National Poetry Month

So apparently it's National Poetry Month. It's also National Parkinson's Disease Awareness Month, National Arab American Heritage Month, and National Manatee Awareness Month, but let's not worry about those other designations for April right now.

As a jump start for my other projects, a much needed update to an otherwise dying blog, and a gift to you my dear readers, I'll be participating this year. Each day I will write and post a new poem based on the following randomizing system. Said randomizer is a nod to my indoor kid past, consisting of drawing from a deck of cards and rolling a twenty-sided die. Each card and each side is assigned a topic and form, respectively.

The list of topics is as follows:

Joker WILD CARD

2C Palate cleansers

2D Pizza

2S Gas station cappuccino machines

2H Leaving a tip

3C White person dreadlocks

3D White Christmas

3S White guilt

3H White Day

4C Television

4D Slavery/Emancipation

4S Evolution/Devolution

4H September 14th

5C Bodacious babes

5D Not-so-bodacious babes

5S Ducks

5H Sacred spaces

6C Organic milk

6D The Great Bear

6S Character sketch of a Starbucks regular

6H Misanthropy

7C The Sea

7D Noble lies

7S Det. James McNulty

7H Victories (small)

8C A highschooler on GChat

8D School photos

8S Riding the T

8H Riding a Ferris Wheel

9C Young poets

9D Skinny jeans

9S Ironic mustaches

9H The yoke of fame

10C Irrational fears

10D Phantom limbs

10S Foreplay

10H Afterglow

JC Tobacco

JD Rasputin

JS Bill Clinton

JH WILD CARD

QC The power of red lipstick

QD Red Dawn

QS Kissing a married woman

QH Having a gay best friend

KC Burger King

KD Fat Elvis

KS Johns

KH Suicide

AC Abroad

AD Vices

AS God

AH Potential Energy

Joker WILD CARD

And the forms:

1 Pretentious doggerel (botch)

2 Haiku

3 Shakespearean Sonnet

4 Ruba'i

5 Free verse

6 Mainstream rap

7 Bruce Springsteen song

8 Limerick

9 Free verse

10 Sapphic Ode

11 Tweet

12 Zen Koan

13 Stream of consciousness prose poem

14 Craiglist missed connection

15 Dylanesque rant

16 Beat poem

17 Heroic Verse

18 Free verse

19 Rondelet

20 Any above form of my choosing

Every day in April I will draw a card and roll the die and write a poem using that topic and form and post it here before I go to sleep for the night.

Caveats:

- I will follow the system everyday even if it means I have to write a Shakespearean sonnet about Burger King. After the first poem of the day, anything else written here will be done so in any form of my choosing.

- Once a topic is used, it will not be put back in the deck.

- On rare occasions, some re-rolling may be necessary. I will adhere to the guidelines of this project as much as is realistic, but I'm not about to write 25 mainstream raps this month.

- Question: Can tweets and craigslist missed connections really be considered poetic forms? Answer: Chill out, Robert Pinsky. I could use this space to argue yes, citing the deterioration of "poetry" as it relates to the death of the monoculture, but I don't need to, because I have full creative control here.

- I would have incorporated the infamous rule card, but since I bought my deck of cards at Dollar Tree, one was not included.

- For the next month, it's a safe bet that you'll find a good bunch of doggerel on this site, but maybe a nugget of gold or two. It's an experiment, we'll see.

Thanks to those who participated by throwing some topic suggestions my way. I'll try to do them justice.

Enjoy and thanks for reading!

Jump to the first poem