The *one-month* poetry challenge

I’m excited to be starting a whole month of writing a poem every day. Last time, Onj and I wrote a poem every day for two weeks and it was incredibly successful — not because I wrote amazing poems, but because it taught me how to write no matter what mood I was in. The blank page is no longer as scary when I sit down to write a poem. I know something will come if I just keep sitting there; it’s hard work, but it’s also like magic.

Plus, I checked off a lot of my original goals:

• Get into a habit of writing something creative more consistently and often. I’m doing this! I have a newish creative project I’m dedicated to and I write in it most days. Plus, blog posts now come out every 3-5 days instead of every 4-6.
• Learn to let go of the idea that every poem I write has to be a GREAT one. Somehow this sank in really quickly, like maybe after day four. It turns out that lowering my expectations for myself helped me to start producing pretty good poems every once in a while!
• Practice writing the thing I want to write — don’t save a good idea for later. It’s pretty easy to do this with poetry, but I’m hoping this lesson sticks enough to influence my fiction.
• Try new things and experiment. During the two weeks, I wrote a poem with four syllables per line, a poem about biking, a haiku, a poem with a rhyme scheme, a song…
• Rewrite drafts. I didn’t get into this a whole lot at the time, but I’ve revised several of the poems now, and wow…revision is very fun. I think I like it more than drafting. It gives me hope for writing fiction — maybe writing a first draft will always be slow and hard, but the revision stage will be faster and easier!

These are ongoing goals, particularly the one about trying new things. I want to continue to experiment by writing a poem in one form and then trying it in another one to see which one suits it better. I think I’m intimidated at the thought of changing a poem that already has a structure, and I would love to see what surprises come out of doing something like that.

This time around, I’m mostly following (belatedly) a form calendar that someone made for National Poetry Month. It’s only day three and I’ve already been introduced to two poetic forms I’ve never used (or really heard of) — the tanka and the Golden Shovel. Poets.org/poems has an amazing search that lets you filter by form, so I’ve been able to see examples of each one.

The Golden Shovel is especially interesting. Poets.org defines it as “a poetic form wherein each word of one line from another poem serves as the end word of each line for a newly constructed poem.” It’s a tribute to another artist; you use an excerpt from another poem. The first example of this style was written by Terrance Hayes (his poem is called “The Golden Shovel”), who ended each line of his poem with a word from Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool”.

I like the possibilities of this form. You don’t have to choose another person’s poem — you could select a line from a speech, a play, a letter, or a work of fiction. You can use your poem to respond to the original work or you could say something entirely different using the same words.

I decided to use part of a quote from Annie Dillard: “…dangle from it limp wherever it takes you” (from the essay “Living Like Weasels”). It’s only a first draft, but here’s how it turned out (with end words in bold to make it easier to see):

It doesn’t hurt to dangle
Your own prowess away from
Your face to examine it once in a while. It
Won’t kill you to limp
When running isn’t available. Wherever
You go, the struggle tracks with you. But it
Isn’t your own strength that takes
You through. It isn’t you.

I love how this stretched me, mentally. I’m keeping my eyes open for other lines that might make a good Golden Shovel because I’d like to play around with it some more. What does this form say about its original source — both when your poem is on the same topic and when it’s about something else entirely? And what if I could make a self-referencing Golden Shovel that took the first words in a stanza and made them the last words in the next stanza??

Poetry is exciting. Tomorrow’s form is erasure and I can’t wait!

Editing a poem

One of the benefits of the writing-a-poem-every-day challenge is that I have an abundance of poems to edit! I find that I’m really enjoying the revising stage. The tension between saying what I want to say and finding the words that do it — meaning vs. form — is so interesting to me. There have been times when I wanted to say one thing and have ended up saying something else, just because a word that rhymed forced me into a different thought. It’s frustrating when there are no synonyms with the sound or syllable count that I want, but I also enjoy being surprised what the restrictions of a form can lead me to write. Because I usually love my first drafts, I do get a little panicky revising, but putting all my drafts in the same document (each on a new page) helps; I can always go back to what I had before, so I feel the freedom to explore new directions.

I thought I would share one of my favorites to come out of the challenge and explain why I chose the revisions that I did.

