NaPoWriMo 2021
April is upon us, once more. For those suffering-inclined poets, it is another opportunity to attempt the annual 30-poems-in-30-days challenge known as NaPoWriMo or GloPoWriMo. What wonderful names for an experience that regularly feels like flaying one’s brain and feeding the strips to crows.
I hope to complete 30/30, and will be posting as many results of my travails as I can, here. My meditations of recent have been centered around trauma and its residue in the human mind and body, as well as the intrinsic violence of the ways we choose to live as a species. I cannot predict the full scope of my work in the next month, but this is the promontory from which I am hurling myself forward. I plan to draw from the NaPoWriMo prompts, as well as a list of trauma-related concepts I have been learning about.
For illustrations, I have long been fascinated by the parallels between the (non)lives of pieces of African art forced into the diaspora of western museums, and my own life as a member of the African diaspora. This will therefore be my starting point, although I’ll stay open to shifts in the flow of my inquiry over the next month. Thank you for coming on this journey with me.