NaPoWriMo Prompt 10

By on Apr 10, 2015 in Blog

India . Rajasthan .... many moons ago
Rajasthan, India by Nick Kenrick (https://www.flickr.com/photos/zedzap/)

For Day 10 of the NaPoWriMo challenge, in our progress through the alphabet, we’ve reached “I” for “Imaginary.” I’m going to borrow an exercise used by one of my poetry professors in grad school. He asked us to write two paragraphs: one a description of a place we knew very well, and one a description of a place we’d never been. Then we were asked to examine those two paragraphs and see which one was more evocative. Almost without exception, the one about the place we’d just imagined was more interesting, because for the places we knew too well, we added too many unnecessary details.

So for today, write a poem the involves the imagination: in terms of setting, character, or action. If you like, contrast that with details from a place/time/event/person that you know extremely well. You might benefit from doing some free writing beforehand, pulling out the best phrases and incorporating them into the finished work.

Feel free to share your poem (or a link to your poem) in the comments.

About

Alyce Wilson is the editor of Wild Violet and in her copious spare time writes humor, non-fiction, fiction and poetry and infrequently keeps an online journal. Her first chapbook, Picturebook of the Martyrs; her e-book/pamphlet, Stay Out of the Bin! An Editor's Tips on Getting Published in Lit Mags ; her book of essays and columns, The Art of Life; her humorous nonfiction ebook, Dedicated Idiocy: How Monty Python Fandom Changed My Life, and her newest poetry collection, Owning the Ghosts, can all be ordered from her Web site, AlyceWilson.com. In late 2019, she published a volume of poetry by her third great-grandfather, Reading's Physician Poet: Poems by Dr. James Meredith Mathews, which also contains genealogical information about the Mathews family. She lives with her husband and son in the Philadelphia area and takes far too many photos of her handsome, creative son, nicknamed Kung Fu Panda.