Andrew-Wyeth-Wind-from-the-Sea

Andrew Wyeth (হ্যা তারা)

Whew. Ok. So that's another NaPoWriMo in the bag. One more year to go.

Meanwhile, I’ve been collecting some final stats on this year’s set of poems.

There were:

  • Nine pretentious literary references 
    1. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
    2. Edna St. Vincent Millay
    3. Proust
    4. (twice)
    5. Cyrano de Bergerac
    6. Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo
    7. Theodor Adorno
    8. Wordsworth’s lake
    9. Svengali from Trilby
  • Two probably-misapplied psychological traits
  • Quantum mechanics
  • Words in five languages
    1. English
    2. French
    3. Spanish
    4. Italian
    5. Some Latin stuck in there

Two late arrivals displaced two planned poems, which changed our demos somewhat:

      • Songs with men: 24
      • Songs with women: 11

I had to gather images for all the Twitter posts and after a while I just decided to add them to the NaPoWriMo page. In the process I found this interesting thing about painter Andrew Wyeth’s  windows. 

Although I love all the songs I picked, I did regret not being able to find a spot for a song of Sara Bareilles’ with her vast array of very helpful and inspiring love songs. And to that point, lots of fascinating and magical things happened during the making of these poems but one of them was this: as I was lamenting the lack of Bareilles in this set, my music app shuffled up a Bareilles song that fit very movingly into one of the new Electrical Dictionary poems, which is a sister set of a sort to this group.

I was also able to create linkages between a few of these poems and some of the poems in “33 Women” from NaPoWriMo 2018 and we could revisit some of the lovely women there. So that was nice.

In related news, the Poetry Society of America is doing a "Song Cycle" series right now where their investigating the relationship of poetry to music in the opposite way, music inspired by poems.