This will be my last National Poetry Writing Month Challenge year. I’ve been doing NaPoWriMo for over 10 years now and I said I would stop at 300 poems, which I will hit this year. I wanted the last set to be something more interactive, like an asynchronous group activity. So I’ve come up with a theme on looking back on childhood and putting the past in a very tiny book.
Although I’ll be posting things every day in April related to the theme, I’m not seeing it as a project that has to be finished in a NaPoWriMo amount of time or even in 30 days. The point is to just get through the 30 little challenges. I’m starting to create a calendar to get it all organized.
Materials you will need to complete the challenges:
- an iphone camera (if you want to memorialize your little scavenger hunt assemblages ((spoiler alert: there will be scavenger hunt assemblages)),
- recipes (see below),
- 5 books from childhood that you loved, (access to childhood stuff),
- 5 postcards,
- a tiny little notebook. I purchased my tiny little notebook (pictured above) a few years ago at the gift shop of El Rancho de Las Golondrinas, the Hispanic living history museum near Santa Fe. I was just waiting for something to do with it all this time.
- Optional: A youtube or streaming music account
Example topics will look something like this:
Childhood Foods
- A childhood comfort food
- A recipe from childhood you still make
- A recipe that breaks your heart
- A recipe you associate with your mother, an aunt or mother-figure
- A recipe you associate with your father, uncle or father-figure
I’ll document my progress as we go and anyone who follows along (and wants to share) can send pics to and progress to mary@bigbangpoetry.com.
Speaking of NaPoWriMo, on the plane to Cleveland, The Birds and the Bee version of this song below came up on my phone’s music app shuffle. (And I really do love these hipster versions of this song, truth be told.) I remembered driving home from work at AECOM in downtown Los Angeles years ago and Steve Jones on his radio show extolling the virtues of the song’s structure.
I also remembered it was the last outtake of NaPoWriMo 2022 and it got displaced for April 13, 2022, for a Genesis song. Here it is.
Fathoms Deep
(“How Deep Is Your Love,” Bee Gees from the movie Saturday Night Fever)
It’s tempting to pick the proliferating
hipster versions instead of this vulnerable
little embryo of a song
by the original vibrato brothers,
its morass of whispering
away from disco foolhardiness.
Regardless, I feel we must ask
the key, foremost question
posed here in a love trill,
addressed here in plain,
manifest English.
Because I really do need to learn
where this knowledge lives,
where it is, for what it longs.
And this is an inquiry to the heads
of the realms where we are both from.
A question to the pilot, the head honcho,
the chairman of the board, the grand poobah.
How many fathoms deep is it?
And can we believe in it?
