Friday, 5 May 2017

NaPoWriMo 2017 Ends

A post shared by Matt Tuckey (@matttuckey) on

National Poetry Writing Month has ended with the turn of May, and I've done hardly any poetry.

This Prospective Nocturne was the only blog post I wrote that was based on prompt from the site. Coming Up, What is the City, Easter Rapped Up, Letter to Fluffy Oakes, Snapshots of Life, Come Party this Bank Holiday, and Rap the News were all poems I wrote this month. You might like them. You might not.

I liked pushing myself to put my thoughts into rhyme. I used to do this a lot in 2000/2001. I feel like writing prose blog posts for so long has been too straightforward, too much like everyone else in the blogosphere. And since December '06, when I started blogging on another platform, I've possibly been letting myself off just so I could write quicker and get on with my life. It certainly slows down the writing process if you rhyme everything.

Also, when you read poetry, whether it rhymes or not you need to be able to pick up on cadence and rhythm. You want to feel how the piece flows as it's read out. The blog posts I create normally include a lot of pictures and videos, and hence they aren't things that you would only read- you'd look at, listen to and watch them too. When you do this, the multimedia will have a pace of its own, separate to the text. Hence these posts I don't feel would work particularly well in free-verse, rhyming or any other type of structured poetry.

The NaPoWriMo prompts didn't particularly inspire me. I thought they were very airy-fairy, typical poetry concepts that only work if you write traditional poetry for those who have always liked such things. I'd rather write outlandish, controversial poetry for people who never thought they'd like it. NaPoWriMo didn't foster that in me.

Not even my own ideas inspired me. I've been hoarding blog post thoughts specifically for use in April, prompts that could be used particularly in poems or rap verses. When April rolled around, I just didn't have the drive to wrote about those specific subjects, and I need that fire to make them work. So they're sat on the list. I might work on them over the next year and put them up on a #creativewednesday when I get the right itch. But, more to the point, if I can keep writing fairly familiar clubbing-based content but in rhyme, I might stand out from the crowd.

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