Does anyone here write a poem a day for, or otherwise celebrate NaPoWriMo?
 

I wondered if anyone here celebrates National Poetry Month in some way?

There are, of course, hundreds of writing spaces to share/read poetry this month (I'm writing on the weird cousin to this forum which is the Pffa, my alma mater in the world of poetry forums).

But I wondered if other people here were using this month as a generative writing space, and if so, where they're writing (social media? blogs?)

Sarah-Jane

Great that you're writing on PFFA. It used to be a savage place, but I think has mellowed now. I'm proud that my poem on Picks of the Litter has had more views than any other.

Alas, I have never been equal to a poem-a-day challenge of any kind. The most I do for Poetry Month is subscribe to the daily poem from Knopf.

I don't. Although I do love a deadline in principle, I find that stuff produced in the frame of mind wherein the "doing" of it is a duty to be ticked off on a to-do list, is often slapdash, ill-considered and, frankly, dire. Form is often the first thing to get chucked in a bucket.

And, I confess, I am embuggered at the outset because I find that coy, twice-bitten acronym peculiarly repellent.

Ann! I know exactly what you mean. Your post reminded me of how much I used to hate it, and how I don't notice it now. I think it's because I've learned to deal with hashtags and the like - it's a way of sorting the world. And I'm not sure that this doesn't dilute things. Thank-you. It's really good to think about that.

I think there's lots of dross produced in it too. I try to get three good poems out of it, usually about a year later. But I work that way anyway, generating like buggery and not much of it good. Where I get stuck is when I've got something with potential and I find it's like wading through treacle to go back and really look at it and revise it.

Gail - that's a good idea. I might do that too - I'll look up Knopf.

David Anthony - I remember reading your poems way back - there was one about a dog, which was really lovely, that's stuck with me through the years (and even though I don't usually like poems about dogs). I wouldn't have been able to say why at the time, either. That's one of the reasons it took me so much time before I posted on here, as the focus on form here requires a level of skill and self-awareness that the PFFA doesn't, certainly in the lower forums of the PFFA, where you can just jump in with whatever drivel you're carrying in your head (although you have to learn quickly if you want to survive). It's a good teaching forum.

Sarah-Jane

Thanks, Jane.
If it's the one I think, I've never published it anywhere since I feared the line between sentiment and sentimentality may have become blurred.
It's one of my favourites of my own, though.

Ann, thank you for saying more or less what I was thinking!

There may have been rare months when I’ve written a poem a day, but that act in itself was never the goal. There have even been times when I turned out a poem within a half hour, but that was only because the poem had been percolating for days or weeks and suddenly a submission deadline was looming....

Although it might be nice to be more prolific in order to submit to more journals, I strongly doubt that a greater quantity would ensure a greater quality of work. Not for me, at least.

Claudia

I've done this over another forum most years since I started writing poetry about 8 years ago. I'm currently five poems deep into my sixth NaPoWriMo.

In large part I see it as practice. I've definitely improved as a poet as a result of taking part in these challenges. Of course, at 8 years in, I'm still a relative newbie, and I still have a lot of improving to do. Still, personally, I would say that a greater quantity does ensure a greater quality of work -- just a bit further down the line.

Incidentally, the goal in NaPo isn't to produce a perfect poem every day. It's a one-day draft. A first stab. You still may end up spending weeks or months on that poem at a later point -- or you may throw it in the bin forever. Seen as practice, though, even if the draft is one that goes nowhere, there's still been a benefit to writing it.

That said, there are usually a number of drafts worth taking forward at the end of it, plus ideas, images, metaphors that will end up in future poems. And I want to say these sometimes come at a higher-than-average rate when I'm focussed on writing a poem a day. It's possible to get in the zone.

It's also a great low-stakes context in which to experiment, try new things and even to have fun. Related to this, having a deadline can force you to take on an idea you normally wouldn't have thought worth pursuing, but because it's the only idea you have that day you have no choice, which can sometimes take you to interesting places. Sometimes not, too, of course :)

I did NaPo once just to see what it is like. From the quantity/quality point of view, I think of poetry writing to be a sum of a collection of subskills/subroutines/subpractices, and I think it is useful from a technical perspective to bring up a subskill to a high level of speed and quantity and quality, and what NaPo demonstrates is which subskill/subroutines/subpractices are already at a high enough speed/quantity/quality to be consistently relied upon in a month of frantic deadlines, but then one does not depend upon a particular month to try this out, unless one very much needs a emotional support network to get through the work.

