Do not wonder anymore

#NaPoWriMo2020  #Day14

Prompt : Today’s optional prompt asks you, like Alice Notley, to think about your own inspirations and forebears (whether literary or otherwise). Specifically, I challenge you today to write a poem that deals with the poems, poets, and other people who inspired you to write poems. These could be poems/poets/people that you strive to be like, or even poems, poets, and people that you strive not to be like. There are as many ways to go with this prompt as there are ways to be inspired.

Well, since you want to know

Let’s start by François Villon

Clément Marot, Ronsard

And most of the Renaissance poets

The seventeenth century

Was more theatrical than poetic

We hit the eighteenth century

The age of the enlightenment 

Was dedicated to philosophy 

And poetry took a second place

We had to wait to the nineteenth 

With romanticism for poetry 

To come back centre stage:

Victor Hugo, Lamartine,

Verlaine, Rimbaud, Musset

Baudelaire, to list a few

And then we arrive in the twentieth century:

Apollinaire, Supervielle, Breton,

Eluard, Aragon, Prevert 

And the list goes on.

All of these were my muses

At one point my inspiration 

And you wonder why

I call myself a mediocre poet!

Do not wonder any more.

Lucette C. Bailliet

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