Plans for Poem-A-Day: the Unmasked Confessional

I have signed up to take part in a poem-a-day writing group over winter break. Don't shake your head wearily. Don't remind me that I had a lot more energy many years ago. I don't think I had more ideas in the past or more ease of creating or more notions about how to get the ship in or out of the bottle (wherever that metaphor came from). I think I have more now. I can turn to myself and pull something out--a thread, a handkerchief, my soul, a song, a frito crumb. I have hope in what has proved to be a vast well waiting.

I am always entranced at the outset of a time frame or schedule like this as if it were New Year's Eve--planning how my life will be different, more dedicated, my eyes never closing all the way, my mind poised to snatch at the impressions and shapes and ideas congregating, foregrounded in the head's temples, charging from one to the next.

I begin to avoid my desk for some days before. I don't want to put my eggs in a too-early basket. But maybe I could write something today and tack it in for day 11 when I might have run dry? Surely pre-writing is against the whole spirit of the thing. I must leap on each day of the month like a tiger ready to tear off a good poem.

Really, I embrace this idea as 30 days of being awake. 30 days of attending the paper. 30 opportunities to surprise myself. I don't expect a poem each time, but a useful nugget or an astounding freewrite like a white water cataract.

And I will have resource to some secret ideas and seeds. One of which is "coconut."

Five Poems and Counting

Working at Tahoe: OK, I exaggerate a little since 2 1/2 of those poems were substantially begun before I came to Tahoe. But one of those poems is for the book I had thought was done which is good.

So far this week, I also made a long list of possible ideas noting where some thing might dovetail with each other. And I did some good free writing on "American Jobs" so that I have at least a base from which to think about what else I might include. Maybe a little homage to Mark Nowak in the form of a haibun.

I also wanted to think about my writing. I've begun reading Talk Poetry: Poems and Interviews with Nine American Poets. A quote I would like to consider in relation to my own work is from an interview with Linda Gregerson: "how to locate the hard edge, the limits, the embodied grammar that will give this new work its own center of gravity." I'm especially interested in that hard edge.