40 poems in 40 days is a LOT, first of all. I am already four days behind.I have written some pretty schlocky stuff in the last few weeks. However, I have also written a few that I can be proud of as-is or with a little editing. I may polish up a couple of the poems from this series and submit them to literary zines.
In addition, it has started stimulating me to do other kinds of writing. This is either due to the fact that I am in effect creating a daily writing practice again, or I am just so damn sick of writing poetry that I want to write ANYTHING else.
I can even see an arc starting to form in the 40 days, now that I am a bit beyond the halfway mark. I can see how I got over the navel-gazing and actually burned out on writing about my feelings and started fiddling with more concrete images and events that don't have as much to do with my love life, past and present.
In short, I am kind of keeping up, and with a few more multiple-poem days I will even complete the project on time. It feels good to have a deadline, even if it is an artificial or self imposed one.
This is all a part of my self directed re-boot of my writing. I felt a real need after the writers' conference to go back to the basics: plot, character development and pacing. I need to start over and pretend I know nothing to keep me from getting lazy. I tend to suffer from self delusion in thinking I am being avant garde by bending rules about writing that I have no business fiddling with. That just results in the kind of crazy-person rambling that bogs down my stories and loses the reader. I need to be clean. Probably not Hemingway levels of word parsimony, but I need to at least show a little substance with my style.
At the very least, I will have some poetry to shop around or perform at open mics.
What is next? I'm thinking some short stories. I need to set myself a similar deadline, or it will never get done.
Image:
http://www1.aucegypt.edu/academic/writers/
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