It was 2011, my first ever NaPoWriMo, which I actually considered AprPAD, because my original ‘point of entry’ into that world was through Robert’s Poetic Asides. Unlike NovPAD 2010, which was very successful along with NaNoWriMo 2010, the April challenge proved somewhat harder to follow.
One thing, I got a large translation project at work, which consumed a lot of my work and free time (as you might imagine, freelancing means great periods of transgression between those two). Another thing, and I believe it affected my success to a greater extent than my work load at the time, was that I tried to follow many prompt sites. Anyone dealing with NaPoWriMo knows that a lot of web sites out there offer prompts for the April Poetry Month. Of all the sites whose prompts I made efforts to write to, only two still exist. That, in itself is a very disturbing thing. Still, to get back to my first NaPoWriMo, that had a negative effect on me, because I would spend the whole morning scurrying the prompt sites and noting down prompts, planning to come back to them later during the day. The mere presence of more than three or four prompts made my head spin. My thoughts would go round and probe the ground, so to say, often resulting in a whole day wasted and not a single poem written.
Still, there is one poem which I remember and it was Robert’s prompt for Day 9, What If… You can read it here and compare the path it took to the one the same prompt will send me now.
April Poem-A-Day 14 – What If I
What if I wrote the same poem again,
Like the one I wrote two years ago?
Would I feel my words the same way?
Would the verse take me exactly
where I go?
What if I were smarter or duller
and stayed, or I left, or what if I did both
but to different people?
Same prompts come over and then once again
so that I reconsider the verse path
that I take
So that I have some time to evaluate
the lifespan of my poem,
its growth
and its truth.
What if I had changed
and did things the same way
as I always do?
©2014, soulmary
