over a kind of script we’ve created

napowrimo_plum In preparation for NaPoWriMo, I’m coming up with some poetry ideas. I have a few topics I want to tackle (Alzheimer’s and my maternal grandparents, a praise poem to bunnies, etc.) and a few forms to work on, including:

  • hay(na)ku: A tercet of 6 words: 1 in the first line, 2 in the second line, and 3 in the third line. I’d never heard of this form before this morning, but I just found out my friend Peg Duthie has a pocket booklet coming out from Open Hand Press called Drop, Portion and Assignment of three hay(na)ku sequences, for $3, with all proceeds donated to Haiti relief.
  • N+7 (or N plus 7): This is an Oulipian exercise where you replace all the nouns in a piece with the noun that comes seven entries later in the dictionary, which can have hilarious results. I use it as a kick-start. I’ve talked about this before: “my version of N+7, in which I replace nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs (I have lists of each) and only keep the sentence structure, and then use the resulting hot mess with its occasional serendipitous accidents as a springboard to write something that makes sense.” My poem “A Kind of Honey” was written during NaPoWriMo 2009 using this technique (from Matt Robinson’s “The Lost Art of Waving“).
  • Sestina: I think most people are familiar with these now, but I’ve only ever managed to write two successfully (“Rex Sestina,” which is forthcoming in Orbis, and “The Rainy Season,” which was in Strange Horizons some years ago), and that’s just sad, so I’m going to try again.

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