Day 24 ... NaPoWriMo / Poem-a-Day 2026 / Stafford 98

Greetings once more, friends! My poem today is #98 in this year's Stafford Challenge (and #463, including last year's Stafford Challenge poem count). Maureen Thorson’s NaPoWriMo prompt: “Today, we challenge you to write your own poem that takes place at night, and describes something magical or strange that happens but that no one is awake (or around) to notice.” Robert Lee Brewer’s Poem-a-Day suggestion: “For today's prompt, write an unidentified poem.” Let me do something different today and give you a photo first. To whet your appetite for later. Photo Source Okay, now on to the poems. I'm happy today to combine the two prompts in two poems — both prompts in both poems — which I'm grouping together as a single poem with two titled sections. Strange Night Tankas             “Spring Riddle” Dark flying creature swooping under stars, her long winter sleep done, makes a baby with sperm she saved since fall . . . skin wings swoosh unseen.             “Moon Gardens” Moonflower vines bloom white at night, beckoning bats, Luna Moths, Sphinx Moths, and other mysterious creatures to scatter pollen. —Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] Bat and flower (Photo Source) If not for the "unidentified" prompt, however, I probably would have given the first tanka a straightforward title like "Little Brown Bat in Iowa Spring" and have it be a poem on its own. (A single tanka is usually not titled, though, so that's something to [re]consider.) The second tanka, separated out, would probably still be "Moon Gardens," but it could be expanded later into a multiple-tanka sequence. Actually, maybe both sections could become separate tanka sequences, in which case the presence of the title(s) would be defensible. We'll see. Oh! The info in the first tanka is all true with the Little Brown Bat . . . the delayed fertilization is pretty trippy. Today, Alan has an interesting approach to the prompts with a poem in six-line stanzas (sestets) in tail rhyme or maybe rime couee, both rhymed aabccb — however all in pentameter, rather than the varied line lengths usually associated with those forms. P O E M   R E M O V E D while being submitted for publication.   Please come back later. The poem may return at some time in the future. Thank you!     About this poem, Alan told me, "There is really a Mothman Statue in Point Pleasant." And there it is up above, red eyes and all. Go up and look at it again. Be sure to click on it to see it larger. And pinch it wider to see it even better. That's a great yarn, Alan! It is a yarn, right? Photo Source Incidentally, the Elizabeth Bishop allusion that this poem is not, is to her poem "The Man-Moth" (though that's worth looking at for another magical creature — or man?). Thanks for visiting the blog, dear readers. See you again tomorrow? Friends, won’t you comment, please? Love to know what you’re thinking. Thanks! Ingat, everyone.  ヅ

The Stafford Challenge, Day 53

Trying the monotetra again today (8-syllable lines, aaaa quatrains, and at the end, a 4-syllable half line doubled). More on the monotetra at Robert Lee Brewer's Write Better Poetry blog, here. Speaking of Brewer's blog, I used one of his poetry prompts today: the most recent Wednesday prompt from 5 March 2025: a "lost poem." Monotetra on Loss —after "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop “Their loss is no disaster,” wrote Elizabeth Bishop, once. But is that really true? How about “lost door keys”? Might lost door keys meet the criteria of disastrous loss? Shut out of a dead lover’s home, never to smell her precious perfume. Always perfume. All ways that she will be gone forever. That faint scent of lost lavender fading from memory, never to recover, to recover. —Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] Photo by MSA-90 from Pixabay That 4-syllable half line repeated at the end is tough. Any thoughts on my experimentation with the last line in each of the stanzas? Yes, critique welcome . . . comment below, please. Also, what about the slant monorhymes? Thanks. Friends, won’t you comment, please? Love to know what you’re thinking. Ingat, everyone.  ヅ

Recalling "The Spine" by Michael Spence

This evening, my Poetry Workshop at the University of Northern Iowa had the pleasure of Skyping with the poet Michael Spence, whose 2014 collection The Bus Driver’s Threnody we are reading for class. In the course of that insightful and invaluable conversation, I brought up Mike’s poem “The Spine,” from his first poetry collection The Spine. When I looked for this poem online to show it to the students, I discovered it’s not available in cyberspace. So, with Mike’s permission, I proudly present that poem to the blogosphere. The Spine “The fossilised vertebrae of a large dolphin-like   reptile dating from 150 million years ago were   recently discovered in this mining town.”                                     —Australian travel brochure The icthyosaur, Like ancient water It flashed through, Dried to dust. A few Pieces of spine Dug from a mine At Coober Pedy Are the only Remains. They glint Iridescent Blue, purple; Bits of gold fill Every crack. The Jurassic Faded: the reptile Changed to opals. Thirty-three Vertebrae Like those here— One for each year I’ve lived—link What I think To how I move. The chord in their groove Sends what lightning I have forking Through my hands Into the land. If my traces reach The distant beach Of the future, The bones I stare At hold my wish: To start as flesh And end as jewel. The line of fossils Burns—each gem A star in the stem Of the Southern Cross. We gain by loss. — Michael Spence, from The Spine (1987). I have a personal relationship with this particular poem because it was, for me, life-changing with regard to my writing of verse. I was an MFA student at Indiana University in 1987 when I found The Spine on a new-book rack in the IU library. I distinctly recall how this poem stunned me, with its bravura off-rhymes—icthyosaur/water, reptile/opals—and its off-kilter dimeter. This poem opened up a new vista for me. I had a moment akin to Elizabeth Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room,” the library stacks spinning a bit as I stood, leaning on a shelf, reading “The Spine.” This was during the “poetry wars” of the ’80s, when the New Formalists were bucking the Free Verse establishment and being called Reaganites. I was personally beleaguered, as an emerging neoformalist myself, in a workshop with classmates who reviled work in rhyme and meter. And it was Mike, on paper, who taught me how to write a poem that was tightly formalist but read like free verse to those who expected free verse. I learned from Mike's poems how to be a tightrope walker—and he’s a master, a damn good one. He can slant rhyme and craft meter like a tenor-sax jazz artist, syncopating silence and staccato sequences. I hope you’ll check out Michael Spence’s work. The Spine, published by Purdue University Press almost 30 years ago, is still in print. His new collection,  The Bus Driver’s Threnody, is a tour-de-force collection of poems about driving a city bus in Seattle. Other books include Crush Depth, a father-son book that includes poems on life in the US Navy, and Adam Chooses, about which Mark Jarman wrote, these “poems, often cunning experiments in traditional form, dramatize the way experience leads to knowledge.” Michael Spence is the real deal, friends. You’ll enjoy his poetry, I guarantee. Won’t you comment, please? To comment, look for a blue link below that says Post a comment and click it once. If you don’t see that, look for a red line that starts Posted by Vince, then click once on the word comments in that line. Ingat, everyone.   ヅ

