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That moment where my eyes glaze and nothing in me knows how to fight; When there’s nothing in me, I’m a sack of flour and I’ve folded. You owe me nothing, we’ve two diverse paths, Yet, ‘blue blue eyes’ catch me, and somewhere inside flutters; Scared A radiance lifts sedating fog, and sometimes I’m so alive, Sometimes, I’m so exhausted I can’t think beyond headaches; Tomorrow’s another day, and ‘blue blue eyes’ linger with an ethereal hue.

This poem, like “Call and Response,” is inspired by the work of others, the poet Morgan Parker, and lyrics from songs by Beyoncé and Notorious B. I.G. The classic villanelle has five three-line stanzas followed by a final, four-line stanza. The first and third lines of the first stanza alternately repeat as the last lines of the following three-line stanzas, before being used as the last two lines of the final quatrain. Following Dargan’s lead, today we’d like to challenge you to write a poem that incorporates at least one of the following: (1) the villanelle form, (2) lines taken from outside text, and/or (3) phrases that oppose each other in some way.

For NaPoWriMo Day 4, the prompt is: “And now for today’s (optional) prompt, inspired by Teicher’s poem “Son“. One thing you might notice about this poem is that it is sad, but that it doesn’t generate feeling through emotional words. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own sad poem, but one that, like Teicher’s, achieves sadness through simplicity. You can be around your things sad singing, As if you were meaningless and abstract, As if you’re loneliness was a forever fact.

For NaPoWriMo Day 3, the prompt is: For NaPoWriMo Day 3, the prompt is: “ Today’s prompt is based in a poem by Larry Levis called “The Two Trees. It is a poem that seems to meander, full of little digressions, odd bits of information, but fundamentally, it is a poem that takes time. . . write something that involves a story or action that unfolds over an appreciable length of time.”