Trees thrive after a forest fire. Some insects cannibalize after reproducing.
Sometimes to be human necessitates becoming wild.
Any gain is this pragmatic. Think about it:
Jubilance is a dissidence. To feel joy
is to make the body a protest, to bear the thorns
of a blossoming moon. To make the body a protest
is to stay alive. To stay alive
is to become a fire, to become more of us and to eat.
I had fun with this prompt, details of which you can find here.
The poem I chose for the basis of the prompt was “Marigold” by Mahogany L. Browne:
Each flower a wilting sun The death of a new day is never kind Grief ain’t no song No loss is this romantic
Set into opposites, it became:
No thorn a blossoming moon The life of an old night is always cruel Jubilance is a dissidence Any gain is this pragmatic
The idea of thorns on a blossoming moon stood out to me a lot, and I loved the concept that “jubilance is a dissidence” so much, especially when to just celebrate one’s own identity and existence is a political statement for so many people.
I had trouble getting into the poem until I decided to read it from the bottom up. Then things started making more sense and I filled in the gaps. I had a lot of fun with how this one turned out!
You feel it on your skin– like cool lightning on a cat’s tongue, feline swallowing an angry ghost. What is a ghost? The sticky sweet streams that streak your wrists after the last bite of mango; the lipstick goodbye; the aftertaste of electricity coursing through seashells. Follow the fog, deeper into the throat of thunder, that colossal purring of the universe, the roaring of contentment, to wherever the gods live.
Happy day two! This poem was based on the prompt found here. If you’re curious about the process, read that first, then the rest of this will make sense.
The words I chose for my prompt were fog, river, salt, thunder, and ghost. Here were the questions and answers wrote down for each:
What does fog feel like? cool lightning on a cat’s tongue a feline swallowing an angry ghost the grass taking a sudden chill a sad song evaporating
Where is the river going? toward a thirsty mouth wherever gods live down the throat of thunder
What does salt taste like? crystallized fears of the powerful/powerless static/electricity running through seashells
What is thunder? graves in an earthquake the universe purring, or growling
What is a ghost? the juice on your skin when the fruit is gone
I ended up using most, but not all, of the answers. Many I ended up using verbatim, but not all. I don’t really get to surrealist in my writing, though I always love poetry that does, so this was a really fun exercise!
I meant to do this closer to May 1, but hey, life gets hectic and the ADHD gremlin that lives in my brain just wasn’t having the whole “sit down and write a coherent blog post” thing this week. Better late than never, right?
First off, I want to thank everyone who has been on the journey of NaPoWriMo with me this year. Whether you read everything I wrote, or just popped in to say hi once or twice; whether you commented regularly, or silently lurked in a corner; whether you were navigating your own writing, or just a reader along for the ride; I am so grateful to all of you who joined me last month in any capacity. Of course we don’t write just for an audience, but having so many people from all over the world to share my work with makes for so much more joy in the work.
I regret not being able to be as active in other peoples’ writing this year. Working from home, dealing with a very interesting phase of raising a toddler, and dealing with house-hunting has left me precious little brain power, so I was mostly an intermittent lurker. Next year, if things are even a little quieter, I’d love to do what I used to do and post recommendations of both published poetry and other NaPoWriMo participants’ work along with my own poems each day. But that’s to tackle next year.
For now, I just want to sit in my gratitude.
April 2021 provided my highest blog traffic for a single month to date. I don’t get a ton of traffic–that’s still barely in the thousands, to be honest–but it was great to see my viewership grow.
More exciting than that, I had people from 38 different countries view my blog last month! NaPoWriMo becoming a global event has been amazing and being able to connect with writers from so many different places and backgrounds is just incredible.
Add that to my own growth through NaPoWriMo and I think I can call this year’s event a resounding personal success. I know I comment every year on how much I’ve grown as a writer, but I have written some stuff I am really, REALLY proud of this year. I didn’t just complete the challenge. I completed it with energy, and passion, and for the first time in a long time, I completed it while genuinely feeling like a writer. I’ve rekindled the passion I always hope to find again when I start NaPoWriMo every year.
So what’s next?
Well, I am going to start working on a book of children’s poetry, and I might share some of that here. Experimenting with children’s poetry on the days when my brain just didn’t want to cooperate was an amazing way to remind myself not to take myself too seriously, and it gave me a way to share my passion with my daughter (who is currently working her way through some Shel Silverstein as well). I don’t think there’s a better way to be creative than to think like a child.
