The Tangled Branch Discussion Forums

Welcome to the Second Annual Tangled Branch NaPo Celebration!!

April is National Poetry Month. One manner of celebrating the value, beauty and meaning poetry brings to our lives is to accept the NaPo Challenge. Th challenge is to write a poem a day during April -- 30 poems in 30 days.

Everyone is invited to partake of the experience of writing a poem a day in celebration of National Poetry Month.

This thread is for all who care to join in -- this thread is the daily record of our endeavor - the public journal of our journey.


Join the challenge, post your poems, share the experience with the other writers. There will be some who succeed with 30 poems for the month, there will those who share 5 or 12 or 21 poems -- all levels of participation are welcomed and encouraged.

Instructions for those who like instructions, will follow.

The Tangled Branch Presents . . . . . . . Instructions:


What to Do:

1. Commencing with the first day of April, write a poem a day - 30 poems in 30 days.

2. Post the title of your poem in this thread.

3. Post your poem in this thread - after a few days you can remove the poem if you want to, but you are not required to.

4. Appreciate some of the wonderful poems posted by others to this thread. Encourage each other - this is for fun and getting a poem done each day is accomplishment worth celebrating.

5. Enjoy. No critiquing allowed, no pressure to write good poems -- just poems, one after the other. Poems are not judged or graded. We pet them behind their ears, coo, and set some warm milk out for them.

6. Let your pen flow - no telling where it will lead, let your keyboard come alive - no telling what it will teach you. And for those days when fifty stanzas of iambic pentameter are not flowing as they should, remember - haiku, senryu, The American Sentence, and (gulp) limericks.

7. Last I checked MyWritersCircle has not popped out of existence yet. So like last year, there's a tab started over at the Red Barren for Tangled Branch NaPo'ers. I'd suggest you get take-out and bring it back here. That's my plan.

8. T-Shirts, decals, and propeller-beanies will go on sale later in the month.

Ye gods, at least three of those Serbian women look just like my nephew's Serbian wife.  Obviously as a race they 'breed true to type'.

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Re quill pens;  the English poet, John Clare, 1793 - 1864 obviously suffered from the still common superstitious fallacy that having the best equipment would produce the best verse.  A lot of the time he made his own inks and used sharpened reeds as pens,and ironed out used wrapping paper to write upon, but he hankered in verse for the 'finest'.

Quote:
I wish I had a quire of foolscap paper
Hot pressed - and crowpens  - how I could endite
A silver candlestick & green wax taper
Lord bless me what fine poems  I would write.

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My advice to poets?  Just bloody do it.  Creativity and editing/rewriting are two totally different beasts.  Even the biggest turd of a poem, when dissected with the sharp blade of editing, can reveal the occasional diamond or pearl worthy of more attention, but nobody can edit a blank page.

Gyppo


 

Good advice Gyppo,

BTW crow feathers were used to write a hand that has come to be known as "copperplate" which of course it wasn't because that name refers to the recreation of the written hand on a printing plate. 

Just killing time until the hour and day arrives

Or, alternatively, just wing it.  Trust your muse to do her/his job and trust life around you to provide prompts.  Ride the fiery and unbroken mount of inspiration bareback.

I know this doesn't work for everyone.  But if careful planning isn't delivering the goods then you'll lose nothing by trying poetry as an adrenaline sport.  Jump off the edge and describe how you feel or think on the way to the ground.

Gyppo

Let the poeting begin. This thread is open!

30 ways to die. 
#1

It burrows through hard fabrics 
agonisingly slow surfing on water molecules
but the intent is there, it'll take a while
Time doesn't always rush,
it has plenty of itself.

Occasional rebuilds are just band-aids
when we know where to repair things like
blood, bones and balconies.
Final straws can be just that,
almost weightless...a fraction of an ounce
or sometimes a pig that's being fattened
in an old and crumbling Italian apartment 
sent outside to trough and breathe in cool evening air.

They fell, the balcony and him,
erosion provided a nobler death for the pig
(nobler than the knife...or Mussolini's)

Time's consideration, walking below
wouldn't have known what killed him...pig or masonry.
Either way, it came slow, 
carefully planned and embarrassing...'killed by a pig!'
It's all just Time
finding new ways to entertain itself.

Colm! You dog! It's April 1st in Dublin now, isn't it? So you have the first poem of 2019! I still have to wait 5 hours and 10 minutes before the poeting hour strikes at my locale.

Seriously -- 30 death poems? Good Lord! What a spectacle.

He'll (Death) be so impressed with my promotion of him he'll (hopefully) give me an easier passage 
Eagerly anticipating your contributions T.

April 1, 2019, One

April first, a waning crescent,
sliver-thin. look for the penumbra
to discern her true nature, a wandering orb
tallying time by phases,
shifts the world.

Possibilities pulse at shorelines,
the beat of circles, cycles, orbits.
Butterflies and whales drift north
toward the pole tilting sunward.

Words pour down, then phrases,
old truths made new.
Cue the William Tell--Hi-Ho Silver
Away...