Idiolexicon

April is National Poetry Month, at least according to the Academy of American Poets. Some folks out there have inserted a word into that phrase to rechristen April National Poetry Writing Month, or NaPoWriMo as it seems to be more commonly known. Being a two-time failer of National Novel Writing Month, I'm kind of a sucker for things like this. Lot's of people are doing it. You should do it, too.

A brief explanation of the rules from Squash Blossom!:

Those who accept the NaPoWriMo challenge must commit themselves to writing a poem every day for the entirety of April. Those who accept this challenge may choose to post those poems on blogs, keep them in their notebooks, or hire underemployed skywriters to decorate urban cloudscapes with their output.

Also, check her side bar for a bunch of links to people who are participating. There's also apparently a forum at Poets.org for people to start their own poem-a-day thread. And you can always just google napowrimo for other sources of napowrimo pleasure.

I'd like to think things like this are especially great because they break the mystique of writing poetry, taking it from something whose purpose should be to join some rarefied realm of higher discourse and bringing it back down to the level of simple human activity. But I'm not sure that's true. Whatever the case, it sounds fun, and that's good enough for me. (Yeah. I'm doing it, too.)