I may also start sharing some prompts that my daughter and I come up with together, so keep a look out for that! (If you want a head start, the first one is her suggestion to me yesterday: A poem about “all of the feelings,” that involves a moose playing board games. I haven’t written to that one yet, but I’m excited to start!)
And of course, I’m just going to keep writing in general. And god it feels good to say that.
In the meantime, I would like to now shift the focus of my audience (if I haven’t lost it by neglecting to write this wrap-up post for almost a week) to some projects of loved ones I’ve been meaning to share.
First, my best friend Cassandra is a wonderful author, poet, and editor, working on her debut novel. She is also offering editing services to those who need it! You can find her online here.
Another dear friend Dawn is a poet working on her debut chapbook Sex Ed. You can find information about that chapbook and her blog about her journey writing it here.
Finally, my husband’s band, St. George’s Folly, is working on their second album this summer! My husband himself wasn’t in the band yet for the first album, Along This Road, but it’s a great listen and if you like the sound I hope you stick around to see what their near future holds. You can find them online, as well as information on where to listen, here.
Please check all of them out if you like my poetry enough to trust my taste. If not…well, check them out anyway, because they’re probably more talented than I am.
Thanks again to everyone reading this and everyone who came with me for NaPoWriMo 2021. I will be back next year for another round, and in the meantime I’ll be active here as this ever-moving life allows me to be!
I know it sounds unfair or even mean-spirited. It sounds petty and bitter. But this is the honest truth: If you’re a successful person, I’d rather see your failures than your successes.
It isn’t that I don’t enjoy your success, or don’t want you to have it. Success stories simply don’t inspire me like failure stories do. Don’t get me wrong, it makes me happy and even proud to see people overcome obstacles! But let’s be realistic: Not every obstacle gets to be overcome. Some obstacles can’t be overcome. Others can be, but maybe you’re not in the right headspace for it, or you were too tired, or maybe you even just got lazy or procrastinated and life got the better of you. It happens.
The truth is we get knocked down way more often than we jump over big hurdles. And those are the stories I want to hear.
I remember distinctly the first time I realized this. I had just discovered that Neil Gaiman, an author I had long loved and admired, had a Tumblr account. I was perusing it out of curiosity, and I saw this:
My favorite author said that. “I can do that with things I wrote this morning.”
And for a moment I thought, that can’t be right. This is Neil effing Gaiman. He’s a good writer. He writes things people all over the world love! He’s successful. Sure, we’re all our own worst critics, but he must take pride in even the work that needs improvement! Hell, I thought, I bet his worst writing is better than my best.
But slowly, I began to realize two things.
One: Even great writers write absolute garbage sometimes.
Two: Even writing that is good, that will resonate with lots of people, is sometimes hated, or at least doubted, by its creator.
Which lead me to more conclusions: That just because I write badly doesn’t mean I’m a bad writer, and that just because I hate what I’m writing doesn’t even necessarily mean I’m writing badly.
It was like I had unlocked something. Probably something the rest of the world knew, but I just couldn’t seem to internalize. So to anyone who needs it: Sometimes successful people suck at what they do, or they doubt themselves, or they struggle to get a words on paper.
I need to remember that sometimes.
That’s why I continue to follow Neil Gaiman on Tumblr, where his views on what it means to make art or be a writer are what keep me wanting to write.
That’s why I think George R.R. Martin and his long delays between books is a damn inspiration. (When he asked Stephen King, “You always get six pages [written a day]? You never get constipated? You never get up and go get the mail, and think ‘Maybe I don’t have any talent and should have been a plumber?'” Boy I felt that.)
That’s especially why Anne Lamott’s S***ty First Drafts has been perpetually on my re-reading list, to be revisited at least twice a year, since I first read it when I was in college.
I don’t always want to know what you did well. I don’t want to hear about child prodigies–they always make me wonder if it’s too late for me. I don’t want to hear about people who won against all odds, because I can’t always see myself in the winners. We all, as creators–and we’re all creators, in some sense of the word–have a touch of impostor syndrome.
So tell me about yours. Tell me about when the odds defeated you. Tell me about the days or weeks when you can’t make anything. Tell me about when executive dysfunction keeps you from picking up a pen (/paintbrush/instrument/tool of your choosing), or when writer’s block keeps your talents at bay for longer than you care to admit, or when you doubt those talents ever existed in the first place. If you show me the things you’ve made that you’re proud of, also show me the days you sat in the quiet, battling yourself, and wondering if you ever should have tried to make anything in the first place.
