4 Poems in 21 Days

Well, wasn't I quite the ambitious little monkey at the beginning of September. I should have known better. Here are my excuses (the validity of which I will diminish in a minute): I was sick for like two weeks straight. I had 16 hours of community service. I've had some depression issues.

These are the dumb excuses. They are the kind of excuses that will always exist (read: "Dumb Shit That Gets in the Way of Important Shit") and therefore lose their validity as excuses due to their constancy. It's kind of like saying, "Gosh, I don't have time to do X because I have to sleep eight hours a night. It's really getting in the way of my productivity. Once I don't have to sleep anymore, I'll get it done. Really." Once my LIFE stops happening, maybe I'll have the time, energy, and inclination to write. Fuck that.

But that's not actually the point. I didn't stop writing these poems for the sole reasons of not having time, energy, or inclination. In fact, I made a conscious decision on Day Five to stop. The reasons are as follows:

1) Poems are short; they are not easy. There is a significant difference there that I did not take into account when I started. I never actually thought poetry would be "easy" but I did count on it taking less time than, say, crafting a short story or a one-act play. This was selling both myself and the form short, pardon the pun. Poems are not easier than other forms--they are different. Additionally, they are not necessarily short (though, Edgar Allen Poe recommends that a poem should take no longer than one hour to read [e.g., one sitting]; otherwise, its singular emotional impact is diluted by the sheer event of stopping, then restarting the reading).

2) Poems require as much proofing, editing, revision, and rewriting as any other form of writing, in proportion to their respective lengths. Writing a poem and assuming it is finished is juvenile and amateurish. I did not take this into consideration. Why would I want to end 30 days of poetry writing only to have 30 worthless first drafts? I'd much rather have four polished, revised, finished poems.

3) Poems take as much inspiration and planning as other forms of writing. Emo kids be damned: you cannot expect something to be profound, emotional, or impactful just because it is a poem. I thought this way in middle school. That thinking doesn't hold up now. Random line breaks do not a poem make. Rhyme (or willful lack thereof) does make words into poetry. To write a successful poem, you have to consider--even more clearly than the what the poem will literally--what feeling and thoughts you want your reader to have when exiting your poem. A poem, like other language art, is a temporal journey that has a beginning and end in time for your reader. He will begin to read it, and when he is finished reading it, time will have passed. During this time, more must have happened than him having read a poem--and the poet is the designer of this small fate.

So, in fewer words, I wasn't giving enough credit to the form, and was probably thinking myself more talented than I really was to be able to write a poem in a sitting and have it turn out as anything more than drivel. I plan to take the poems I did finish and revise and refine them until they're actually meaningful and effective--no matter how long that takes.

As an anecdote, I will share that between Days Three and Four, I lost the poem I wrote on Day Three. It was something to do with the way my computer synchs to the network at my job. I was really quite pleased with it, and really disappointed to think I wouldn't have it anymore. So, I did the only thing I could think of: I wrote it again, as best as I could remember it (I planned this poem in my head before I got it down on paper, so remembering it wasn't too difficult). The next day, when I went back into work, my computer synched properly, and the original poem returned to my My Documents folder. I was elated! I opened it to compare it to my rewritten version.

They were exactly the same.

I thought that was pretty cool. Maybe there IS a sanctity in the first draft. Who knows?

30 Poems in 30 Days

A new undertaking, inspired by the recent revival in my writing revelry, and a new and sudden passion (of unknown origin [though perhaps from listening closely too closely and too frequently to Andrew Bird's lyrics]): 30 poems in 30 days. It's kind of like National Novel Writing Month, except it's personal, not national, and it's poems (plural), not novel (singular, or even fractionally singular, being quite possibly unfinished).

I already cheated and wrote one on August 29th, and not one on September 1st, but since then, I've done one a day--that makes four so far. I plan to continue to write (at least) one a day for the remainder of the month. I may or may not post them for your reading pleasure, as some of them are more personal (and/or bad) than others. I may submit some to one or more contests, just to see if I have any idea what I'm doing (I don't). I will submit at least one to the City Paper Poetry Contest.

For inspiration and education, I have actually been reading poetry (never before a pastime or pleasure of mine), including that of Wallace Stevens (thanks to Chris), Thomas Gray, William Blake, Dylan Thomas, and more.

