Welcome to NaPoWriMoNZ!

Every day in April 2018, we posted a prompt, a link to a poem by a living New Zealand writer, and a quote or link to a reading related to writing. We left the site up subsequently for anyone who would like to write or read poetry on their own PoWriMo schedule.

The prompt is intended to help you play, experiment and generate a draft. The other elements – the poem and the reading – aren’t connected to the prompt, or each other, but are an opportunity to encounter (or maybe re-encounter) work that might interest you. A list of the poems and poets is provided on the ‘About’ page, for easy reference.

As noted during NaPoWriMo, we’re unable to provide feedback or post work here. In fact, we recommend you put your drafts away for a few weeks before coming back to them, to decide which you want to keep working on – as in no. 2 of Rebecca Solnit’s tips on ‘How to Be a Writer’. There are links to suggestions for editing poems in the posts around the middle of the month.

Thanks to everyone who followed the site and gave us positive feedback during the month. All the best for your writing!

P.S. as at March 2024, all of the links in the posts still work…

Day 30

Prompt: On Day 16, you were asked to track down a book of poems written by one poet – preferably someone whose work you’re not familiar with – and published in the decade before you were born.
Set aside time to read this book through, to form an initial impression of it as a whole. Does it seem contemporary, of its time, or a bit of both? What surprises you most about it – what’s most familiar? What stands out about its forms, the language it uses, its cultural references?
Choose one poem and copy it out. Pay attention as you write – do you almost write a wrong word by mistake? Do the line breaks feel right? Do you find yourself warming to or recoiling from any attitudes or phrases in the utterance of the poem?
Now write a reply poem. Don’t try to include direct reflections or responses to the poem (or the book as a whole) – leave them in the background of your mind and let your poem do what it wants.

(If you haven’t found a book yet, have another go at one of the prompts from earlier in the month, ideally one you felt very positive or very negative about. But don’t pass on today’s; make it a May prompt. It can be a very revealing and thought-provoking exercise.)

Today’s poem is here.

Today’s reading: ‘I didn’t turn to poetry so some authority could tell me what not to do.’
– Brenda Hillman

Day 29

Prompt: Choose a form that makes you grind your teeth when you see it on this list. Write a poem in this form, or pushing against this form, titled ‘Spiral’.

Today’s poem is here.

Today’s reading: ‘[…] I have to believe that the practice of poetry, and the professing of it (in the sense of both teaching and speaking as a poet in the world) is an act of paying attention to experience, of responsive awareness. And in that sense it does make the world a bit more human.’ – Mark Doty

Day 28

Prompt: Take at least a 15-minute walk somewhere you don’t normally walk. Along the way, keep an eye out for the things listed at the end of this prompt. The first time you see one, write down what it is. When you get back, write a 15-line poem that includes everything on your list (in any order). Look for: a bird; a number between 1 and 9; public property; something orange; a piece of equipment; a person’s name; something discarded or broken; something making a noise; something half-hidden.

Today’s poem is here.

Today’s reading: ‘[P]oetry is there to resist fashion’; also, ‘Poetry is evidence for the possible existence of the soul, something those who shoot people or keep them in near-slavery are trying to deny. It’s an indication that language can reflect the world back in an intense and passionate manner, and that the users of language are important, not just commodities.’ – W. N. Herbert

Day 27

Prompt: On an unlined sheet of paper, or a screen that’s at least A5 in size, write a poem that looks like a sketch – with some deft lines and phrases, irregular indents, and ample use of the white space.

Today’s poem is here.

Today’s reading: ‘Narrative forms accumulate to form a sort of meta-story that everyone thinks is reality. And this meta- or mega-story has a life of its own that presses down on our psyches all the time. Some might call it ideology or false consciousness or whatever, but it’s spiritual too […]’ – Sharon Thesen. [This interview was at http://www.thecapilanoreview.ca/interview-with-sharon-thesen/, but trying to access the site in 2024 yielded security warnings, so proceed with caution]

Day 26

Prompt: Write a love poem without identifying the beloved or declaring your feelings.

Today’s poem is here.

Today’s reading: ‘Dreams are important to me – and sometimes they can be powerful. A dream, however, is not a poem. One has to be very careful when using dream material in a poem. There’s always the danger that the dream fails to come to life within the poem or that the dream doesn’t allow the poem to acquire the freedom it needs in order to become a poem in its own right. Myths pose similar problems.’ – Sujata Bhatt [in an interview on publisher Carcanet’s website, available 2018 but removed 2020]

Day 25

Prompt: Today being Anzac Day, choose a family member who was alive during WWII (but who didn’t serve in the armed forces or participate directly in the war effort), and write a poem imagining or embodying some aspect of their life during that period.

Today’s poem is here.

Today’s reading: ‘It is when the imagination withdraws from things that they become objects, when it lets the world go.’ – Robert Hass, Twentieth Century Pleasures (Ecco, 2000)

Day 24

Prompt: Write a poem where each line is a complete phrase or sentence, and is completely unconnected in subject to the line above. (If you normally write poems with pen and paper, try writing this one on a computer or other digital device, and vice versa.)

