pf roundup & forward...march!

Greetings to all and welcome to the last Poetry Friday round-up of February! I'm delighted to be your host as we leap over this year's invisible 29th into March, my birthday month.

Inspired by fellow Piscean Laura Shovan's February Poetry Projects (if you haven't, check out three years' worth here, here and here), I got to thinking about the word "march."  What a great word!  In addition to being the month of the god Mars, you can slow-march to the beat of your own drum or quick-march someone else off to their room.  You can play a march with the band, you can lead a march to demand rights or protest wrongs, and you can observe the march of time or progress.  The origins of this meaning of "march" are quite old, dating to when the Franks and even the Indo-Europeans before them marked off boundaries by foot.

Best of all, "March" is a tasty mouthful.  That -ch ending is explosive, definite; and yet it also has a softness, a long-lasting breathy end that belies its hard beginning.  As I considered this -ch sound, I realized that I have a particular fondness for words that end in -ch--they pop up again and again in my poems--and a project, a challenge, was born!

So here is a collection of -CH words, one muscular verb for eaCH weekday of MarCH.  I'm going to stretCH myself to post five -CH poems weekly throughout March!  A few will be previously published, but most will be brand-new. Please join me in this CHallenge, poetry friends!  If you can't write with me every day, maybe you'll share your one or two per week, or your five-in-a-row, or your favorite poem by another author including the -CH word of the day....I welcome your participation!


MarCH CHallenge: Dates and Words

2 march
3 stretch
4 twitch
5 punch
6 fetch

 9 preach
10 sketch
11 smooch
12 pitch
13 arch

16 inch
17 lurch
18 botch
19 lunch
20 hatch

23 clutch
24 crouch
25 snatch
26 perch
27 quench

I'll repost each word on its day, and you can send me your responses by email or leave them in the comments for that post.  I'll share all the responses for each week on Sunday mornings, and on March 31st I'll announce the "Stretchiest Marcher" (the poet who responded to the most words) and send a poetry prize his or her way!

Oooooooohhhh noooooooooo!  Returning from school I accidentally deleted all the round-ups I'd written after 1pm, from Irene (22) through Tricia (34).  And then, hoping to retrieve them, I accidentally deleted all the roundups I'd written this morning!  Woe is me, woe are us!  Luckily, we have the blue frog working for us and I think your links are all still there.  My apologies, but I'm just going to leave it this way.

Thanks for stopping by--I look forward to reading each and every post thoroughly!

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