For my conference paper, I looked over the topics/titles I had already come up with and decided to trash all of them. None of them were very compelling for me, and I would like, instead, to focus on the timely phenomenon of NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month), which along with National Poetry Month, is celebrated in the month of April.
Just as a quick overview, NaPoWriMo is, obviously, a month-long "event" for which anyone willing to participate writes a poem for each day of April. Typically, each day comes with a corresponding prompt to help participants running dry on ideas.
Title - NaPoWriMo: Blog-Poetry, Born and Bred
A few questions/sub-topics of interest within the topic of NaPoWriMo:
- connection to technology, the internet, the blogosphere: napowrimo's birth was through the blog of poet maureen thorson, in the year 2003.
- the growing number of participants, year after year; does this mark an increase in people's interest in poetry, specifically writing it? and does this help detach poetry from being just for a specific group of people, an "exclusive" or "elitist" activity?
- napowrimo brings up the issue of too much poetry being written, and not enough being written about poetry. the whole event is about writing poetry, as its name says: National Poetry Writing Month. It's not about reading others' poetry, or writing about the poetry being written. So, I would like to write about it.
-NaPoWriMo is happening now. It's a huge part of the contemporary poetry world, being a fairly young "tradition." and, the main medium of napowrimo is the computer, typing, blogs. the website provides over 500 websites of participants for this year's napowrimo.
-despite having been alive for several years now, napowrimo still seems to lack official establishment. although poets.org did promote it in conjunction with a pledge drive in 2009, this has not been true for 2010 or 2011.
As NaPoWriMo is still quite young and much more a part of internet culture than print, most information about it can be found on websites and blogs, not anything in books. At the moment, I wouldn't say there are any "official" reference sites for NaPoWriMo, but here are a few all the same. There's not much "research" or any essays written about NaPoWriMo, as far as I know (I have searched for them).
NaPoWriMo
Bloof Books (napowrimo podcast readings)
ReadWritePoem (napowrimo anthologies, past host of napowrimo prompts)
-esther.
You might also want to look at National Poetry Month, as a production of the American Academy of Poets.
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