National Poetry Month Group Dare: Create a 30-Day Poetry Journal

Today marks the start of National Poetry Month and Poetic Earth Month under the most unusual of circumstances. Many, if not most, of us find ourselves distancing in ways we are unaccustomed to, facing our own particular uncertainties and difficulties. At the same time, many of us are making wonderful discoveries about what is possible, finding creative outlets we had not before discovered, drawing closer in ways we might not otherwise have done.

As we do during the month of April each year, we invite you to a group Poetry Dare, an individual activity you can do in poetic community. Instead of reading a particular poet together, we encourage you to explore the daily prompts at Poetic Earth Month and create a visual poetry journal. Poetic Earth Month was created to provide a month-long focus for earth care, with daily prompts designed to create a “beautiful place that inspires the everyday person, by providing art and story and poetry that connects us to each other and our world. It also offers simple earth care ideas anyone can try—easy to implement and life-enriching—so we can all take care together, as part of our everyday lives.”

There are a couple great ways you can participate in the 30-Days, 30-Poems Challenge:

One: Join Tweetspeak Patrons for convenient daily delivery of each day’s Poetry on the Menu, a food-oriented daily poem and prompt that aims to care for your health and well-being, as well as the health of the earth. The inbox delivery also includes an exclusive meditative photo.

Two: If food poems make you too hungry, pick up a copy of Earth to Poetry: a 30-Days, 30-Poems Earth, Self, and Other Care Challenge and work through the book throughout the month. This book is a collection of the 2019 daily prompts, focused on a more broad overview approach to earth care.

Then, create a visual journal of your poems, paired with beautiful images. Here are some examples from the first prompts for this year’s Poetry on the Menu challenge:

Last year, I used Earth to Poetry a little while after April (I tend to run a little late on a lot of things) and created a visual 30-day poem journal on Canva with my own poems and photos from my own camera roll or Creative Commons images from Flickr. Here are some sample pages:

Want to create your own poetry journal?

You could use whatever photo editing/collage app you already love. Or, you could try Canva, like we did for our pages.

You can sign up for a free account at Canva.com. There are all sorts of templates you can use once you have your account, but we suggest to keep it simplest, you choose one of the Photo Collage options.

Once your design is complete (you could add to it daily and save it, or wait until the end), you can download as a PDF or a variety of other formats, or share it to Facebook, Twitter or another social platform. Be sure to credit the photographer and follow usage guidelines if you don’t use your own photos. We’d love to see your journal, so tag us when you post!

Share Your Poems Daily

If you want to share your poems daily, without doing a visual journal first, feel free to share them in the comments at this post.

Photo by Karen Roe, Creative Commons license via Flickr.

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Will Willingham

Director of Many Things; Senior Editor, Designer and Illustrator at Tweetspeak Poetry

I used to be a claims adjuster, helping people and insurance companies make sense of loss. Now, I train other folks with ladders and tape measures to go and do likewise. Sometimes, when I’m not scaling small buildings or crunching numbers with my bare hands, I read Keats upside down. My first novel is Adjustments.

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