Challenging Yourself To Write a Daily Poem for a Month Can be a Good Thing
A few years ago, I signed up for Tupelo Press’ 30/30 Project, which celebrates and shines a light on poetry by challenging writers to write a poem everyday for a month. The project is also a fundraiser and a creative way to raise awareness and support for Tupelo Press. Each month, a different group of writers volunteer to write and share their poetry here.
As a writer who began highly focused in fiction, my comfort zone was always in the longform essay and prose. Writing poetry felt intimidating to attempt. After I was diagnosed with an auto-immune disease, all my writing ceased. Nothing wanted to be written. I didn’t have the joy, patience, or energy for developing characters, writing dialogue, or letting a story unfold over several pages. Pain was an awful distraction, taking over all the spaces that I had once found confidence in. My comfort zone was no longer comfortable. My prose began to shorten, my lines were more and more broken, and my limited words started to intensify, focusing on imagery, rhythm, and metaphor. My writing was changing and it was terrifying. This was uncharted territory, but I needed to follow what my writing was trying to tell me and what it wanted to convey.
I came across the 30/30 project and I applied. I didn’t run the idea by my inner-editor, I just jumped in. This definitely felt comparable to waking up on a Friday and deciding to run a marathon the next day, without any kind of preparation or training. I was barely published anywhere, I didn’t have much info for an author bio, and my writing had felt unreliable. Still, I wanted to see if I could run this race. Luckily, there are no repercussions to signing up on an impulse to write a daily poem for a month, and, leaning into technique, bad writing has to spill ink before we get better on the page.
What I loved about this experience was how welcoming and inspiring a space it was. I didn’t meet anyone in person, but we were connected online as a group, and our conversation was infrequent, but friendly. We talked about our daily challenges- if the weather was inspiring enough, if we saw a cute puppy or heard something funny or tragic, or if the day was just chaos. Creating in this space far outweighed my fear of posting a rough draft of a bad poem on a website every day. Having been isolated and not feeling like myself in the craft that identifies me, it was nice to know that there were eight other writers (both seasoned and new) who committed to the challenge. It was nice to not feel alone in the craft. Even more so, it was nice to feel something that resembled joy in the space that only felt its absence for too long.
On Day 1, I jotted down some lines that I had been thinking about, and I took a good amount of time to write. It was hard to find focus. A lot of other ideas sprang up as I was writing, and I had to cut those ideas away and stick to the poem that was trying to speak. I started to keep a small notebook for some of the pieces I cut and saved them for later. By the time I had finally finished my poem for Day 1, I was already looking forward to tackling tomorrow’s poem. I was looking forward to having a reason to carve out some time to focus on this. After the first week, a routine had solidified. I decided that any significant observations or thoughts from ‘today’ could be my inspiration for tomorrow’s poem, unless something else popped up that I felt more compelled to share. The challenge made me walk through the day listening more, observing more, and immersing myself into all of my spaces to think and write.
I love that this challenge forced me to make time for the daily poem. Making time for the daily poem was making time for me to write. It was the window I needed to become inspired, and at that point, any kind of writing slowly restored itself as my comfort zone. By the end of the month, I had jotted down a reliable reservoir of prompts, words, emotions, and phrases that had been on my mind or came up during that month; all in a small black notebook in my bag, and I still jot prompts, words, ideas and observations down to this day. By the end of the month, I was a little sad that the month went by so fast, but I was invited to stay on for another month, and again, I bypassed my inner-editor and I accepted the challenge to keep going.