One basic subskill/subroutine/subpractice might center soley on idea generation, another might be finding a form for an initial idea, or a small form like a triolet or the American sentence which allows one to practice various things simultaneously within a small scope (finding an idea, finding images, finding form, finding music, attention to detail, etc. etc)

Unless you're going to post/share your poem-a-day, there's no particular reason that you need to do it during poetry month. If you feel it would be a worthwhile exercise, you can pick whatever month you like. I tried it once in the context of a small private children's poetry group I belong to online, and showing your daily efforts to other people seemed to be an important part of the exercise. I can't remember if anything I wrote during that month was particularly good, but I do believe one or two ultimately turned into keepers. The exercise did serve as a reminder that you can make yourself write when you don't "feel like it," and that sometimes the feeling only kicks in after you have forced yourself to begin.

I've never tried to write a poem a day for a month, but when I got a writing residency for two weeks (many years ago), I did discover that simply spending hours every day trying to write poems proved to me that if I sat down and tried, the ideas and poems did start coming. Until that time I had always waited for inspiration to come.

I don't think I would enjoy forcing myself to complete a poem a day. It would certainly limit the kind of poem I would attempt. Now that I am retired, I do spend several hours a day in writing, but usually I am working on translating poetry. It gives me practice in all sorts of areas--rhyme, meter, diction, syntax--but it doesn't give me much practice in generating ideas for my own poems. That's okay. The writing itself gives me a sense of purpose, even when the ideas are not my own.

Susan

Adding a comment to Susan's thought: Interestingly enough, to me, recently I reckon that learning how Chinese characters structure the meaning/definition of words within the structure of the characters would give me an intense practice in dissecting, synthesising, and naming observations of scenarios in life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9BJRE4r46g I reckon my ability to construct poetry would rise exponentially.

So I can very much see translation as a way to intensely practice a whole bunch of useful subskills, but I suspect that Chinese would allow a person to drill down a level below words, in a way treating each chinese character/character combination as its own "poem".

Yes, the sweet spot for most of us lies somewhere between waiting for inspiration and meeting a rigid quota.

A related dilemma is balancing revision with writing new stuff.

I grow convinced that thinking itself is analogous, that the mind (the ego?) must constantly choose between consolidating/understanding/remembering what it has just thought and pushing further.

I love what Chuck Close had to say about it:

“Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightening to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.”

And in a similar vein, Leonard Bernstein:

"Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long."

I'm reminded of a friend who took a class in which participants were asked to share their efforts after being given a half-hour to write on a prompt. She referred to this part of the class as "showing each other our turds." But a large part of her distaste was for the polite exclamations that everyone was expected to utter after each contribution, and for the assumption of some of her classmates that everything they wrote was golden in its raw, unedited form, simply because they had written it.

An interesting dynamic at NaPo on PFFA is that some poets are skilled and fast enough to write non-turdish first drafts under duress, but I tend to mostly interpret those poets as just mostly continuing a project that was already underway, of applying techniques already well drilled, of material that had already been stored up, as opposed to frantically finding topics to write about each day. Too, it is sort of a poetry party! For myself, I find it difficult to shut of the critical mechanism that just wants to analyze the heck of out stuff turd or no turd.

Yes, that's what makes that end of the spectrum so attractive. Part of me feels (as I imagine many of us feel) that my poems should be products of pure love, written for no reason but that I was inspired and felt driven to write them.

Certainly when I read others' poems, I want to believe this of them. Though I know that good poems can be inspired many different ways, knowing that a poem was written because the poet wanted to write a poem that day (or to meet any goal other than following the inspiration to write that particular poem), would not make me eager to read it.

But I don't think it's such a binary thing, Max. Sometimes the inspiration comes during the writing process even if the writing process began out of pure discipline. For me, anyway, there's little inspiration to be derived from a blank sheet of paper, but if I can manage to put one or two lines down on the paper then I might (if I'm lucky) start feeling the inspiration. As Close said, "All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself."

I communicated poorly if you think I disagree with anything in your post, Bob.

A better exercise in my opinion is to pretend you are blind for a month and compose poetry that way. No pen, no paper, no computer/laptops/mobile phones, etc. Only the "internal" page, your mind, and your voice. "Write" and revise ten poems this way. After the month has gone by, then write them down. Once you better master moments of using only the internal page, you will be less dependent on the external one. You'll learn better to create and retain poetry internally on the spot, anywhere, everywhere, anyday, everyday.

Let me understand, Kevin. Does pretending you're blind mean you have to give up driving?

I'm writing a poem a day right now. Yes, I am in a vein and many of them are similar in pace and structure, but when I can write myself into the zone I like much of what appears. I write poetry for what it does to me. Chances are I'm never going into the Norton Anthology or whatever so I write to touch something. One advantage I may have is that I made my living writing nonfiction for years. In some ways that hampered me when I returned to poetry, but one of the gifts it provided me is I can write and write and write, although I have slowed down a bit because of age and such things. So I don't mind writing the poem a day because I may write a couple of thousand words or so before I touch something that sparks me, then I'm in the place I need to be. I do it because it's fun and I know that at some point I'll go to a place that won't allow me to do it and be miserable until I am allowed to leave.

Also, who in the hell wants to write without seeing the words? That's like having sex with the most beautiful partner you can imagine in the pitch dark. I love the words before me.

So the house style is not to explicitly refer to other people's comments. Rightio.

I interpret composing with eyes closed as an exercise in what is commonly called "working memory" and it is useful insofar as an increase in mental bandwith can easily be applied to eyes open composition. Be able to manipulate large amounts of information mentally is known as usefl in fields as different as chess and muscial composition, so no reason why it would not have an application to poetry. Nevertheless, for me a preliminary exercise would be expanding working memory in relation to sensory perception, so being able to hold the sensory details of something as simple as sitting in the garden.

The talk of inspiration reminds me of what I heard a music teacher say recently: Mozart wrote his masterpieces because he was getting paid. Talk about seperating those that are amateur from those that are not, to me, has a basis in the history of artists having to feed their children. More generally, I interpret talk of inspiration as depending on subconscious processes not made explicit. There was a phase when I could write ten poems a day.

I don't think you really understand your own analogy. Since individuals who are blind have access both to their own technology, screen readers, and forms of written communication, your comment seems uninformed at the best.

I just wanted to quickly leap back to say ‘thank-you’, as this forum seems to have a knack of turning what is quite a dull question into a critical debate that along the way shares diverse writing processes as well as some very interesting ideas.

Alchemists, all of you!

David - It might be that one. It was quite sentimental - I don’t usually like sentimental poems either, but I liked that one, and it’s stuck with me! Isn’t that strange. Maybe it’s a sign to send it out?

Claudia Gary - thank-you - it’s really interesting what you say about the poem/poetry percolating and then writing itself just before a deadline.

Matt - I think our views are fairly aligned here - for me, it’s a struggle between balance, because I like writing/generating ideas and find it more tricky to slow down and edit. Producing in quantity is sometimes, I fear, my procrastination-strategy for not doing the harder, more complex editing work.

Yves - Thank-you - I think practice can help support technical expertise, which I think is what you’re suggesting.

Roger - I agree - I like the camaraderie of working in a group for this kind of exercise - I think it’s useful to see it as an exercise, too.

Susan - thank-you - I never thought about translation in that way at all. Your translations are lovely (I don’t comment on them because of my sublime ignorance of translation) but that is so, so interesting. I might try translating something, although I won’t be posting them here! I need the practice in the technical areas you mention, so it’s a good idea.

Max - thank-you - the balancing of revision with new writing is a very good point to make, I think.

Roger - yes, and although I hadn’t thought about NaPo so deeply I think that it does kind of condition you to put aside an hour or two to write and then it becomes part of your day - a kind of space-making/mental expectation/practice.

Julie - thank-you. I agree - and the polite exclamations can be tricky sometimes. Crikey to those who think their first drafts are unequivocally golden, though - although what is coming across to me in this thread is that sometimes a first draft can be something that has been brewing for a long time, too. I’ve occasionally produced a first draft of quality which was good enough to send out, but rarely (like twice) and it was - well now I’m thinking it probably wasn’t a fluke, it was just I’d been thinking about it for a while. I tend to get three or four good poems out of April, and those after revision. But I do have a lot of fun along the way!

Yves - I think you’re right about the company being important - I wonder, too, how many people engaging with the exercise save up some drafts to post in April (that could just be me being mean though). But again, it makes me think of an interesting potential correlation between skill/practice - making space to write and also ideas-generation.

Kevin - that’s an interesting exercise - the idea of thinking about words as kind of internally-spoken. I’ve never tried that (although sometimes maybe I have on walks) - again, it sets me thinking about the process before the writing. Thank-you.

John - I like your work very much, and it’s interesting to me what you say about having had all those years of practice writing. There’s something about craftsmanship here, I think - and also about not being afraid - not writing to produce the ‘perfect’ but writing because it’s important to write - to make/craft new space, to tell stories.

It’s all getting so interesting now that my thoughts are getting muddled so I shall pause before I write an essay.

I think, for me, much of what I get out of writing a poem a day is playfulness - a chance to experiment - and company - there's a camaraderie which is fun. I wouldn't enjoy it if I couldn't work in a group. Revision, on the other hand, takes a pen-chewed individual silence. I think I just enjoy it - not every day, but most days in April. It's nice to be able to play with words, see what happens.

And thank you again -



Sarah-Jane

Hello Jane,

I am mostly thinking that a fine-grained approach to technique (which includes idea generation) is foundational to all things including 30-day poetry marathons. NaPo for me is mostly fun for experienced and skilled writers who have a resevoir of technique, background, an audience, and a general thought process that is already continually running poetry (having a running not a standing start), and more an extended torture exercise for folk who do not have the advantages.

I only did NaPo after I gained a certain background, and that made it productive to me because it then allowed me to apply that background at high-speed while getting lots of positive feedback. All you are doing during NaPo is applying what you can already do, because there is no time to develop new skills.

The social element is also a key ingredient. Having fun increaseses your output (positive emotions help the mind), being accountable is important, also massively reading a lot of other people's poetry adds to the process, and just knowing your work is getting read all play a key role, each of these things gives you something that composing on your lonesome does not.

I agree with Yves that napo often allows one to heighten pre-existing strategies. For me, I am being drawn to ekphrastics, which (I hope) play to my own skills. I hope later to branch into metre, or do something modernist with rhyme.

I have a very basic instinct to write. I wouldn't even call it having a story to tell or a message to present; it is a much more biological, baser instinct. Napo is accessible for me in that regard.

Ekphrastics is a good general strategy for NaPo, because the artwork gives constraints (the artwork is about something specific written in specific context in a specific time and place by a specific artist in a specific place in their artistic journey ) while giving a multi-sensory stimulus/prompts in a stock of aural or visual (music and paintings) images, themes, memory/emotional associations, structural devices, and so on.

Personally my base instinct is to sing as the birds sing, which can be transumuted to a constrant stream of words (redirect emotional flow to another "channel").

Did I mention that I use online forums to just generally practice the transmutation of thoughts into words?

But what is the language using us for?

I often find that rubbing up against the constraints of an ekphrastic present new opportunities for me; I guess I take an impressionistic rather than descriptive approach.

Maybe the beauty of language is that it is doing more than you bargain for. For me, transmuting thoughts into words is made more complicated because with language, unlike music for example, each word has not just an emotional connection but a historical connection, so that meaning itself in language is less under control than you would at first think.

