NaPoWriMo 2025 (April 29th): The Woman Who Chose Absence

From NaPoWriMo 2025 (Day Twenty Nine): Happy Tuesday, all, and happy penultimate day of Na/GloPoWriMo.

Our featured participant today is Adil Akbar, whose response to Day 28’s “music and ceremonies” prompt rather reminds us of César Vallejo.

Today’s daily resource is the online galleries of the Whitney Museum, where you’ll find artwork as varied as this fun portrait of Billie Jean King, a Frank Stella sculpture that looks like what would happen if a space station fell in love with a bridge, and this contemporary take on the classic embroidered sampler.

And now for today’s prompt – optional as always. Just as poetry is made by poets, music is made by musicians. There is always a living being behind the words, the rhythm, and at the heart of every song. Just as music and poetry can fascinate in their own right, so do the personalities behind every form of art. In her poem, “Canary,” Rita Dove riffs on Billie Holiday, and how her life has been spun into myth. Likewise, in “Ode for Donny Hathaway,” Wanda Coleman muses on another tragic figure, in the form of the eponymous soul singer and keyboardist.

Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem that takes its inspiration from the life of a musician, poet, or other artist. And while our example poems are squarely elegiac, don’t feel limited to minor-key feelings in your own work.

Happy (?) writing!

NOTE: I am so late I almost forgot about this, and there was a storm, so I fell asleep like a baby and woke up in the middle of the night to write for this prompt, and got distracted for a couple of hours arranging some hundred random links and messages. So, I am absolutely delirious right now. I’ve twisted this prompt into a deliciously conspiratorial one. I’m going to take a writer/poet who’s used a pseudonym (someone cryptic, semi-anonymous, hiding in plain sight, but never known) and from there, build a fictional "real self" behind the mask of their persona. Kind of Paul Auster meets Roberto Bolaño, a bit of postmodern noir with poetic ruin scrawled into the margins.

BACKDROP: 

Inspiration: Elena Ferrante (Italy)

We still don’t really know who Ferrante is. Yes, journalists have made various claims, even using financial records and real estate deeds to try and "out" her, but Ferrante, the author of the Neapolitan Novels, has insisted that the anonymity is part of the work. She writes in Italian, but her voice is global, intimate, and terrifyingly raw. She embodies womanhood, class struggle, memory, and creative obsession with such eerie precision that it feels lived like a diary whispered into an attic floorboard. So now… let’s do what the world doesn’t know. I will be unearthing a dossier lost in the Vatican’s forbidden archives or smuggled out of some smoky Milanese literary salon.

• Name: Rafaella di Lupo
• Born: March 17, 1949
• Birthplace: Oliveto Lucano, a nowhere village where wolves outnumber buses.
• Occupation: Midwife by day, illegal bookseller by night.
• Education: Taught to read by a nun who carved quotes from Dante into tree bark.
• Wrote her first novel in goat’s blood and blackberry ink (revised later with a biro).
• Never married, not out of principle but forgetfulness.
• Favorite word: estraneo (stranger).
• Believes literature is an exorcism, not entertainment.
• Theory: She lives in a crumbling house built into a cliffside. Her manuscripts are mailed via a boy who doesn’t speak. She’s got a wall covered in torn-apart pages of Simone Weil, Lucia Berlin, and Rimbaud. Each character she writes is a person she tried, and failed, to become.
• Status: Active. Undocumented. Believed to be a non-person under Italian citizenship records post-1977.
• Last Seen: Leaving the port of Salerno in 1989, wrapped in a shawl stitched with marginalia.
• Only writes between 3:12 a.m. and 4:01 a.m., convinced that’s when memory is most porous and shame is still half-asleep.
• Considers all novels to be confessionals, but lies constantly—especially when telling the truth.
• Sends edits to her translator on torn scraps of brown butcher paper. Each one ends with the same phrase: “Burn after meaning.”
• The Apartment on Via delle Ombre: An address without a buzzer. Inside, stacks of books double as furniture. The walls are hand-painted with notes from a diary she insists she didn’t write. On the kitchen table:
• One fountain pen.
• A teacup full of red wine.
• A playing card with the queen’s face scratched out.
• A letter from someone named “Lenù” that ends: “You wrote me into being, and then you left me here. I hope your ghosts are kinder than mine.”
• Rumors & Red Threads:
• In the 70s, she was rumored to have translated Ingeborg Bachmann under a pseudonym which later disappeared from the publisher’s catalogue.
• She once mailed a manuscript soaked in sea salt and bundled in fishing net. When opened, every third word was smeared—readers described it as “the most emotionally accurate censorship of grief.”
• Her handwriting allegedly resembles that of three separate literary women, now dead, all unrelated. A coincidence? Or a composite ghost?
• Hidden Bibliography: 
• The Silence of Garlic (1975): a novella allegedly about cooking, but actually about sexual shame and Catholic repression.
• Figlia Della Neve (“Daughter of Snow”): unpublished, rumored to exist only in oral form, passed between women who meet in candlelit libraries once a decade.
• The Left Side of the Bed: poems so elliptical and cryptic they’ve been banned in Naples for “inducing familial unrest.”
• Final Truth (or Lie?): There is no Ferrante. There never was. There was only the woman who chose absence louder than presence and in that absence, we all found a mirror.

The Woman Who Chose Absence

{Inspired by the invented secret identity behind the pseudonym 'Elena Ferrante' — Rafaella di Lupo, the woman who chose absence over fame.}

In Oliveto Lucano, where the wolves sang first,
she was born; not wept for, but noted,
like a comma in the parish ledger.

By day, she pulled screaming souls from the screaming dark.
By night, she stitched forbidden words into the hems of her skirts.
The villagers said the wind in the cliffs spelled her name,
but they never agreed on the spelling.

At 3:12 a.m., while the shame still slept,
she dipped her pen in blackberry blood,
writing not stories,
but exorcisms,
each word a scream swallowed inside a stranger’s throat.

Her manuscripts sailed from her cliffside —
carried by a boy who had no tongue,
wrapped in butcher paper that smelled of salt,
marked with a warning:

Burn after meaning.

No portrait remains. Only furniture made of books.
Only a teacup that never spills.
Only a letter, unsigned, reading:

"You wrote me into being.
You left me in the mirror.
I hope your ghosts are kinder than mine."

Some say she dissolved into salt spray.
Some say she inked herself into disappearance.
Some say Ferrante is a myth we made,
when we needed a woman to blame
for telling the truth so beautifully
we wanted her dead for it.

- Oizys.