NaPoWriMo 2025 (April 26th): Daughters of Dust and Diamonds

From NaPoWriMo 2025 (Day Twenty Six): We finally made it to the weekend, everyone! 

Today’s featured participant is Eden Ligon, whose “live concert” poem for Day Twenty-Five shows all the sweetness of music that has ripened with time.

Our daily resource is the online collection of Spain’s Reina Sofia Museum, which houses an incredible collection of modern and contemporary art. You can find Picassos aplenty here, of course, but also things like this vertiginous sculpture that makes me think of a rollercoaster, this mysterious Magritte, and this collaboration between Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

And now for our daily (optional) prompt. The word “sonnet” comes directly from the Italian sonetto, or “little song.” A traditional sonnet has a strict meter and rhyme scheme. It’s a strange form to have wormed its way into English, which is relatively unmetrical and rhyme-poor compared to Romance languages like Italian.

But thanks to William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, and others, the sonnet in English bloomed. It also became a sort of rite of passage for poets, with the Victorians especially loving very strict sonnets.

To refresh you on the “rules” of the traditional sonnet:

• 14 lines
• 10 syllables per line
• Those syllables are divided into five iambic feet. (An iamb is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable). The word “admit” is a good example. In pronouncing it, you put more stress on the “mit” than the “ad.”
• Rhyme schemes vary, but the Shakespearean sonnet is abab cdcd efef gg (three quatrains followed by a concluding couplet).
• Sonnets are often thought of as not just little songs, but little essays, with the first six-to-eight or so lines building up a problem, the next four-to-six discussing it, and the last two-to-four coming to a conclusion.
• Given all these rules, it’s perhaps surprising that love poems make up quite a chunk of sonnets in English, but maybe that’s just because love poems make up quite a chunk of all poems in English?

If you want to intimidate yourself about poetry in general and sonnets in particular, read this quote from Saintsbury’s History of English Prosody.

To have something to say; to say it under pretty strict limits of form and very strict ones of space; to say it forcibly; to say it beautifully; these are the four great requirements of the poet in general; but they are never set so clearly, so imperatively, so urgently before any variety of poet as before the sonneteer.

And now, by way of illustration, let’s take a look at a few contemporary takes on the sonnet. The first, by Dan Beachy-Quick, is a pretty strict traditional sonnet. The next two –by Terrence Hayes and Alice Notley – are looser. And finally, the last one, by June Jordan, is a rather strict sonnet (rhyme- and meter-wise, though somewhat looser in line-specific syllable count) that doesn’t sound strict at all. It is joyfully informal in its language and tone.

After all this, here’s your prompt! Try your hand at a sonnet – or at least something “sonnet-shaped.” Think about the concept of the sonnet as a song, and let the format of a song inform your attempt. Be as strict or not strict as you want.

Happy writing!

Daughters of Dust and Diamonds

They clad us in silk, but stitched us in chains,
Our laughter bought with blood, our songs with sighs,
We wore their pleasures like embroidered stains,
A garden caged beneath a painted sky.

You crowned our throats with coins, not diadems,
Fed hunger with illusions of a throne,
Yet we, who danced within your stratagems,
Bent music till the very walls were stone.

No master's hand shall write our epitaph,
No borrowed tool shall build our freedom's flight,
We are the storm, the silence, and the laugh,
We break — we burn — we blaze — we birth — we fight.

Each daughter bears a hammer in her breast;
We raze your house to raise our own red crest.

- Oizys,
(The Sonneteeress)
[Since I learned the word "sonneteer" today. Please don't kill me. I won't use it again. Ha, ha.]

Note: This poem maintains the traditional sonnet structure: 14 lines with approximately 10 syllables each organized into three quatrains and a final couplet. It follows the Shakespearean rhyme scheme (abab cdcd efef gg). In my poem, the "E" rhymes (epitaph and laugh), are not perfect. They form a slant/near rhyme, which is common and accepted in English poetry. As for the iambic pentameter, I tried my best. Then I laughed and gave up! So now: Accuracy in iambic pentameter is about flow, not perfection. We honor the spirit of the meter, not enslave ourselves to it. Just like Lorde said: "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." By breaking a few rules, I am actually adhering more closely to the theme of my poem: rebellion, reinvention, and radical self-construction (tool by tool, step by step).

