A Poem a Day...

It's been interesting to return to the 30 poems I wrote over National Poetry Month.  I feel like an outsider hired to edit someone else's work--some of these poems I hardly remember writing as that ticking clock, that deadline, made me pound something out and save it just to meet my goal of a poem a day. 

The one bonus this exercise had is that I've sort of continued with a "poem a day" into May.  I find that now when sit down to write, I'm less hesitant.  I start writing immediately and just see what happens.  I think the poem-a-day exercise reminded me not to take poetry or writing poems so seriously.  *Serious* can kill a poem.  I think it was Marvin Bell who said that the goal is to fool your mind into writing, or was it William Stafford.  I can't remember, but the message is just the same-- to distract yourself from the idea of "the poem" so your mind can be a little more free.

 

I've decided to take a day off from "the office" (aka the coffeeshop where I write) and stay home to submit some poems.  Now, I won't be submitting the poems from National Poetry Month, well, there's one or two I finished, but those poems will be in poetry purgatory until they've been cleaned up, ironed out, and dusted off.  But I realize I don't have a lot poems out there and well, I like to get mail.  Even a rejection is better than an empty mailbox. 

 

So, this is my poetry life today.  I will walk the dog, make a fresh pot of coffee or treat myself with a Chai tea, then sit down in my now-clean-office-with-the-disheveled-bookcase to send some things out into the world.  Summer is coming.  I can see it in the wingtips of swallows and I know poetry will be folded up and set a side for a few months.  Today my poems shall be paper airplanes flying out into the world.