Today’s poem is here.

Today’s reading: ‘[A]s well as reading widely, I think it’s important to read closely: choosing two or three great poems and devoting yourself obsessively to understanding their workings. Read them again and again, silently and aloud. Pin them to your study wall. Write them out in your own handwriting. Memorize and recite them […]. It’s the surest way to push your own writing to the next level, as your qualities of perception refine and expand.’ – Sarah Howe (from an interview on the Forward Arts Foundation site, available 2018 but a 404 in 2021)

Day 23

Prompt: Play a round or two of Oulipo’s n+7. For this you’ll need access to a dictionary and a piece of text that’s several paragraphs long – it could be anything, like a news item on rugby or a business report – or a famous poem. Underline each noun in the text, then start writing out the piece. Each time you come to an underlined word, look it up in the dictionary. Count through the next seven nouns that follow yours in the dictionary, and replace the word in the text with the seventh noun. The result is likely to look nonsensical, but unless you’re really unlucky it should yield at least a phrase or two that make a kind of curious sense and intrigue you. The exercise is finished when all of the nouns have been replaced, but if this doesn’t feel enough to you, feel free to write a poem including the phrases you found most interesting.

Today’s poem is here.

Today’s reading: ‘I detest “nature writing”. I consider myself a writer of the environment – an ethically and politically motivated writer who perceives each poem, each text I write, as part of a resistance against environmental damage. “Nature writing” […] is too tied up with validating the relationship with the (Western!) notion of self, of egotistical sublime, of the gain the self has over the “nature” s/he is relating to.’ – John Kinsella

Day 22

Prompt: Write a poem that is one long sentence. Experiment with punctuation, line breaks and stanza breaks to see what effect different choices have on the flow and sense of the poem.

Today’s poem is here.

Today’s reading: ‘When, as a poet, you abandon the unintentional in order to serve the intentional, you are not writing toward discovery or recovery. Instead, you are denying wonder a place to flourish. You are patting your own ideals on the head. You are relapsing into lifeless terrain you know not by heart but heartlessly.’ – David Biespiel

Day 21

Prompt: Write a poem which includes at least 6 clichéd phrases or attitudes, used neutrally or as though they were fresh. Now rewrite the poem, replacing all the clichés with something that makes the poem more alive and interesting.

Today’s poem is here.

Today’s reading: ‘The proper response to a poem is another poem.’ – Phyllis Webb

Day 20

Prompt: Write a poem farewelling someone or something.

Today’s poem is here.

Today’s reading: ‘I know that linear plod is the least interesting tendency that I have in my mind. Things start doing the plod and the better part of me thinks, “Stop, disrupt it, break it up.”’ – Philip Gross. [This quote came from a 2016 interview in The Cardiff Review, unfortunately no longer available online as at March 2024.]

Day 19

Prompt: Write an acrostic, a poem in which the first letter of each line spells out a name or a phrase when the letters are read top to bottom. (See here for some examples.)

Today’s poem is here.

Today’s reading: Helena Nelson’s ‘32 Ways of Reviving a Rejected Poem’

Day 18

Prompt: Write a reply to a poem by someone else – affirming, challenging or extending its images, propositions or themes. Before you start, choose a constraint you’ll use in your poem and stick to it – for example, using the same number of lines as the original, or replicating the end-words in each line. Come up with your own title for your poem as the last step (and make the subtitle ‘A reply to [Title, Author]’).

Today’s poem is here.

Today’s reading: ‘In my book, poetry is a necessity of life. It is a function of poetry to locate those zones inside us that would be free, and declare them so.’ – C. D. Wright. A short video of Wright talking about revision is here.

Day 17

Prompt: Begin writing a ‘notebook poem’ – a sequence of fragments or separate sections that has the sense of being collated from a notebook. (If you haven’t got a notebook, start keeping one – hard copy or digital – and jot down ideas, phrases, impressions and lines as they occur to you.) In order for it to be a notebook poem, rather than a notebook extract, you’ll need to edit it carefully and title it judiciously – keeping the sense of work in process, while also thinking about what the poem does as a whole.

Today’s poem is here.

Today’s reading is Simon Armitage’s Poetry Testing Kit.

Day 16

Prompt: Write a foggy poem – no hard edges, suggestive rather than descriptive – something that has to be felt through.

Bonus task, for the next couple of weeks: Track down a book of poems written by one poet – preferably someone whose work you’re not familiar with – and published in the decade before you were born. (You should be able to find one by browsing through your local library or second-hand book shops, or using inter-library loan.) Start looking for it now, as you’ll need it at the end of the month.

Today’s poem is here.

Today’s reading: Jane Hirshfield’s list of revision questions includes:
• What is being said?
• Is there joy, depth, muscle, in the music of its saying?
• Is there more that wants to be said?
• Are there things in it that don’t belong?
• Are there things in it that are clichéd or sentimental?
• Is it self-satisfied?
• Is it predictable?
• Is it in the right order?
• Should it go out into the world?
• Is it finished?
• Six months later, is it still finished?
(The full list is given in The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux, W. W. Norton, 1997.)