Na(tional)Po(etry)Wri(ting)Mo(nth)

While I've written some novellas during NaNoWriMo, and wrote a script once during April's script writing frenzy, I haven't tried the poem-a-day gauntlet of NaPoWriMo.

Because poetry is so much harder? Perhaps. And because it's a public writing - the others were private unless you wanted to post, and at the end you sent in your mms. for a word count. NaPoWriMo isn't like that. NaPoWriMo is less centralized, for a start. There are many different organizing sites participating. And they all offer 'prompts.'

This is where I run into trouble. I don't need 'prompts.' I have too many unfinished projects on the go as it is. What I need is focused finishing power. What I need is a NaPoWriMo site that exists solely to help poets focus on longer projects, of their own choosing.

This morning I searched for such a site, without success.

Many of the prompts I saw seemed more appropriate to writing skits - funny, clever, cute. But nowhere did I see any prompts that attempted the ineffable - to help the poet elicit the deeper poetry within. I can't imagine Paul Celan, or Rilke writing on any of the prompts I saw.

Why isn't there a site where you can march to your own drums but together with other similarly idiosyncratic eccentric poets?

NaPoWriMo isn't anything like the novel writing month, or the script writing one.

Are poets secretly autocrats? I began to wonder during my search for a community to join for the coming month.

How come there's no invitation anywhere to simply write what you want to write? There must be, somewhere. And perhaps I'll discover it, or someone will point me in the right direction.

In the mean time, I have decided to go ahead, valiantly, willy nilly, and write a poem a day. If my writing seems to co-incide with a prompt at one of the sites I've looked at, I'll enter it for that round. Otherwise, I'm beating my drum in my own jungle of words alone.

I'll label each of these posts NaPoWriMo 2011.

And I am diving back into my stalled manuscript of Venus Poems.

Found the mms. in my Google Docs tonight, browsed it, groaning. Still, continue...

I am currently listening to a wonderful recording of D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love by Ruth Golding that I downloaded from LibriVox (all the readings, of public domain books, by volunteers, and free to download, a rich site of many delights). Lawrence was so articulate about love. Life, the flowers of death, the mystic universe, limits of love, and the forces, and what is deeper than all of these. Do such intellectual lovers still exist?

Lawrence's meditations on love as voiced through his character Gerald in Women in Love is a good place to start on my way back into my manuscript on love.

Hopefully, I'll have something written before midnight!