Poem-A-Day Challenge Part of National Poetry Month; Christmas in April, a “Used” Lagniappe

April 1, 2013 in Cats, Caveman, Lagniappes, Poetry, Vampires, Writing
Tags: Fantasy, Horror, National Poetry Month, Poem-A-Day, Poetic Asides, Science Fiction, Writers Digest

As noted by Marge Simon in the post just below, April is National Poetry Month, and not just for horror writers either.  For the poets among us of every stripe, a few years back WRITER’S DIGEST Poetry Editor Robert Brewer offered a challenge on his blog:  to write a poem from a prompt he would supply every day during April (cf. March 31 2011, et al.).  When this began I got in touch with another local (in her case, mostly fantasy) poet and proposed a game.  We would share the prompts, write the poems, and meet once a week to share the results.

So one wouldn’t back out — one might be occasionally late, but to not produce a poem at all would be embarrassing.  As a result, I, at least, have written lots of poems lately, especially since this proved popular enough that Brewer repeats it in November and, in the months that lie between, he offers a weekly prompt on Wednesdays.  That’s days of the week Wednesdays, no relation to the resident cave cat.

Many of these poems will suck, to be sure, though even then some can be rewritten.  And some are good the first time out, including a number of the newer poems in my book, VAMPS (A RETROSPECTIVE) — don’t know what that is, just click its picture in the center column and, should there be a hole in your spirit that begs to be filled by vampire poetry, buy a copy for less than the cost of a blood-sausage pizza.  The thing is, an extra challenge that I’ve given myself is to try to confine the poems I write this way to horror, science fiction, fantasy, or related themes.  Granted some of these, too, may be short poems — senryu, haiku, or sloppy but hopefully witty imitations thereof.

So why not give it a try for yourself?  For the prompt du jour, just press here — after all, you may like it.

And then, to see a sample of  what might come from this exercise, harking back to an entry on this blog from December 26 2011 — thus a lagniappe, but one that has been “used” — first written on November 25 2010 from a prompt to write a poem about Space (“could involve outer space, white space, inner space, the space between one day and the next. . . “), press here for “Expanded Mission,” published exactly a year and a month later as a special Christmas edition of ABYSS & APEX.