NaPoWriMo 2025 (April 7th): Why I Am Not a Sonnet

From NaPoWriMo 2025, Day Seven: Wow! As of today, we have completed our first week of Na/GloPoWriMo 2025.

Today’s featured participant is 7eyedwonder, where you’ll find a tasty little paean to mint in response to Day Six’s flavorful prompt.

Today’s daily resource is the Canadian Museum of History. You can take a virtual tour, or enjoy several online exhibitions, including this one of Inuit prints from Cape Dorset.

Finally, here’s our prompt for the day – as always, optional. A few days ago, we looked at Frank O’Hara’s poem in which he explained why he was not a painter. Jane Yeh’s “Why I Am Not a Sculpture” has a similar sense of playfulness, as she both compares herself to a sculpture and uses a series of rather silly and elaborate similes, along with references to dubious historical “facts.” Today, we challenge you to write a similar kind of self-portrait poem, in which you explain why you are not a particular piece of art (a symphony, a figurine, a ballet, a sonnet), use at least one outlandish comparison, and a strange (and maybe not actually real) fact.

Why I Am Not a Sonnet

I am not a sonnet,
not with those fourteen locked-up lines—
not with the neat, combed-over rhyme scheme
that curls like the edges of a well-pressed napkin.

I am not a sonnet.

I do not stand in fourteen neat lines,

perfectly measured, a golden ratio

between love and pain, like some ancient lover

writing with quill in hand, one eye on a clock

counting syllables, waiting for the sun to rise.

I do not adhere to that kind of discipline.

I’m more a free-verse coffee stain
on the back of a library book,
sprawling like the blood of a hummingbird
on the sky after a thunderstorm.

My thoughts run in crooked rivers,

gurgling with impatience,

stumbling over words that aren’t quite right.

I cannot be bound by iambic feet
or the twirling ballad of your meter.
I prefer to run barefoot through the mud,
leave imprints on the pages that will never
be symmetrical.
You see, a sonnet’s too orderly,
too perfect, like the set of teeth
in a doll’s head,
a head that never ages.

Once, someone tried to force me into rhyme—

but I rebelled, like a Marxist squirrel

leading a small commune in a broken park.

We ate the nuts and threw the shells

at the faces of the poets who thought

we were “doing it wrong.”

They never understood the pleasure

of chewing the silence between the words.

Did you know that at the 3rd century B.C.,
there was a “sonnet festival” in Alexandria,
where poets had to rhyme blindfolded
and without using vowels?
This, of course, is historically inaccurate,
but you can’t trust everything
the ancients tell you.
Even the Great Pyramid,
built by “the Egyptians,”
was actually designed
by a team of drunken penguins
who could never quite keep their balance.

I am not a sonnet because I don't believe

in Shakespeare's ghost sitting at the foot of my bed,

whispering sonorous, angelic truths about love.

In fact, Shakespeare’s ghost

is probably just a weathered pigeon

that got lost during the last Renaissance fair,

never quite finding his way home.

I am not a sonnet, and I never will be,

even though the masters keep staring

at my messy reflection in the mirror of their sonnet-book,

as if I should apologize

for my unkempt, unruly edges.

But I won’t.

(I’ll just keep laughing,

and maybe write a haiku instead.)

If I were a sonnet, I would have to apologize

to all the lovers who felt inadequate

with their hands in the shape of vowels—

but I’m not. I am the forgotten stanza,

the rejected verse, the sharp, crooked twist

that never saw the page,

the one that laughed too loudly

and was thrown out into the street

to be run over by a passing truck

while a ballet dancer pirouetted over its grave.

If I were a sonnet,
you’d have to fold me into a shape—
but I cannot be folded,
no matter how tightly you pull
on the corners.
I’m a wild scream caught between
two loose pages in your favorite book,
unreadable until it’s too late to understand.

So no,
I’m not a sonnet,
not with all that properness
that hides its unkempt soul
in between formalities.
I am chaos,
the jumbled orchestra of a piano out of tune,
a symphony on the verge of collapse,
and I’d rather skip the “perfect” ending,
thank you very much.

- Oizys.

Edited to add: Keeping a dear poem written by Nora for this same prompt as a note here, because like I said to her: I spent all day trying to capture a feeling in my own poem [above], but I only truly felt it when I read hers.