1/26/24

I’ve watched you in the kitchen. 
You stir the pasta until it becomes tender,
Taste everything with the same spoon.
Bending over a plate to drizzle a sauce, 
Your nose wrinkles. It’s how you concentrate.
You never want to make something I won’t eat
And you give me a larger share
Of the little warm bundles of gnocchi.
You’re the only one I trust with new foods.
Plating is your favorite
And it is here I see the artist in you:
Swirls and textures and colors of things
Please you in their arrangements and relation
To each other. In the flash of your
Knife I feel my heart chopped open,
Bare on the table
For you.

Here is my third draft:

2/23/24
I’ve watched you in the kitchen. 
You stir the pasta until it becomes tender,
Tongue everything, use the same spoon.
Your care in centering a plate,
Pouring a sauce in the shape of a crescent moon. The way 
Your nose wrinkles when you do. It’s how you concentrate.

Ordinary splendor: You won’t make something I won’t eat.
Generosity is your staple; you give me a larger share
Of the bundles of gnocchi. As you plate
I see the artist in you: A swirl of sauce, a glitter of salt, 
A cilantro leaf pressed flat against the porcelain. 
I eat until there’s nothing left. Memory and flavor. 
These arrangements bring joy; our own unstable 
Origins savored into something sweet
All the way through. 
In the deft flash of your knife I feel 
My heart chopped open,
Bare on the table
For you.

Upon rereading, even though I loved it and was tempted to leave it as-is, the first draft felt a bit flat. I knew I wanted a few things: more complex sentences of varying lengths to help the poem flow, more vivid images and specificity (a glitter of salt), and a more unified set of sounds that, while not rhyming with any regularity, pulled the poem together.

But even more things happened as I worked on it. The poem split into two pieces because I didn’t want it to feel rushed (I would even be okay with three pieces, but I haven’t yet found another good place to break it). I listened to Colby’s (very wise) feedback about my favorite line and shortened it (goodbye, little warm bundles of gnocchi). Lines got added. One was removed entirely because I couldn’t find a place for it.

I’m the most happy with the sounds of the poem, how it chimes. There is tender/center in the first stanza, and spoon/moon and plate/way/concentrate. The next stanza, though separated, ties itself to the first with echoes of previously used rhymes: splendor with tender/center, eat and plate with concentrate (both of these are at the ends of their lines to emphasize the final t). Porcelain and Origins; flavor, savor, and arrangements; left and deft. And probably my favorite set of chiming words is staple/unstable/table. The near rhymes are sprinkled through the poem on purpose, made to feel scattered, like herbs scattered in a soup that enhance the overall flavor. I want them to surprise when they’re recognized; some of them are so subtle they probably won’t be noticed — a little secret of spice.

I’m still not sure if it’s done. Now that I’m mostly happy with it, I’ll probably give it some air and wait until I’ve almost forgotten it to read it again. Then any problems will jump out immediately, and I’ll know what else to edit.

In the meantime, if you have any feedback, I’d love to hear it. Things that felt like they didn’t fit, things that could be stronger, emotions you felt — all of this is helpful!

And yes, this poem is about Colby. 🙂

Effective and beneficial

When I read Ted Kooser’s “The Poetry Home Repair Manual” a couple months ago, I was either bored by or opposed to a lot of the things he said. (Which felt weird, I should add. He was a Poet Laureate. I should have trusted that he knew what he was talking about.) But my goodness, this writing-a-poem-every-day thing is showing me more and more how right he was about nearly EVERYTHING.

For example: In his book, Kooser strongly advocates for understandable poetry. “A lot of this resistance to poetry is to be blamed on poets,” he says in a discussion about why there is not much money in poetry (lol). “Some go out of their way to make their poems difficult if not downright discouraging. That may be because difficult poems are what they think they’re expected to write to advance their careers. They know it’s the professional interpreters of poetry — book reviewers and literary critics — who most often establish a poet’s reputation, and that those interpreters are attracted to poems that offer opportunities to show off their skills at interpretation. A poet who writes poetry that doesn’t require explanation, who writes clear and accessible poems, is of little use to critics building their own careers as interpreters. But a clear and accessible poem can be of use to an everyday reader.”

I balked against this at first because nearly all the poetry I’ve read in my life to date has been confusing. I thought that was what I was supposed to aim towards: poetry so complex that you have to work really hard or be really smart to understand it. I figured that over time, I would reach that level.

But I was asking myself a few days ago “How do I get better?” and it sent me into a little spiral. I couldn’t figure out what to stive towards, aim for, or practice in order to get better. What even is “good” poetry, (never mind how to get there)? Surely what I’m writing at the moment is “bad” in the grand scheme of things; how will I tell when it’s “better”? What makes published poets’ work worth being published and how do I practice that in my own writing?

