On National Poetry Month and Challenges and What Was I Thinking?

Remember back in November when my writing wasn’t going well and I decided to do NaNoWriMo? The idea being it would give my writing a much needed boost and get me back on track. And it worked ... for a while.

Unfortunately, due to a series of unfortunate events, over the Christmas holidays I kind of lost my momentum. And my motivation. So I thought, why not take part in the A to Z Blogging Challenge? This challenge has you doing a blog post every day for the month of April (except Sundays) following the letters of the alphabet. I’ve done it a few times in the past and it was a lot of fun - each day is a new letter.

But when I went to their site I discovered that they’ve changed the way they’re running it, which is their prerogative of course, but instead of a links list of participating blogs, you’re required to post a daily link either on their website, their Facebook page, or Twitter - or all three if you have the time and inclination. Which quite frankly, I don’t.

For my A to Z theme (it’s always easier if you have a theme) I was going to do poetry, seeing as April is National Poetry Month. More precisely I was going to do poetry forms, which I’ve explored with great enjoyment in the past, but writing an original example for each day’s form.

When I decided not to do the challenge I toyed with the idea of just posting my A to Z poems anyway, but a daily blog post seemed like a lot of work. I was all ready to just shelve the idea when I received an email from my best bud Jamie who was waffling over participating in a local poem-a-day seminar.

I goaded double dog dared encouraged her to participate and even suggested I’d be willing to match her poem for poem, never really believing she’d accept. ;-) But she did, and now we’re both writing a poem a day for the month of April. To keep each other honest, we’re going to email each other our poems on a daily basis and then post a week’s worth of poems on our respective blogs on Saturdays.

I don’t know who’s facing the bigger challenge: Jamie, who’s working from a specific prompt that’s sent to her daily; or me, who has to come up with an idea for a form. One year I participated in the Writer's Digest PAD Challenge where you write to a daily prompt, and it was indeed challenging. The only good part about it was you could post your poems any time, so if you fell behind it was easy to catch up. But that’s where I first discovered a poetry form called the Sestina, which I’d never heard of before and that sent me on my journey of discovery of poetry forms.

I started out writing poetry, and I’ve always felt that it gave my other writing a creative boost. I think Jamie will find that too. If nothing else, it’ll get us writing every day, right?

Don’t forget to check back Friday for the picture prompt for April, and then Saturday for the first week ‘o poems. :-D