Today is the first of March (or, almost). What that means for most people is that spring is on its way, with budding trees, birds singing, and flowers blooming by the roadside. Unfortunately, it also means the cruelest month is only 31 days away. With April comes NaPoWriMo, aka (Inter)National Poetry Writing Month, in which writers all over the internet write a poem a day for a month.

Oddly enough, the hardest part of NaPoWriMo is not the amount of writing. As you get used to the task of writing a poem a day, writing often comes more easily and more naturally. The true hard part is finding inspiration enough to fill thirty poems, especially thirty halfway decent poems, all with unique imagery and just the right metaphors.

To that end, I hereby declare March to be Inspiration Month. ^LadyLincoln will also be working on inspiration, focusing on positive (aka inspirational) attitudes, while I focus on inspirations for writing.

If you don’t already have one, one of the most useful tools for overcoming a lack of material is an ideas file. An ideas file is a collection of ideas, fables, observations, poetic forms, works of art, cool-sounding phrases, scraps of writing that didn’t fit in other pieces but are too good to delete, and anything else that might prompt you to write so that you don’t end up writing haiku at fifteen minutes until midnight every night. Doing research now can also save you time, so that you don’t waste precious minutes in April looking up the names of all the naiads when you could be writing.

The best part is that your entries only have to make sense to you. ‘kookaburra medley’ might not make sense to anyone else, but as long as you will able to remember what you mean, you can jot down whatever you like.

If you write about your emotions, your challenge for April is to mix your emotions with imagery, figurative language, and sounds. Are you in a long-distance relationship? Weave that into the story of Odysseus and Penelope. Are you in love? Write you and your love into Gustav Klimt’s painting “The Kiss.” Does the sound of the wind in the trees make you lonely? Write about it using lots of hissing ‘s’s. Think about the emotions which might inspire you next month, and look up myths, paintings, stories, or symbols which might help you express those.

Of course, after NaPo is over, the inspiration folder remains useful all year round, so be sure to keep it stocked!


Here are some samples from mine:

the girl from the subway—obviously a fantasy fan, the way I could read her thoughts from her facial expressions as she daydreamed

the Schuylkill river

Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa

what the pavement knows

lilacs bloom / like bruises round exhausted eyes

Descartes’ fetish for cross-eyed women

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

budding trees

a bear with its head in the hive / nauseous with the promise of honey

As you can see, some of these are specific, some are very vague; some are clichéd and some are more original; and some are phrases or topics while some are pieces of art or observations. These aren’t organized or detailed, but they’re things I’m interested in exploring or writing about, and because I’m interested in them, writing about them and filling in the details will be easier.

Now go start yours. Add a couple of your inspirations to the comment section, if you want, and share your muse.