I’ve committed to writing and publishing one poem every day for the month of April. Mike Hopkins and I did it last year and we both agreed that while it was a challenge, it was certainly worth it.
You can read more about National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) here.
The most difficult part of this challenge for me is publishing drafts of poems or incomplete versions of ideas. My internal editor has a hard time allowing these to be seen before I’ve had a chance to polish them a little.
I’ve been interested for a couple of years now in applying constraints to writing and the effects of doing so. I have found that when I establish rules – for example choosing a particular form, number of lines, rhyming schemes and even certain ways of generating a poem – other aspects of my creativity have been liberated somehow. The resulting poems are often quite different to others that emerge more ‘organically’. I will explore more of this during this poem-a-day project.
For example, I’ve wanted to write a poem based on the mathematical Fibonacci sequence. Then I discovered that many others were already doing this and that there’s a great online jounal called the Fib Review which publishes ‘Fib’ poems.
In the Fibonacci Sequence, every number is the sum of the two preceding it. So, starting at 1, the sequence is 1+1=2; then in turn 1+2=3; then 2+3=5; then 3+5=8 and so on.
The number of syllables in each line in today’s poem follows the Fibonacci sequence. I went as far as 8, then decreased. There’s also a point-of-view change/turnaround half-way through. And there’s no title.
So here we go: the first of 30 poems in 30 days.
Be-
tween
night’s and
light’s deep folds
lurk our darkest fears,
tasting our sweat, testing our shell.
Shell-blocked, we tease; whetting, we’re poised
foretasting moments
when we’ll creep
through; hear
you
scream.
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