After a few conversations with Karlyn, Colby, and my mom (sorry, Onj, we haven’t had a chance to talk about this yet!), I am realizing that Ted Kooser was right.

The publishing industry is a business. It promotes good art, yes, but it is a business. It doesn’t determine the standard for “good” poetry, so I don’t need to try to make poetry that only reviewers, publishers, and critics will like!

Additionally, in our post-postmodern world there are an infinite number of ways you can find value in poems. Things like the expert use of the sonnet or the stirring narrative of a lyric poem are no longer the standard for good poetry. Now we have free verse, fragments, poems shaped like fish and halfmoons and shoes, inventive new forms, disruption of language, poems based on only sound, poems that dazzle with metaphor or image or consonance. Anything goes. Almost anything could be “good”!

And this is actually a comforting thing for me, because if there are infinite ways to write a poem, I can just practice the ones I like! Which frees me up to ask different questions of myself (What are my goals for my poems, and what do I enjoy?) and use different terminology (“beneficial” and “effective” instead of “good”, “bad”, or “better”).

And here’s what I want: I want my poems to be effective. I want them to tell stories. I want them to communicate emotions. I want them to help readers feel something. I want to recreate moments so other people can experience them. I want to illuminate hope. And you know what? I’m already doing a lot of these things. So some of my poems are effective and beneficial.

All of these realizations answered another question I’ve had about “valid” ways to write poetry. When I write a poem, does it have to be written according to the idea I started it with? Is it only successful if it accomplishes what I wanted it to do? Or can it wander its way into completion? Can it start from nothing and say nothing in particular? Am I allowed to be confused by my own poems or feel like they don’t mean anything?

As an example, I wrote this poem because I couldn’t think of anything to write and I literally just needed to get the words down:

If you were to
Sleep you'd miss the
Way the cloud banks
Fall.

Hills of mist and
Deep, dark streams are
Here now and they
Call.

Do you think you
Could be more in
Love with who you
Are?

Dark drops from the
Edge of all things;
Mourn the once bright
Star.

I felt like it didn’t mean anything. I didn’t understand any of it; it was total nonsense to me. A garbage poem, right? But it showed me something surprising, actually: that when I write from thin air, I can still produce something effective and beneficial. I was working from a prompt and was only allowed to use one syllable words. But my subconscious seems to have worked within that limitation to produce a poem about something sad and mysterious — something that totally fits with the form of the poem. That’s something I would have tried to do on purpose if I had thought of it beforehand, fitting the mood to the form of the poem. But my meandering way of writing this gave me the same result!

So no, I still don’t understand this poem and I have ideas about revising it. But there was something valuable in it even though I didn’t set out to accomplish something specific with it. What I’m concluding from all of this is that I just need to write more poetry. More and more and more. Writing will teach me how to improve my writing.

Obviously I knew all this, and I’ve always known that you have to make art for art’s sake, not for the approval of other people or for the hope of getting famous. It’s just that it sunk in this week in a new way, that I don’t need to be anxious about how my poems are “good” or “bad” right now. It’s really nice to feel free from expectations and just practice learning how to love my work — the process of it, the daily grind of it, the joy of it.

Ted Kooser had it right again: “Most of the fun you’ll have as a poet will come about during the process of writing. Eventual publication and recognition are reasons to feel good about yourself and your work, of course, but to keep going you’ll learn to find pleasure working at your desk, out of the way of the world.”

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.

Weighing

My poem was published in the last issue of Visual Verse! I’m really grateful for this magazine and how it has helped me restart writing poetry. I will miss its monthly prompts, but hopefully I will keep using its archive of images for future inspiration.

This image was weird 😂 But it challenged me and I am really pleased with what came out of it!

The weight of the world hangs on small things, like a second
That matters, shouldering itself into the present long after it has passed. Or
The way little shadows mutter under each roof tile to wait out the sun.
The way blinking might be more significant at one time than another, or
A treeline might have tufts in it–
Insisting on being sawtoothed to prove that it’s not all one thing.
The way a flame can’t sit still; the way a c(h)ord could be a rope or
A stack of notes and the way an egg feels like a stone in the hand. And yet,
Not everything must be handled
To be real.

