One poetry challenge month completed with February's "Post-It-Note Poetry" challenge.

A month to rest and start an editing gig.

And now, April is here...and with its spring showers we have National Poetry Month.

I first took part of National Poetry Month last year, and since it was also the month where World Haiku Day resides, it wasn't hard to do haiku and tanka for the month, along with some free-forms. I started my "conversations with dead Japanese poets" theme last year and I am still working toward adding to that collection for an e-chapbook of the same name.

For PINP 2023, I started a new theme: "3 Ways of Looking at..." which are 3 stanza, linked haiku on particular subjects. I plan on penning a few more of those for National Poetry Month.

I have an online e-chapbook of sorts where I post multimodal versions of my poems (think images+text). I am way behind in posting there. I need to rectify that when the universe opens a slot of free time for me.

So my plan for 2023 Poetry Month is to write more tanka, haiku (especially linked 3-verse haiku, or "3 Ways"--and yes, one will have to be about chili since I'm from Ohio), Japanese short-forms riffing on the Master Japanese poets of old.

I need to write more octains since this is a form I invented (8 lines, rhyming or not, using an opposites theme, one to start and one to finish like hot/cold and lines mutiplying in syllables up the fifth line--the volta--which has the number of syllables from the fouth line and then we divide down to the last line. An example of a syllabic theme for the octain is 2/4/6/8/8/6/4/2.

I'm aiming, as with last year, to post a poem a day. I need to get more poems written and collected for the e-book project "swamp lillies" and I started a new e-book project for "3 Ways of Looking."

I am looking forward to another month of writing poetry!