Hey Sarah-Jane

No, I've never tried any sort of poem-a-day or Poetry Month Challenge things. Apart from the analogy with being blind, which doesn't quite follow through, I think I recognise Kevin's approach as closest to my own. What happens is I spend a lot of my time vaguely thinking, daydreaming, musing and fretting about poems and poetry, like I'm constantly trying to kind of 'plug in' to something that feels creative. This isn't a conscious writing technique though, it's just how my brain works these days. Sometimes it pisses me (or other people) off because it makes me distracted. But I don't write anything down. Then, when a poem comes it seems to come from nowhere, and it comes fast, and it's usually written to completion within a few hours, or overnight at most. Then I show it to you guys and you tell me what's wrong with it ha. So I don't really have those notebooks of half-finished ideas and random lines, I just have what feels like dead time, but clearly isn't, that lasts anything from a week to a couple of months and then suddenly BANG! A poem. Some of this routine is probably due to lifestyle. I can't find the time to set aside daily exclusive writing time. I mean, I write a lot of rubbish here on GT, but I just do that on my phone as I'm doing other things. It doesn't need the same mental space as poetry.

As I say, it isn't a conscious approach, it's just what my experience of writing has always been since I was bitten by the poetry bug. And because that was relatively recently and relatively late in life, I've had a, perhaps superstitious, reluctance to mess with it. Occasionally I've self-pityingly whined to poet friends here that I'm blocked, that I'll never write again. And they've given me a title or just forced me to write something. I quite like that. Being affectionately bullied into writing haha.

All the sensible people say write every day/force yourself to write/do writing exercises. It's just not what I do. Perhaps I'm missing out!

That historical approach to a word implies everybody is equally influenced by their social environments, or something like everybody is equally unaware of their own minds to observe how words were first learnt and applied and how the application of words influence their own minds.

I remember taking 5 years to learn how to define one word. I can recall the context in which I first learned the word, the meanings, associations, memories, and emotional interpretations I first applied to it, the reasoning behind why the original interpretations of the word was incorrect, the reasoning why similar words in the English langage do not have good dictionary definitions, a reasoning of why and how the lack of good dictionary definitions might influence other people's minds, and finally the reasoning of how and why to properly define the word relative to my own first hand experience/subjective judgement, and the finally understanding why few other people would understand what the word implies. However, I think I have just began to approach the word.

Though it is not directly similar to what I am referring to above, this man's experience of learning Chinese demonstrates a bottom up approach to defining a word which has analogies to what I dand described above (already posted this video in this thread): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9BJRE4r46g

Summary: if you want to know the influence of a word on your mind, then you would need some degree of self-awareness/mindfulness, because not everyone reacts similarly to similar words irrespective of the origins and historical journey of a given word.

Do you believe that subjectivity is also in music? I mean, not everyone experiences the same emotional reaction to a melody, but I think there can be a general consensus whether a melody is deeply sad or not, for instance. What I am thinking with words is that they are both subjective, and also complicated by present and historical context, which I kind of see as a way in which language has evolved into something much more complicated than communication. Also, there is etymologies to think about, and how that effects a word's present use, though knowledge of these etymologies is itself socially-restricted somewhat. So language is both subjective and contextual.

Kevin's point about not always relying on our eyes is a good one.

I'm probably not alone in obsessively running what I'm working on through my head when I'm away from any version of the text I can see. Often, getting back to the text shows me a line, a stanza, a paragraph I'd "forgotten." These tend to be fruitful cuts.

I'm also intrigued by John's desire to see the words he's working with. The approaches, of course, don't have to be mutually exclusive (though we have to choose one at a time).

Thank-you so much - what a brilliant discussion, and I'm so sorry I was absent for the last part of this. I will catch up soon, and I hope I will have the headspace to think now that the April madness is over to do this justice.

My very knee-jerk reflections are that, for me, part of the draw of NaPo is the exercise aspect - and also really, really pushing that so you have to push your practice beyond where its comfort zone - & also a sense of 'belonging' - to be part of a community who are grimly posting poems-each-day regardless - at the end, anyway, of any agenda about quality. I know I use it to try to push my hybrid practice (this year, anyway).

Maybe it's just about 'making', and that NaPo creates a space to make? I think it's Deleuze & Guattari who talk about 'smoothing spaces to dance' - perhaps it's that.

But having said that, I really like and appreciate the ideas that Mark articulates, a kind of subconscious musing (I hope that's reasonably accurate) that can manifest the creation of poems more organically - outside of the dialogue about production/linear time.

It's SO interesting (for me, anyway) and thank-you.

Sarah-Jane