The Harwood Guide to the 2021 National Poetry Writing Month Challenge

This is the 25 anniversary of National Poetry Month! We challenge ourselves to write 30 poems in 30 days. At first, this seems daunting, especially to beginners. I believe we can do it! Even if I write fewer than 30 poems, I have new poems, which feels like a win. This is a game you can’t lose.

No Worries

Never wrote a poem? No problem! Poetry can’t be taught, only learned by writing it. If you have never read poetry, now is a great time to start. If you want to learn forms, there are plenty of site with information. Otherwise, just let yourself be free. Write from the heart, or describe the world around you. Rules are entirely optional.

Don’t worry about how good the poems are. Like National Novel Writing Month, the goal is to write every day. This trains your brain and gets easier for me with each day. You may find that as you get used to writing poetry every day, the first drafts improve.

Don’t worry that you won’t know what to write. There are writing prompts all over the Internet. You can pick a theme at the beginning of the month. Feel free to change it later if you wish. One year I decided to write poems using local, seasonal imagery. I put the best of them in a self-published limited edition broadside called “East Bay April.” You may wish to do something similar, but don’t pressure yourself. You can think about what, if anything, to do with your poems in May.

Don’t worry about making it perfect. You can do that in the second draft unless, of course, you use the Beat practice of not self-editing. (By the way, Kerouac was not honest when he said he never revised. You can see the original butcher paper scroll manuscript for “On the Road” at the Beat Museum. It has plenty of cross-outs and handwritten edits over the typed print.) The important part is to finish the poem. Editing is for May.

Poetic License

There are no poetry police! You are the person who decides if it is a poem. Size doesn’t matter. There are minimalist poems of few words or only one. “Tundra” actually won a prestigious literary award. I wrote the minimalist poem “ethereal wisteria” some years ago. Gogyoshi, five line poems, can be five words long. Of course, there are good old haiku! Perhaps you write poems that you think are much too long, jungles of dense verbiage you long to prune. Remember our motto, editing is for May!

You can write proems or prose poems, make up a form, break every law of the language, even mix your metaphors like cocktails and get drunk on poetry. You may use high-falutin’ language in phantasmagorical flights of fancy or be as plainspoken and direct as you like. Write about any topic you want, from amphibians to Zanzibar. Last year, my first poem was the table of contents of “the Book of Hours.” After writing it, I wrote poems for the titles listed in the first poem. Voila, chapbook!

You don’t have to share your poems. Write them just for yourself if you wish. You can call them exercises and put them aside. I save everything if only to see my progress and evolution. Often, we are the worst judges of our work. What I think is junk, others often see value in. Sadly, the converse is true!

Tips and Tricks

“It’s April second (or later), and I haven’t started.” Start now! Give yourself permission to write enough poems to catch up. I like to write extra poems in the beginning, because life happens. Short poems are great when you just want to get it done, yet they can be profoundly beautiful. Short forms include haiku, gogyoshi, tanka, limerick, cinquain, and minimalist.

Are you trying to write formal verse and stuck for rhymes? Don’t want to use a free, online rhyming dictionary? Put in filler verse in the correct meter, “tra la, tra la, tra la,” or use nonsense words like “Scrambled Egg,” which became the immortal “Yesterday.” If you only write a stanza or two, you can still call it a poem, “The Ballad of Cobalt Cat Part One,” for example, which will be about my darling cat.

You always have a copyright on anything you write, even if you put it online. You don’t have to register with the government. Unless you give permission, no one may publish, post, or share your poems. When putting any creative writing online, it’s good to always put your name in the body of the post and the words Copyright 2021 All Rights Reserved. If you’re using a Creative Commons copyright, you can use that instead of All Rights Reserved.

If you want to publish, always put your name and contact information on the first page of your document, with the page number and your last name on each additional page. If a publisher wants a blind submission, you can easily make a copy without this information.

Back everything up. A lot of writers email pieces to themselves or leave them in the draft section of their email. I have seen the grief of an author whose only copy of his manuscript was lost. The downside of the draft email trick is if you get hacked, you lose your poems. It happened to me, and it hurt. Now I send them to my backup email account. You can also put poems on AllPoetry.com without sharing them. (AllPoetry requires a free account.)

Join a private poetry writing group. The Internet is rife with theft. The best social media groups are intimate and with clear rules about honoring your copyright and only giving positive feedback. The support and inspiration of other poets can make a huge difference. There are open poetry groups on All Poetry and NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and, of course, in real life. I like to join Camp NaNoWriMo in April for the support and fun. I love to set my word goal low because it is fun to surpass it.

If you accept the challenge, you can expect to have fun and write more than you knew you could. If you write 30 poems, you will have an astounding achievement and bragging rights. You can do it!

Resources:

AllPoetry.com Collections of classic and new poetry. Free classes, community, and contests with free or paid membership. Members post their own poems on their pages.

NaNoWriMo National Novel Writing Month. Camp NaNoWriMo. Free membership with communities, writing buddies, project management, badges, and winner’s certificate.

NaPoWriMo National Poetry Writing Month. Writing prompts and links to participants’ websites. Free.