National Poetry Month 2011

It's National Manatee Awareness Month once again! I'm not sure what started the trend of associating a month with a particular charity or subculture, but it has gotten pretty out of control. One designation for April that is missing from this list - overshadowed I guess by National Soft Pretzel Month - is National Poetry Month.

Last year  I participated, writing a new poem every day in April and it was a success! Well, as much of a success as something that takes up all of my free time and generates no income can be. So I'm doing it agian.

For the next 30 days I will write and post a new poem determined by the following randomizing system: I have a deck of cards and a twenty sided die. Each card is assigned a topic and each side a form. In the morning I will draw a card and roll the die, and then, using the randomly selected topic and form, write and post the poem here before I go to sleep.

The list of topics is as follows:

RULE CARD WILD CARD
JOKER WILD CARD

2C Progress

2D Potential Energy

2S Phantom limbs

2H Noble lies

3C Quails

3D Abortion Protesters

3S Octopuses

3H Bonfires

4C Before Pictures

4D Conks

4S Scratch Tickets

4H Komodo Dragons

5C David Icke

5D Thomas Kinkade

5S Silly Bandz

5H Schadenfreude

6C Two Girls, One Cup

6D Two Brains, One Skull

6S A Random TED Talk

6H Crying on the Internet

7C El Trains

7D The Dead Sea

7S Wooden Escalators

7H The Scott Kazmir Trade

8C Zombies

8D The Hundred Flowers Campaign

8S Meteors/Meteorites

8H Invisible People

9C Dead Dogs

9D Cicadas

9S Whaling Ships

9H Resident Ghosts

10C Big Pete/Little Pete

10D Mitsuwa

10S Rooftops

10H Underage 'X's

JC Character sketch of a Starbucks regular

JD My Girlfriend's Toothbrush

JS Man Vs. Food

JH Magazine Street

QC Love Hotel Hill (Shibuya)

QD “Ravishing” Rick Rude

QS Falling in Love on the T

QH Mitochondrial DNA

KC Sadaharu Oh

KD Fat Elvis

KS Righteous Gentiles

KH Suicide

AC Apocalyptic Dreams

AD Sophomore Slumps

AS Sudden Enlightenment

AH Victories (small)

JOKER WILD CARD

JOKER WILD CARD
(I don't know why there are three jokers in this deck) 

And the forms:

1 Prose

2 Haiku

3 Shakespearean Sonnet

4 Ruba'i

5 Sestina

6 Blank Verse

7 Craigslist Missed Connection 

8 Free Verse

9 Hip-Hopera (except)

10 Free Verse

11 Petrarchan Sonnet

12 Limerick

13 Dialogue

14 Rondeau

15 Acrostic

16 Tweet Length

17 Sapphic Ode

18 Beat Poem

19 Bruce Springsteen Song

20 Any Above Form

 

Caveats:

- I will follow the system everyday even if it means I have to write a Ruba'i about Two Girls, One Cup.

- 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 sestinas this month.

- Question: Can the Craigslist Missed Connection really be considered a poetic form? 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.

- Like last year, 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, we'll see.

Thanks to those who participated with topic suggestions. I'll try to do them justice.

Enjoy and thanks for reading!