The two-week poetry challenge

Onj and I are doing a poetry challenge: Write a poem every single day for two weeks. (She thinks we can do a month. I am insisting that we start small. Lol.) I’m hoping to get a lot out of it:

• Get into a habit of writing something creative more consistently and often. I need to know that I can produce work even if it feels intimidating. I’m hoping that habit and regularity will slowly convince my brain that it likes the hard work of sitting down and thinking about writing.
• Learn to let go of the idea that every poem I write has to be a GREAT one. This article had the good point that trying to write a great poem every time will stiffen you up; in trying to make it “good”, you’ll only stick to what you know and not risk trying new things.
• Practice writing the thing I want to write — right now. (I think I have a habit of “saving” good ideas for another day when I’m feeling less inspired. I’m learning that this isn’t a good idea.)
• Try new things. If I like an idea I was working with, I could try putting it in a different form. If I only had the time for a haiku the previous day, I could lengthen it into something with more than three lines. If something worked well in free verse but I want to challenge myself, I could turn it into a sonnet. I could try writing a poem with exactly 11 syllables in every line or a poem that uses only one-syllable words.
• Rewrite drafts. I might not get to this goal in this particular time period, but I’m hoping that messing around with what I write — trying the same idea in different forms, stealing a line from yesterday’s poem to use today, etc. — will reassure me that rewriting is fun and can make my work better.

I’m three days in and don’t have a lot to report except that it’s hard to write poems. Lol. But I can already tell that this is a good process for me. And if I see benefits in two weeks, it really might be worth it to go for a month.

We’re also trying to track our mood each day as we sit down to write, because of an interesting idea in that same article by The Writers’ Greenhouse:

"Find out what kind of poem you write when you’re knackered, fluey, tipsy, light-headed, stressed, hormonal…
All the usual conditions when you'd dismiss the idea of trying to write a poem? Now's your chance to try them out. Sometimes the poem will just be about how tired you are or fluey you are; that's fine, and it falls into one of the categories above. Sometimes, you'll be stunned that despite your state, you can still step through the magic door into poetry land, and come back with something that pleases and surprises you."

Having felt apprehensive, lazy, unmotivated, or apathetic every day so far, it has already been rewarding to see the results of this tracking. I can write when I don’t feel like writing. And nothing has come out as bad as I thought it would.

I likely won’t share many poems here, at least not during this two week period, but I thought I would share the very small one I wrote yesterday in the spirit of vulnerability:

Chickadees

Chickadee feet
Sink in snow like
Fork tines into
Sponge cake.

The feeling these
Birds are bibbed fairies -- 
A hard one
To shake.