For the last month or so I have been particularly neglectful of DO. This is a combination of a few factors, including a mystery illness that has basically obliterated my ability to willfully focus on lengthy writing. In other words, I can do it, but never when I’m planning to! This has been a complete disaster for my dissertation 
One way I survived is via the new poetry site that I set up in March. I got really interested in seeing how I could connect with other amateur poets on the internet and discovered the Read Write Poem community, which is sadly closed as of midnight May 1. To go out with a bang, they celebrated National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) with a challenge: everyone who completed a poem each day, posted a comment about it on the site and in 50% of the cases wrote poetry that responded to the daily prompt would be included in an anthology at the end of the month.
So, what little creative energy I’ve been able to muster has been devoted to cranking out at least a poem a day. I’m very proud of my accomplishment: 46 poems over the course of 30 days. Here is a selection of my favorites:
I encourage you to have a look at the April 2010 archive. I’m now hoping to keep posting daily (that was the original plan anyway). In the end, napowrimo was a difficult challenge. Some days the poetry came easily and other days it didn’t, and I learned a lot about persistence in the face of inevitable failure. Even if the poem flopped on a particular day, at least I could say I tried. That gave me momentum for the days when I actually did write something decent (or at least something I was happy with). I also learned how to allow my poetry to be a vehicle for healing, and I’m extraordinarily glad for that.
{ 1 comment }
I think you got the point exactly! Write. Simple, but allusive sometimes because it is so obvious.
Before April I did Dana’s little micro-challenge to write 30 poems in 30 minutes! Now that was a confront. But “in process”, a sight to see as my internal editor was simply overwhelmed and had to give it up. 30 poems were mostly #@x&*, but so what, and that wasn’t the point. That exercise really made a difference for me in April when I sometimes first felt I was drawing blanks. Didn’t matter, just write!
And congratulations on making it through April for sure!
~Neil
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