There are several NaPoWriMo, or poem-a-day, sites, for people who are celebrating National Poetry Month by drafting a poem every day. I've been very kindly invited to participate in some of them, but I don't think I'm going to. I know I don't have time to read that many poems: I may not have time to read the poems I already know that my favorite bloggers are going to produce. April gets kind of nuts.
I'll be going along as a freelancer, or a fellow-traveler. I'm not doing it as a discipline. I have lots of anxieties, but the one about not producing enough poetry has not yet bitten me. I don't think I should write more poems. Probably I should write fewer.
But I like writing poems, and I like the way everybody gets a little wacky and loose when they have to write that much, and I don't want to miss the party completely. So I'm in, more or less. Happy April!
The other April poetry thing I'm doing is the Via Negativa book club. It will be tremendous fun, and I'm looking forward to it very much.
2 comments:
I think it would be really difficult to write a poem every day -- at least to write anything approaching a good poem every day. I have been working on a poem about dandelions for months, and it still isn't at a point where I would want to send it out into the world. I probably never will. Poetry needs to be honed and perfected so that the words come together like crystals. That takes time.
Oh, Lord, yes! I don't expect them all to be good, and I don't expect any of them to be finished. But I've may already have keeper -- I really like yesterday's poem, and I *think* (I never really know) that I'll still like it a month from now. So it's already, so to speak, paid for itself :-)
I don't think all good poems form slowly like crystals, though that's certainly one way. There's a remarkable variation in how good poems come about. When you look at the staggering output of someone like Shakespeare, you can see that it's physically impossible for him to have done a lot reworking -- much of that stuff must be practically first draft. Amazing.
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