individuals and organisations do likewise (including our friends over at the Poetry Non-Stop Podcast). And this year, so will we! Check out the blog every day during April 2023, where we’ll be posting a series of prompts (which you can view as serving suggestions, obviously - more like guidelines than rules). The magic that is dlvr.it will be cross-posting those automatically to our Tumblr, Twitter, Insta, Facebook, and even discord server. We hope. It could all go interestingly wrong, so 1st April may be foolish in more than the usual ways for us!
And just to add a soupcon of chaos to the mix, the Allographic prompts were randomly generated… having put together a list of subjects (and images to go with them) and a list of poetry forms, Fay went a bit extra with a spreadsheet (to no-one’s surprise) and generated 30 unique combinations, hence some of the slightly less… conventional combinations, let’s say… The idea is for this to form the basis for more randomised prompt generation in future, so do let us know what you think (especially if you have any inspiration to add to the pot)!
[Image description: In a curly font, April! is written against a backdrop of a rough oval of cartoon grasses, clover leaves, and tiny, colourful mushrooms. The text has a pastel rainbow spectrum from pale green on the left through all the other colours to yellow on the right. End image description.]