Day 23 ... NaPoWriMo / Poem-a-Day

Happy Day 23, everyone! I'm going to start off differently today by giving you a poem before reporting on prompts. Here are a pair of linked haiku from Catherine. Pay close attention, now. ======= === === === ====== ========= ==== === ====== ====== ======= ==== === ===== ==== ===== == === === ====== ==== === ======= ===== == ==== === =====                         Poem removed for publication purposes. Sorry. It may return at some point. Thanks. —Draft by Catherine Pritchard Childress     [do not copy or quote ... thanks] That one bears some thinking. And rethinking. Quite a bit of wisdom there. Sneaks up on you. Okay. Prompts, PDQ. Maureen Thorson: ekphrastic poem — Robert Lee Brewer: morning poem — Andrea Boltwood: "noise-y" poem. Once again, I've decided to mash up all three prompts, though I said I wouldn't. I'm an inveterate masher, I guess. Or masher-upper. Anyway, to do Maureen's ekphrasis, I needed an image to work with. When in doubt, make your own. So I took a photo today of one of my vintage electrics, a guitar I played in bands during grade school and high school. A Sears Silvertone. A lot of parents in those days (mid- to late '60s) bought their kids guitars from Sears. This is called a Silhouette, modeled loosely after the Fender Jaguar. Ironically, I eventually gravitated toward Gibson guitars, Fender's main competitor. My main six-string now is a Gibson SG. Anyway, held the Silhouette up to the sky and snapped this shot with my phone. Head to the Sky — after Elizabeth Bishop The sun, a ruddy egg poised on the pale wavery horizon, rose like a shimmery balloon into a bright robin's egg cumulus-clustered sky. Trees whispered their breezy sussurus into the thin violet haze of early morning.   redburst finish   On the spaceport’s wide, white concrete, cracked and overgrown with green, the vast ship stood warming, its mirror-like engine housing thrumming and steaming with liquid oxygen. A single chrome fin arced upward like a pointing arm.   whammy bar   On the side of the spaceship, its massive magenta hull plated with cardinal and amber ceramic armor, the shiny bubbles of the bridge and engine room lit up like angular bars of silver soap, chrome lozenges flashing morning sunlight back to the heavens.   silverfoil pickups   The sleek thin parallel armatures of the faster-than-light drive streamed from the black base of the ship’s tail, laddering up to its stiletto nose, high in azure air, pointing like a slim spike, a bright arrow, set to needle into the bleak vacuum of interstellar space.   slinky strings   With the blaring clamor of a thousand thunderstorms, a million Jimi Hendrix feedback howls, his Woodstock “Star Spangled Banner” magnified a billionfold, the gigantic space ark Silhouette, a handmade Titan larger than a city, rose like a majestic frigate into the air, poised like a resplendent phoenix on its column of fire, this final vessel of humankind, leaving behind a ruined, exhausted Earth, this last sliver of Homo sapiens flinging itself outward into the obsidian brightness of the universe.   rock and roll —Draft by Vince Gotera     [do not copy or quote ... thanks] So there you go: an ekphrastic poem, set in the morning, with over-the-top soundplay. Whaddayathink? Today we feature poem-a-day blog Marilyn Cavicchia, Editor and Poet. Marilyn has been writing marvelous April poems — I particularly like her parody on Day 15 of William Blake's "The Tyger" (with its own humorous "y" misspelling). This blog is also somewhat of a business venture for Marilyn . . . so if you need an editor, etc., dig deeper into this blog and what Marilyn has to offer. Okay, that's it for today. As usual, please leave a comment below. See you tomorrow! Ingat. P.S. Catherine's poem for Day 19 is up at the post for that day. Take a look! P.P.S. I added another morel mushroom photo to yesterday's post. Check it out. Yum! POEM-A-DAY 2012 • Pick a day in April: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30