A while back, I discovered the ‘Escapril’ poetry challenge, organised by writer Savannah Brown. For every day in April, there’s a poetry prompt that can be used in whatever way inspires you. You then post the piece you’ve written on social media. I’d been eagerly awaiting it for what felt like ages because I’d been really excited to get into writing poetry again (prompts or briefs often help me when I’m out of practice at something), even if it did land in the same month as the deadline of my most recent university assessment.

Here are this year’s prompts:

I didn’t manage a poem everyday (especially while working on my essay) and very quickly, I realised that I didn’t want to post them online until I’d had more time to develop them, edit them, and just make sure that they were good enough to share. I didn’t want to put a piece of work out into the world that I wasn’t confident in.

I have to admit that I’ve been struggling to be creative since the pandemic started and we went into lockdown, something I know a lot of people are dealing with. I read that long term fear and stress affect your brain, making it difficult to find inspiration and be creative – I don’t know about you but having a scientific reason for why I’m struggling so much definitely helped, even if it hasn’t actually solved the problem. Knowing why at least reassured me that my brain hadn’t just stopped working for no reason, that presumably it will start functioning again at some point. So I just have to be patient with myself, as hard as that may be. I’m a lot less patient with myself than with others, as it turns out.

Anyway, the month and the challenge are now over. As I said, I didn’t manage to write a poem everyday but I did manage to write something for most of the prompts and I really enjoyed writing in this format again, despite struggling with all things creative. Since I didn’t post anything during the challenge, I thought I’d share a few here that I’m pleased with or can see potential in…

2. GROWTH/DECAY

6. OBSESSION

12. SUBMERGED IN WATER

17. GRIEF

18. HOW DID THE SKY LOOK?

24. BLACK HOLE

So I hope you enjoyed these, that they’re not too obscure or clunky. As I said, I’m out of practice at writing poetry. It has a very different feel to writing songs and it’s definitely different to writing essays, the two forms of writing I’ve been doing over the last few months. So, yeah, I hope they’re okay. I hope you like them.

Have you taken up any new hobbies or skills since the lockdown? Or revisited old ones?