Big Bang Poetry

Reinventing the Life of a Poet in the Modern World

Tag: NaPoWriMo 2024

The End of NaPoWriMo

May 1, 2024 / / 0 Comments

A little bit of catchup to do. I was in Cleveland for a month dealing with some family stuff. And then my dog. And then my computer. And then my sanity.

New Mexico Poetry

When I arrived home from Ohio, sitting on the doorstep, (literally), was the Albuquerque anthology of poetry, Open-Hearted Horizon, from the University of New Mexico Press. This was the first piece of good news I had had after many, many days of increasingly bad news.

I knew the book was coming out sometime this spring but I hadn’t heard an update since the fall of 2023, including any news of the book launch party which happened in March while I was gone.

Sigh. My streak of being unable to network with local poets continues.

But two of my poems made it into the anthology, including one from each of my books, Why Photographers Commit Suicide and Cowboy Meditation Primer. I’m very excited about reading this collection, which includes some famous local poets and Joy Harjo. To be in an anthology with her is pretty awesome.

This book will also be included in an upcoming page I’m working on that will be an ongoing roster of poetry anthologies and poets who write about New Mexico. I have a shelf of these books! It’s the kind of page I wish I had found when I moved back here in 2010 and was looking for examples of how poets write about the place to understand how I might do it.

You can buy Open-Hearted Horizon from the University of New Mexico Press page or from Amazon.

NaPoWriMo 2024

This was my last year doing the challenge as I’ve hit the goal of over 300 poems (311 to be exact). Quite frankly, I’m shocked I was able to get this year’s challenge completed, almost without a hitch.  I say almost because on the last day,  (April 30), I accidentally copied over the poem prompt from the day before, (for April 29), with no backup available locally or online. I hadn’t yet printed off the set and had kept no offline copy. Why I forgot to do this? I have no idea but it’s a great example of  the precariousness of NaPoWriMo challenges because almost every poem starts that morning without much pre-writing. So I literally had to re-invent that entire prompt from scratch.

I guess it’s surprising this had never happened to me before in all the 11 years of NaPoWriMos. It was an almost miraculous bit of luck that I was able to slowly remember most of the poem. Unfortunately, it’s not an exact copy. I know a few lines here and there are missing from the summary and the poem. It was an interesting mental experience to crawl back into the flow and see what memories came back in what order, the most recent memory being a missing piece that woke me up very early this morning  and I kept mulling over whether the line was “instead of someone to  spend all this time with” or “instead of someone with which to help spend all this time” or finally “instead of someone to help spend all this time” and then I fell asleep and forgot it all over again and had to start all over when I woke up again, the second time finally scribbling it down on a piece of paper in the dark and then going back to sleep again.

This last challenge is interactive with 30 multimedia prompts covering food, handwritten postcards, music, maps and scavenger hunts so you can write along. I had really no idea how each poem would go each morning, with the exception of the Winslow weekend posts which I had to preplan.

Here is a summary of the last 11 years of NaPoWriMos:

2013-2017 and 2019 can be found (somewhat degraded over the years) on Hello Poetry.

If you’re interested in interactive poetry projects, you can also try the 52 Haiku prompts.

The NaPoWriMo poems will stay up for a little while until I find the time to edit them better and compile them into a book. The nature of this challenge is that poems are quickly scrawled off and edited only within the span of a day. So they will be improved before their final resting place.

Winslow Writer’s Trip

One of the things I’m grateful for right now is being able to have taken a writing trip to Winslow, Arizona, a week or so ago. I so needed it. The trip was to meet up with the Sarah Lawrence College off-campus writing group that started in the early 1990s at the house where Murph and Denise’s were living in Bronxville.

Over the years we have stayed in touch and a few years ago we started a reading group to tackle Infinite Jest. We kept going after that. Last August, when I visited New York City, we met for dinner and agreed to meet again in Winslow in 2024.

We caught up on life stuff, writing projects and generally became a closer, fiercer gang of writers. It was perfect, aside from the fact that three of us miscalculated the time-zone change driving back east to Albuquerque and I had to floor it to get them to the airport to catch flights back to Philadelphia and New York. Good times.

 

To be honest, I almost decided not to finish the NaPoWriMo at all. This spring was so rough I was very much feeling like “what am I doing all this for?” But then I decided I would get to the 300 poems done if killed me. It did not kill me. But I have some quiet reflection to do right now.

People, Place or Thing: NaPoWriMo 2024 Is Coming

February 23, 2024 / / 0 Comments

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

  1. A childhood comfort food
  2. A recipe from childhood you still make
  3. A recipe that breaks your heart
  4. A recipe you associate with your mother, an aunt or mother-figure
  5. 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?

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