A Poem A Day for the Month of May

It’s all there in the title: ‘A Poem a Day for the Month of May.’ That’s the plan. Not that anyone asked me to explain myself; this piece is more to keep me motivated. To remind me why I decided to try this now. Hint—it’s not just because ‘day’ and ‘May’ conveniently rhyme. Though that’s a plus.

I can’t remember the last time I published something on Vocal other than poetry. Challenge after challenge, poem after poem, ranging from haiku to something called a sestina, which I hadn’t heard of before. I became a poetry machine; an inherent contradiction. Which begs the question, why more poetry? Why shout more pieces of my soul into the Vocal void?

First, and perhaps most obviously, I love poetry. I don’t get sick of it. I love to play with structure and rules and I love to throw both out of the window, even when the result is cringeworthy. I love when I find the perfect phrase to capture my brokenness and my joy. Most of all, I love when someone else can identify with my words, my pain, my feelings. What begins as “mine” becomes “ours.” Our words. Our pain. Our feelings. In the sharing, I feel seen, and I hope I facilitate even just a fraction of that strange intimacy with others. That is what writing means to me. That is ever my goal when writing, if indeed I have a goal beyond wrestling myself on proverbial paper.

My love for the thousand faces that poetry can wear is not why I’m setting out to intentionally write one poem a day for a month. It is why I will find joy in the process, but it’s not my “why.” The bulk of my job is writing. Lengthy reports, seemingly endless emails, templates, note sheets-some days it feels like all I do at work is write. And the writing is dry. Formulaic. I use the same words to say the same things, over and over. It is a terrible way to exercise the creative muscle. It’s no way to do so at all. The problem is, when I write and write and write all day long, not about what I want to write but what I must, I lose my appreciation for the craft itself. For the pleasure I find in it, for the ways writing feels playful and moving and provocative. There’s no room for such qualities in the writing I do for work. So I must practice them elsewhere, even on days I don’t feel like it. Especially those days, for those are most days.

I noticed a distinctive difference in my writing before and after Vocal’s introduction of the Haiku challenge. The haiku allows no room for superfluousity. It dares you to say something beautiful and then refuses to give you more than seventeen syllables to do so. Brutal and succinct / the haiku forced me to learn / brevity’s art form. Something I sorely lacked before; every essay and short story in college would be returned to me full of red marks, slashes indicating the places to cut. Which I never felt like I could do—it seemed a cruel incision to make, and almost always it seemed to be unnecessary. My peer editors just didn’t understand my writing; only I could see it was a part of a bigger picture. That’s what I told myself, anyway. And I was wrong; comically so. They had objectivity, while I had the fresh memory of hours of labour. They had brutality where all I had was sentiment. There is a place for both, in writing, but I didn’t learn how to wield brutality until much later. Until the haiku challenges.

I am still learning how to balance sentiment and brutality in my writing. Perhaps this very article is proof of that. I have a long way to go, and I’m hoping this self-imposed challenge kickstarts some growth. To help me learn, and to help me imbue even my reports with a hint of beauty. To stretch me creatively, to keep me in practice, but most importantly, to keep my love for writing from becoming resentment.

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A poem a day for the month of May,

Pick up your pens and join me-

Come out and play, help show me the way,

Of structure and of beauty.

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