Sometimes I think we all need to be reminded that our heroes are only human. At least for me, that’s what keeps me capable of hoping to join them.
This year was my fifth attempt at completing NaPoWriMo, and I hoped it would be my third completion, but alas, it wasn’t meant to be.
I was out of state for a week and didn’t have consistent access to a laptop–that alone made it daunting, because doing this from mobile is kind of a pain for me, but I might have soldiered on anyway.
But I was also with family I hadn’t seen in almost two years, who hadn’t had a chance to meet my daughter yet (she’s 16 months old, and last time they saw me I was about four months pregnant with her). So not only did I not want to fight with doing things on a small cell phone that would’ve been much easier done on a computer, I also didn’t want to lock myself away from dear family for a couple hours or more a day to write. I hammered our a couple tanka, which were a delight because I always love finding new ways to use language within a small, controlled space, but I didn’t want that to be the bulk of my poems this year and I didn’t feel I had the time (or that I was willing to devote the time) to really exploring my writing like I prefer to for NaPoWriMo.
But I gotta say, I wrote some of my favorite poems I’ve ever done as part of a NaPoWriMo this year, and some of the prompts over at NaPoWriMo.net pushed me in ways I was really satisfied with.
I wrote my first abcedarian poem, which ended up being one of my favorites of this year. An origin poem of sorts gave me the opportunity to explore some really difficult but impactful times through writing. When asked to write a poem that sprawls through time, I delved into how my anxiety has manifested since childhood. When asked to write a poem about how to do something, I was able to finally write a poem about my grandfather I’d once tried to write in college and couldn’t at the time.
I was asked to write a poem about something simple and mundane, and why and how I loved it, turned out to be one I was kind of on the fence about at first but ended up really liking. A challenge to write something using very conversational language turned out to be one I felt the same way about. Similarly, the challenge to write a poem as a monologue turned out to be one of my favorite pieces I’ve ever written!
I wrote 23 poems this month, and those right there are seven–SEVEN!–that I genuinely loved and felt proud of. Many more poems I wrote this month, while not ones I was particularly emotionally attached to, felt very new to me, which was a reward all on its own.
The first couple years I did NaPoWriMo, I did it just to prove I could do it–I could stick to writing a poem a day for 30 days. While I still hope to complete that challenge every year, I’m not super upset with myself for not doing so, because my goal has shifted–I just want to learn, test myself, try new directions, and hopefully write something I can be proud of, and I did all that this year.
This also reinvigorated my love of writing, which has fallen by the wayside the last year or so as I deal with parenthood and other life messes.
Thank you so much to everyone who read and commented this month. I tell myself I don’t write for praise or attention, but I can’t pretend the encouragement isn’t motivating! Some new people started following this blog this month too, so welcome to you guys, have a look around, etc.
I thought about pushing myself to catch up, or to at least pick up where I left off on the daily prompts, but I feel okay about holding off for now, focusing on other things, and getting back into writing at my own pace. Been a wild ride this month though, and as always, I love it. 10/10, will return to it next year.
Hi all! So tomorrow begins NaPoWriMo, that fun time of year where I am actually as active on this blog as I wish I was every month.
Okay, that’s a lie. If I posted a poem a day every single day of the year I think I’d be permanently incapacitated after about three months. But I do feel just a bit guilty for neglecting this blog as much as I have the past year. In my defense, I have a one-year-old now and she doesn’t leave me much time for writing in between chasing after her, chasing after her, and oh, sometimes a little bit of chasing after her. She’s already quite a mischievous child.
Here’s to hoping this year’s NaPoWriMo is a new beginning for this blog and for me as a blogger/writer. If you’re participating too, let me know in the comments. I’ll be participating and linking my poems through NaPoWriMo.Net‘s comments as well so maybe I’ll see you there!
A couple days late, but I did want to do a NaPoWriMo recap.
So, I did not complete National Poetry Writing Month this year. The idea was to write a poem every single day for 30 days. I completed it last year, but fell short this year.
Except I don’t really see it as falling short at this stage. I did exactly what I set out to do, and I feel I withdrew at the right time.
