If you started reading this blog in the past 11 months, you may not know about Napowrimo. Napowrimo is modelled on Nanowrimo—National novel-writing month—a scheme which encourages people to try to write a novel (or at least 50,000 words) in the month of November. Napowrimo is national poetry-writing month, and the target is a poem a day for 30 days; in April because April is National Poetry Month in the US. And yes, the ‘national’ part of the name is a bit of a misnomer; blame whichever short-sighted person came up with the name for nanowrimo. I’m occasionally tempted to refer to it as wopowrimo or glopowrimo, but I think the name has pretty much stuck now.
Which means that this blog is going to be taken over with poems for a month. I can tell you now that many of them will be truly awful. Sorry about that. I’ll probably write the occasional non-poem post as well, but if you really can’t stand slapdash amateur poetry, you might want to avert your gaze until May.
There’s no convenient central napowrimo website as there is for nanowrimo. The idea was invented by Reen, who was the first ever napowrimo-er back in 2002. I introduced the idea to PFFA in 2005, so this will be my third year. I reckon in 2005 I produced some quite good poems, like this one, this one and this one. Last year I was much less pleased with my output and I didn’t manage the 30 poems anyway. So my target is to improve on last year. In the meantime, here’s a picture of a fluffy kitten:
Max, originally uploaded by Tante Bluhme’s.
Wish me luck.
2 replies on “Napowrimo: consider yourself warned”
Good luck, Harry, and hey, if you manage to pull one or two brightly coloured stones out of the rock pile, it’ll have been worth it (well, that’s what everyone keeps telling me anyway).
:-)
Cheers Scotty. I can’t say I’m currently feeling enormously inspied, but I’ve still got over 12 hours until the first deadline… perhaps I’ll go and make a cup of coffee.