NaPoWriMo Day 1: "How to Write in Meter" 4/1/2019

So, the blog is back, at least for the time being, after being on hiatus since last July. Once I started writing poetry it's what I wanted to blog about, and I wanted to share poems, but then I realized that those are considered "published" and I had to take them down if I was going to send them out to journals, and it all seemed rather depressing. Which it still does, from that angle. But I sort of miss doing it all the same. I may pick up more after I retire (!!!) in May.

However, crazy as it is in a busy month, I've decided to try NaPoWriMo, National Poetry Writing Month, and I need a place to post poems in some kind of gathering. So obviously this is the place. I will take down the posts later if and when I send any of these out.

Writing a poem a day feels very intimidating to me, although I am greatly inspired by Vince Gotera, who is a master at it, and his collection of NaPoWriMo poems, The Coolest Month, is officially out today. But I think it will be good for me, to build my chops, to get out of the sense that everything I write has to be great/deep/potentially publishable or I'm not good. And it will help me stockpile some ideas and drafts for the MFA I'm beginning this summer.

If anyone wants to get involved, the two sites doing (different) daily prompts for April are the official site at NaPoWriMo.net and Robert Lee Brewer's Poetic Asides blog.

Today's NaNoWriMo prompt:  Write a poem that provides the reader with instructions on how to do something.

My poem is pretty meta, as it's about writing poetry. But it wasn't so much that I was trying to be clever, rather that it's the subject that immediately jumped into my mind. I just taught a class in writing in meter on Saturday as part of the monthly poetry series I'm teaching, so the gist of these instructions was something I actually said (minus the imagery of course -- certainly minus the sex part!). And I love meter and it's something I get excited to introduce to others.

The meter is basically iambic here with natural variations, but there's a trochaic line and an anapestic line, both inserted on purpose and related to the subjects described -- trochees always feel to me like a stamping dance, and anapests like a horse cantering.

The line lengths aren't uniform in terms of number of feet -- I'm letting myself go with that, though it bothers me, as I can only even begin to fit this in to my months if I don't obsessively revise.  Letting poems be imperfect (for now) is one of the reasons I think doing this will be good for me.

How to Write in Meter

The secret is, I told the workshop students,

don’t think about it. Analyzing is a later move;

your brain won’t get you there; you have to feel it

in your breath, your body. Heart that beats, lub-dup,

the pulse that throbs, that other pulse of coming.

That time you strode the city, full of your intent.

Cajun dancing with that wild man at the festival --

how you’d fall for him and finally fuck him too

after so many years, for all you disapproved.

You must recall a horse you loved in childhood,

how you cantered across the wet fields, with that scent

of crushed wild onion blooming in the air.