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Godawful Poetry Fortnight - writing cue - day 13
Godawful Poetry Fortnight - writing cue - day 12
D Mervin Ffingir writes, and having writ, moves on:
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Your poem must be based on any Wordsworth poem. It must be titled "The spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings."
Labels: Godawful Poetry Fortnight
Write a poem about what a bitch it is to have to go to a dull boring office with crass commercial philistines who don't see the beauty of art rather than sit around languidly writing poetry all day. For bonus points, make say nasty things about publishers and how your genius will be recognised one day, long after you're dead, and then they'll be sorry, but see if you care.
Labels: Godawful Poetry Fortnight
It's Sunday. You have time on your hands. You could spend it with family, and/or doing fun things outdoors. But no. You are a poet.
So, today, you will create a new poetic form. And explain it by writing a poem in that form.
Of course you can name it after yourself.
Labels: Godawful Poetry Fortnight
It's the weekend. Yay! You can teach yourself stuff about how to format things online. Write a shape poem.
Labels: Godawful Poetry Fortnight
Your poem must be an ode to a public figure. Preferably a film star or a cricketer. Or Anna Hazare.
Labels: Godawful Poetry Fortnight
In this poem you must write about The Grave Social Issues That Plague Our Country.
Labels: Godawful Poetry Fortnight
Today's poem must be in SMSese. And it must be at least 20 lines long.
Labels: Godawful Poetry Fortnight
Today, Godawful Poets, you will write either a ghazal in English or a sonnet in Hinglish.
Labels: Godawful Poetry Fortnight
Today's poem must be about love again. But at any age.
And it
• must be in rhyming couplets
• should, preferably, be in terrible meter
• should, preferably, use the rhyming pairs love/dove and moon/june
Labels: Godawful Poetry Fortnight
Dang. Wrote this and forgot to publish it!
Today's poem must be about unrequited teenage love
Labels: Godawful Poetry Fortnight
As you already know, Godawful Poetry Fortnight starts on the 19th August and runs up to the 31st August. This blog is its literal and spiritual home. All previous posts on the subject here are tagged thus.
Our Patron Saint is William Wordsworth.
And he gets this signal honour for saying that poetry "is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." Way too many aspiring poets have rallied behind that banner, too few going so far as recollecting those emotions in tranquillity, let alone reading the rest of the preface to Lyrical Ballads (which can be found on Bartleby, for those interested).
This is its fifth year.
Godawful Poetry Fortnight isn't a competition such, so we don't invite entries. We instead invite all poets, of whatever degree of cringing self-image, to use its licence to put down their very worst work. Let it all out, we say, like you would acidity or, erm, other body wastes. So this is our call for exits.
Post godawful poems as often as you like during the Fortnight. (The True Believers Challenge: post thirteen godawful poems, one on each day of the Fortnight.)
If I can think of 13 prompts in time, I'll post them all here, and you can use them, if you need them. No promised though.
Use a Godawful Poetry Fortnight tag or label on your post, and/or maybe a #GodawfulPoetryFortnight hashtag on Twitter and/or Google+. You can link to this post or this blog if you want to, and/or you can alert me on Twitter) and/or Facebook and/or Google+. None of that is required if you'd rather not. The important thing is the evacuation. I mean exit. I mean poetry.
Right then. Onward! Upward!
Labels: Godawful Poetry Fortnight
Note: [*] = The site linked to requires registration.
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We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually produce a masterpiece. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.
~ Eyler Coates
to be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best night and day to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle any human being can fight and never stop fighting
~ e e cummings
In three words i can sum up everything I've learned about life.
It goes on.
~ Robert Frost
Ring the bells that still can ring,
Forget your perfect offering,
There is a crack in everything;
That's how the light gets in.
~ Leonard Cohen
May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.
~ Edward Abbey, naturalist and author (1927-1989)
I fell in love – that is the only expression I can think of – at once, and am still at the mercy of words, though sometimes now, knowing a little of their behavior very well, I think I can influence them slightly and have even learned to beat them now and then, which they appear to enjoy.
~ Dylan Thomas, Welsh poet, short-story writer, and playwright, "Poetic Manifesto" in the Texas Quarterly, Winter 1961
A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
~Thomas Mann, novelist, Nobel laureate (1875-1955)
The world in general doesn't know what to make of originality; it is startled out of its comfortable habits of thought, and its first reaction is one of anger.
~ W. Somerset Maugham, writer (1874-1965)
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~ Al Rogers
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~ George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), novelist (1819-1880)
Either you think - or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.
~ F. Scott Fitzgerald
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~ Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, author (1689-1762)
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