I successfully completed the April poem a day (PAD) challenge and wrote 30 poems, and I posted published poems from other authors every day on Facebook. Fortunately, I have a lot of friends who were English majors--so the response was pretty positive. Hopefully some of them found some poets they hadn't heard about before, and hopefully some folks who don't usually read poetry got exposed to some.
But something else happened too. As I struggled to get back into writing poems every day for the PAD, the more I read poetry to find poems to post on Facebook, the easier it got to write. I also felt more confident in what I was writing. I wasn't just grinding through them to get to better stuff, I was writing better stuff. The process happened much more quickly than it usually does, so as if we needed any more proof that reading more makes us better writers, I now have my own personal experience to back that up.
To keep the ball rolling, I set another goal for myself. I'm going to try to work on 10 poems this month (new ones or revisions). I have a weekly paper calendar at my desk that I keep all of my appointments on (I haven't managed to go completely paperless yet). During April, I kept a running tally of my poems on the bottom of the calendar page so I knew how many I needed to write. It seemed to be a helpful tool to keep me going, but 30 is too many to do every month. Some weekends you don't want to write...and sometimes it's hard to come up with the 2 or 3 ideas during the week to catch up, so 10 seemed like a nice doable number to start with. Hopefully it will get me going. I've already written one, so it seems to be working. Maybe I'll be able to push it up to 15 or 20, but I wanted to start out achievable so that I could find a happy medium between forcing it every day and weekly regularly writing so that I don't end up with dry spells of months without writing.
I hope you all had a successful poetry month!
To close, I'll share the poem that got the most response out of all of the ones I posted on Facebook last month:
by William Carlos Williams
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
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