No, I didn’t write thirty poems in thirty days. However, I did write to the prompts each day that I completed, which gave me the chance to explore new angles for writing and try new things in my writing. I experimented with writing in new forms, new styles, poems based on art…I learned a lot. I taught myself to stretch my poetry beyond what I was comfortabe with. Just as I knew, in the discomfort was where I found some of my favorite poems.
I’m not sorry that I backed out. I started feeling too overwhelmed to wander into discomfort, and started instead writing poems for the sake of having written them. I wasn’t learning anything from them anymore. I wasn’t letting myself feel the discomfort enough to write something different. And of course, it wasn’t worth it to push myself to complete it just to say I could and I did. I did that last year.
So here I am, having written a fair bit of stuff I hated but also a few poems I’m quite proud of. I’ll link my favorite poems I wrote this month below, and let you all get back to your regularly scheduled programming. Some of them are my favorites becuase I just think they were good poems, some because I’m proud of having worked in an uncomfortable form or style, and others just because I had so much fun with them.
I’m a little bit bummed to say it, but I won’t be completing NaPoWriMo this year.
I had a lot of fun with it this year. I do feel I did what I set out to do, which was to experiment with new writing styles and learn new things by sticking to the NaPoWriMo.net daily prompt (even when it felt like something I wouldn’t be able to do).
But the last week or so I haven’t really felt I was experimenting or learning anything new. I’ve been really burnt out, and NaPoWriMo felt like an obligation looming over me all day rather than something I was excited to do like when it first started. And as a result I started churning out poems I didn’t like at all, for the sake of having written something for the day.
Which would be fine if my only goal had been to show that I could complete NaPoWriMo, but I did that last year. I KNOW I am capable of pushing myself to finish. I don’t want to make myself dread writing each day for the sake of churning out a poem I didn’t learn anything from.
So I feel no guilt in saying I’m backing out of NaPoWriMo this year. I made it most of the way through the month, and I did some things I can be proud of. On May 1, when I’ve had the chance to review my month’s work, I’ll still write up a month in review about some of the highlights of NaPoWriMo. In the meantime, I’ll let myself take it easy the rest of this month.
Some exciting news I’ve been waiting to share: I’ve just recently had my first poem accepted for publication over at Rat’s Ass Review!
They’re compiling a collection of poems called the Such an Ugly Time collection, a series of poems about our current administration during its first 100 days in office. My poem, Another New Colossus (originally published here on this blog), has been accepted as part of this collection.
It’s up on the Rat’s Ass Review web site now, and you can find it HERE!
In addition to the web site publication, the Such an Ugly Time collection will also be published as an e-book and print book. I’ll post more information on that as it becomes available.
Thanks to all for your support and for continuing to read what I put up here! I’m excited to be able to finally call myself, after 14-ish years of writing, a published poet!
We are exactly one week away from the beginning of this year’s NaPoWriMo!
Last year was my second attempt at NaPoWriMo, and my first attempt that was actually successful. And I learned so much more than I thought I would.
I went into NaPoWriMo expecting that the main thing I’d learn would be what makes a poem flow for me. I thought by forcing myself to write every day, even when I’m not inspired enough for the poem to just pour out, I’d get a better sense of my own writing process, of what makes the poem seem to pour, how the voice of each poem is shaped, etc.
I did, but more so, I learned about the importance of prompts. I found some of my best writing came from prompts. When I sought my own inspiration, I tended to go to the same sources and write in similar styles. I was used to thinking about writing and creativity in a certain way at that point. But prompts pushed me to think more about how an idea forms, and how to experiment.
So that’s my goal this year: Lower my expectations, and experiment. National (Novel/Poetry) writing month is about quantity, so we don’t expect quality anyway, right? You could argue that, due to the specific and meticulous nature of poetry, this defeats the purpose, but I learned so much last year. So if I’m going to write badly anyway, I may as well go all out and write badly in ways I’ve never written before.
A new adventure awaits!
You can view last year’s NaPoWriMo poems at my NaPoWriMo2016 tag HERE.
This year I’ll once again be keeping an eye on NaPoWriMo.net for inspiration, ideas, and community. Also, like last year, I’ll be posting a poem I love every day, but I think this year each time I respond to a prompt from the NaPoWriMo site, I’ll also share a poem or two by a fellow participant for that prompt.
If you’re participating in NaPoWriMo, comment below with a link to where you’re posting your poems so I can follow along with you!
Katie Staten 