Musings on the first month of this year’s poetry project – and a poem.

I have written 30 poems (sort of) in the last month(ish)

Of those 30 poems, I’ve transferred 19 from my notebook to my computer for further contemplation and editing. Now, it’s actually 17 poems, and 2 short stories, although one of them I’m thinking of trying to sell as a poem anyway. The second short story is definitely a short story and it just happened yesterday morning. It is… rather disturbing. There’s some junk in my head that makes me go “um… how did that get there?!”

Overall I’m quite impressed with myself and having managed to write so many poems I’m thinking are worth a second look, but I must admit that I haven’t written anything yet today.

I thought at first that I would be able to tell the difference between the poems I’ve written in the mornings and the poems I’ve written at night, or during the day, simply by their quality, but I can’t, although I can see several poems I remember writing in the morning and which did not make the cut. Some of my poems are sometimes rather more lists of random things than poems, as I try and get anything down on the page for the day.

Here is a (slightly better than average) example, which was (I think) written one afternoon:

Today a sabbath

I get to work

uncover under drawers in built cabinets

small plastic top off some container

two of the smallest packages of individually wrapped

panty liners I have ever seen

and nine years accumulation of semi-arid-land dust

realize I must never have taken these drawers out

before

oops

pause to agree with the nostalgia station on the radio

vanilla is indeed the finest of the flavours

say to myself I’m not doing the windows

and then do the windows moments later

once again successfully avoid going through my papers

how many instructions, manuals, and old receipts

does one need

how many old birthday cards, ticket stubs and reminders

does one need

how many candles for someone who never lights candles

I make a note to buy more microfiber towels

I will need more

to make this house clean

flush the drowning spider

Sisyphus should have been given a broom

but that’s men for you

when I’m done for the day I can run a bath

choose extra bubbles

I don’t think I actually had a bubble bath, but it was a good idea.

Getting in the groove of this project, I think it’ll be interesting for me to make a note of what time of day I write each one each day (? hopefully) for the next month, and perhaps I’ll be able to see a correlation then between time of day and poem quality at the end of it. I know that a few times early morning poems have essentially been transcriptions of dreams, and the results are strange but also sometimes quite rhythmic. The poem before yesterday’s story was a dream transcription which is essentially a song.

I also think my storytelling brain likes writing at night, but it is good to sleep, too.

A couple of days ago when I was doing my monthly round of story and poem submissions, I discovered that these people known as Rattle do a poetry prompt every week, with open mikes and prizes and all sorts of things. Perhaps one day I’ll be able to write something worthy of winning one of the prizes.

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving to my fellow Canadians!