Friday Writings #178: Pick Your Pic

 

Hello again, dear Word Weavers –

Maureen Thorson’s April prompts this year for Na/GloPoWriMo were complex. We didn’t have to use every aspect of a prompt – in fact the prompts were altogether optional – but when I attempted to do so, they took my poems in directions which I found both unexpected and exciting.

While we were set specific tasks to do with form, style, and subject matter, there was also opportunity for the ekphrastic (in which, as I'm sure most of you know, visual art inspires poetry). Every day we were invited to look for inspiration in particular online art museums, choosing which of a great range of artworks spoke to us poetically. 

I haven’t been very keen on ekphrastics in the past, finding it hard to summon up good poetry about particular paintings, even those I enjoy looking at. It was different this time. With the opportunity to explore vast collections and make our own choices, it was much easier to find something which set lines forming in my head. So I am offering you the same. 



Your prompt this week is to find a piece of visual art which inspires you to poetry – or prose, since here we accept both.

By all means choose something you already know, but if nothing springs to mind you might like to take an online look at one of my favourite galleries: the National Gallery of Victoria, in Melbourne – a city I lived in for many years and have visited often since. Click here to roam around the NGV and see what inspires you. I enjoyed searching particular words, whether artists’ names, regions of the world, styles of art, historical eras …

 

 Entrance to the National Gallery of Victoria, taken by moi in January 2020.
(The display alters as exhibitions change.)

Guidelines: Link your ONE post on Mister Linky, below. 369 words maximum (excluding title and notes). Old or new writing, poetry or prose, on prompt or not.

Next week: We will invite you to write poetry or prose which explores starting over... again and again.   

Friday Writings #123: April

 

 

Dear Word Weavers (someone called me that recently and I loved it) –

It's April again! Who else remembers that song from the original 'Moulin Rouge' movie? Or we might think of April in Portugal, April in Paris, April Fools … not to mention April showers, and all those poems about Spring.

Though here DownUnder, we’re well into Autumn and our showers this year have often been heavy and prolonged.

For me and many others, including some of you, April is poetry month when we all write a poem every day, at least one, either privately or in participation with others doing likewise, and read even more poetry than usual. Every year I get to a point in April when I think I must have been crazy to do this. Yet every year I come back and do it again!

This year I decided to combine the NaPoWriMo (aka GloPoWriMo) prompts, which I’m doing for the first time, with the Poem A Day ones at Poetic Asides. It works quite well most of the time, as the NaPo prompts are very specific and the PAD ones quite broad.

Both sites specify that the prompts are optional, and that people are welcome to follow them ‘quietly at home’ without participating with the others who are doing them. I’m not participating at the Poetic Asides site this year – it was only after we were a little way into April that I made the decision to include those prompts – and unfortunately I’ve only had time to participate minimally at NaPoWriMo, but the posts there will remain accessible, so I can go back and read later and explore at leisure all the online poetic resources they alert us to as well.

So anyway, you guessed it, the optional prompt this week is April. You can allow that to inspire you in any way you like – or, if you are writing a poem a day this April, we’ll accept any one of them as fitting the prompt too – which is what I'm doing myself rather than try to write anything extra just now. 

And of course feel free to give us something entirely unrelated to April if you prefer.

Guidelines: Poetry or prose, old or new, one piece per person, 369 words maximum (excluding title). Please link, below, to that particular post in your blog.  If possible, also read other people’s posts and  leave an encouraging comment.

Next week, Magaly will invite us to write poetry or prose which includes 3 (or all) of the following words: consume, heartless, inflamed, peculiar, teeth.