April is National Poetry Month, and to celebrate it (or punish ourselves), everyone is challenged to write 30 poems in 30 days. Purists believe the challenge requires writing one poem each day in April; procrastinators understand that April 29th is the 24-hour catchup slog with haiku and caffeine. 

As you may have noticed,  I slacked off for a couple of weeks. I am now ready for challenge. The last two years I did write 30 poems (NOT 30 good poems, mind you, but 30 poems anyway). Previous years, I got about 15 or so. The goal is to increase your writing frequency and create a daily writing habit. I usually like a couple 30/30 poems after revision and find that I can use lines or images from many of the others for new poems. Alas, I still don’t write every day, but I certainly procrastinate writing every day.

Since I am obviously not a prolific writer—either as a blogger or as a poet—I won’t pretend I will provide daily prompts as well as write 30 poems this month. I will include a couple of prompts a week but will provide links to sites that do or that have done so in the past. To get you started, check out the official site for National Poetry Month (NaPoWrMo), which will post a new prompt every day and has already posted one for the early birds and for writers in earlier time zones. You can of course check out the site’s prompts from previous years.