Simultaneously, I am working, story-by-story, through the near-2000-page The Story and Its Writer short story anthology. I am on indefinite hiatus from finishing Moby Dick, whose literary merits do not agree with me (or, vice versa, with whose literary merits I do not agree).

Also, on this note, I have finished the first short story I wrote during the Writers Block meetings. Alas, it is too long to submit to its originally intended City Paper contest (by a formidable thousand words), so I'll be writing another, pithier story, and submitting "Scheme" elsewhere.

Note: Chris and I are still in disagreement as to whether a limerick counts as a poem. Thoughts on this are invited.

The List

So much left to read...(and this, only a start: Time's 100 Best English-Language Novels post-1923). Money is (currently) my favorite novel of all time, so I was elated to see it on this list. And The Sound and the Fury is the novel (in conjunction with Toni Morrison's Jazz) that made me want to be a writer.

I've cancelled my cable, scaled back my netflix, gave my television antenna away, and now I'm focusing on reading, reading, reading. I've already started working on this list, having most recently finished the astounding Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood.

I'm currently reading Dubliners by James Joyce, while waiting to see which of the following books I get for Christmas. They're all on my list.

The Adventures of Augie March
Saul Bellow

All the King's Men
Robert Penn Warren

American Pastoral
Philip Roth

An American Tragedy
Theodore Dreiser

Animal Farm
George Orwell

Appointment in Samarra
John O'Hara

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
Judy Blume

The Assistant
Bernard Malamud

At Swim-Two-Birds
Flann O'Brien

Atonement
Ian McEwan

Beloved
Toni Morrison

The Berlin Stories
Christopher Isherwood

The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler

The Blind Assassin
Margaret Atwood

Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy

Brideshead Revisited
Evelyn Waugh

The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Thornton Wilder

Call It Sleep
Henry Roth

Catch-22
Joseph Heller

The Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger

A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess

The Confessions of Nat Turner
William Styron

The Corrections
Jonathan Franzen

The Crying of Lot 49
Thomas Pynchon

A Dance to the Music of Time
Anthony Powell

The Day of the Locust
Nathanael West

Death Comes for the Archbishop
Willa Cather

A Death in the Family
James Agee

The Death of the Heart
Elizabeth Bowen

Deliverance
James Dickey

Dog Soldiers
Robert Stone

Falconer
John Cheever

The French Lieutenant's Woman
John Fowles

The Golden Notebook
Doris Lessing

Go Tell it on the Mountain
James Baldwin

Gone With the Wind
Margaret Mitchell

The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck

Gravity's Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon

The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald

A Handful of Dust
Evelyn Waugh

The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter
Carson McCullers

The Heart of the Matter
Graham Greene

Herzog
Saul Bellow

Housekeeping
Marilynne Robinson

A House for Mr. Biswas
V.S. Naipaul

I, Claudius
Robert Graves

Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace

Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison

Light in August
William Faulkner

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
C.S. Lewis

Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov

Lord of the Flies
William Golding

The Lord of the Rings
J.R.R. Tolkien

Loving
Henry Green

Lucky Jim
Kingsley Amis

The Man Who Loved Children
Christina Stead

Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie

Money
Martin Amis

The Moviegoer
Walker Percy

Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf

Naked Lunch
William Burroughs

Native Son
Richard Wright

Neuromancer
William Gibson

Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro

1984
George Orwell

On the Road
Jack Kerouac

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Ken Kesey

The Painted Bird
Jerzy Kosinski

Pale Fire
Vladimir Nabokov

A Passage to India
E.M. Forster

Play It As It Lays
Joan Didion

Portnoy's Complaint
Philip Roth

Possession
A.S. Byatt

The Power and the Glory
Graham Greene

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Muriel Spark

Rabbit, Run
John Updike

Ragtime
E.L. Doctorow

The Recognitions
William Gaddis

Red Harvest
Dashiell Hammett

Revolutionary Road
Richard Yates

The Sheltering Sky
Paul Bowles

Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut

Snow Crash
Neal Stephenson

The Sot-Weed Factor
John Barth

The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner

The Sportswriter
Richard Ford

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
John le Carre

The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway

Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston

Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe

To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee

To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf

Tropic of Cancer
Henry Miller

Ubik
Philip K. Dick

Under the Net
Iris Murdoch

Under the Volcano
Malcolm Lowry

Watchmen
Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

White Noise
Don DeLillo

White Teeth
Zadie Smith

Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys