My Dirty Thirty Challenge

April 2021 marked the 25th anniversary National Poetry Month. Poetry Month is the opportunity to celebrate and appreciate the importance of poetry and acknowledge the contributions poets around the world.

Poetry month is celebrated in many ways in the community and in the classroom – I celebrate each year by participating in The Dirty Thirty Poetry Challenge. The organizer provides participants with a new prompt every day in April and asks them to write a poem using this prompt as a guide. Participants would then share their pieces with other participants in the Facebook Group. There are approximately 2800 participants in the challenge.

Now… humble brag… this is the first year that I have managed to complete the challenge! In previous years I have missed days… Scraping around for new inspiration each day can be tricky – especially when you are set with a theme or a particular style of poem to write. This month participants were asked to write haiku, limericks, poems that rhyme, poems which started and ended with set words, were letters, or that addressed particular themes. In addition to sharing my pieces through the Facebook group, I also posted them to my Instagram account, so hopefully you have already seen them!

My favourite prompts this year were the ‘Zombie Apocalypse‘, and ‘Trapped Inside an Elevator‘ … both are topics I would absolutely never have written on…. While writing about being trapped in an elevator we were asked to imagine there were other people in the elevator and there was not enough oxygen for all of us. Then while writing about the Zombie Apocalypse I decided to incorporate the biblical definition of an apocalypse (as a a prophetic revelation) into human relationships.