Published in Vol. 10 Chap. 12 of Visual Verse. Image by Marc Schlossman

Coral

Here is another Visual Verse poem — possibly my favorite of the things I’ve written this year. I like the sonnet form so much, but here I let myself keep only the barest structure of one. I love how it turned out.

You call yourself an invertebrate, but I know
you’ve been hardened: by the laving of the years,
by the pinnate ache of opportunity―
vanes of joy or of new loneliness

I hope you find what you’re looking for
but not in that far off way, not like
watching the ocean, its spread hands paling at your feet
and its feet too far away to get to

This love isn’t just mine; it is yours.
Leave your fears and failures on the shore.

Published in Vol. 10 Chap. 04 of Visual Verse. Image by Olga Naida

The Hummingbird

I frequently start writing a poem from an image. But another strategy I like to use is looking something up in Wikipedia, haha. For this poem, I read Wikipedia’s entire article on hummingbirds, writing down words that were interesting or particularly vivid. My list included words like this:

• violet/violent
• lozenge
• beak
• iridescent
• fairy
• metallic
• hollow bones
• sickle
• gorget

Once I had my list, I started writing the poem, trying to use the words that interested me most or gave me images or colors. This was the result!

The Hummingbird

The moments speed much faster when you're he
Part beak, part wingblur, his throat a violent jewel
Each hour that dies is plural with his speed
The little lozenge heart beats as for two

He turns his fairy body towards the sun
Allows the light to turn him crystalline
His wings are iridescent as they thrum
His breast afire -- a lit, metallic green

Fragile, hollow bones erase his past
His sickle wavers shallow, plunges deep
The copper crown; the gorget gleaming, glassed
He slows his bladelike beauty into sleep

He hovers next to death with fire to spare.
Praise the little pirate of the air.

Thank you, Visual Verse

I’ve been writing a lot more poetry lately. It’s a special joy to get back into it. I kind of stopped writing entirely after college when an abusive relationship drained me of creativity and I sabotaged my lifelong writing habits. I have found it difficult to get back into, but God has been so kind and patient with me over the past few years that I’m finally starting to practice the joyful habits of writing again.

One thing that has been SUPER helpful is finding Visual Verse, an online magazine for art, poetry, short fiction, and short non-fiction. Each month, Visual Verse chooses an image and invites anyone to submit a response — but you only have an hour to write it. “We offer you the chance to experience the rush of writing without overthinking,” their website says. (Such a helpful tactic for me.)

Unfortunately, Visual Verse is closing down their project after next month, but they have an extensive archive of images that I plan to use to keep up my poem-writing habit. Starting with an image turns out to be an excellent way for me to find my way into a poem. I’ve submitted like eight of them so far and VV has published six, which is so cool and gives me so much confidence!! I will probably share a few of those here, but for now I’d like to share one that wasn’t picked (I just like it so much), and the image that goes with it.

Untitled

We sit dignified

Before the summer storm:

We feel its breath on the long wheatgrass

And see it snaking, parting,

Twisting it like hair.

We smell the storm’s breath on the wheatgrass– 

The fragrance that lifts, sun-warmed,

And settles on my skirt

Of saffron.

We settle on my skirt of saffron and watch the field,

The bright foreground of a play; the storm 

Bruises the sky behind. Crows cry,

Their bodies, too, blueblack. 

What appears to be a tawny hole in my shawl is

A tortoiseshell butterfly, its wings shuddering with the wheatgrass.

Already the earth in my hand feels more real. Already

The storm comes.

The butterfly closes its wings once carefully, like a book.

I, too, close my eyes– 

I am hiding from rainbows.

Image by John Everett Millais/Birmingham Museums Trust

Train Full of Flowers

I was describing to an old professor the ride home from Philly – one afternoon in particular, when the Philadelphia Flower Show was still on. The train was a crush of people and their flowers, and the aroma was heady. He said, “That’s a nice image – a train full of flowers.” He was right, so I wrote a poem about it:

The train is full of swaying flowers

Clutched, wrapped in brown paper,

Overflowing from the narrow seats—

A cloud of purple and indigo and rose.

Sun crinkles off the plastic packaging;

A burst of orange

Blooms blind me.

It’s hard to feel ambivalent while breathing in a haze of flowers,

But my hands are empty.

Tipped toward me, the fragrance

Of these bundled, gold-throated lilies

Swells

And I remember, then,

how heaven stood silent to your

Perfect cries

Just so it could open

To me