It’s been a little while since I sat down with the intent to write a poem. I’ve continued to collect blurbs and quotes and thoughts and ideas, because that part has always been very easy. But sitting down and making those little pieces of fluff into actual poems has just not happened. Sure, I could cite a lot of complicated reasons having to do with general philosophies and institutions, but what it boils down to is the fact that I’ve been extraordinarily lazy. And uninspired. And a little bit terrified.

Somewhere, I know that the key to being a good writer of any type is to do it consistently, so that you eventually get to the point where you stop listening to yourself edit as you go. Just like exercise, I know I need to do it every day to enjoy its benefits. But it sucks to sit here and consider the fact that when I do sit down to write, it could turn out to be absolute shit, that I’m a complete idiot for even trying because I am not a Writer, and that I need to just give up trying to write poems, because, let’s face it, I’ll never be any good.

Yep, it’s the completely unoriginal, shitty, boring little monologue that almost every writer goes through each time they sit down, knowing that they are going to try and make art. And yet, it still feels so true every time I go through it. And it probably always will. And I just need to get over this already.

So…let’s start with a little assignment. I know I started off this whole project a little late into the first month, so I don’t have the luscious expanse of time I will with the later pieces. The best way I’ve found to get myself moving is to make the whole thing seem smaller by defining my terms. So this month, I’m going to write an ode.

I’ve been dying to write something a little on the dramatic side to just get that all out of the way, so an ode is the perfect way to satisfy my craving for a little over-the-topness without going too far.

My favorite place to start with odes is with the Romantics, because dudes, to them, almost every poem was an ode. These folks were pretty much in love with everything (well…everything except the loss of The Gleam, getting older and forgetting their infant wisdom, conventional religious ideas, picking on monsters, etc.), and they weren’t afraid to say it. Let’s check out the beginning of Wordsworth’s “Ode” from “Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” (I swear my poem’s title will be better than that.):

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth and every common sight,
To me did seem
Appareled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.

Whoa. Pretty intense. I’m down for dramatic, but Wordsworth dramatic, I don’t know.

And since we checked out the beginning of one, let’s check out the end of Howard Nemerov’s ode “The Blue Swallows”:

O swallows, swallows, poems are not
The point. Finding again the world,
That is the point, where loveliness
Adorns intelligible things
Because the mind’s eye lit the sun.

Nice. Any of you all have favorite odes?

In my first poetry class, I remember being terrified by the things we read. Each week, we'd receive a generic assignment: write a place poem; write a haiku; write a sonnet. Then, we'd read example poems that the professor thought "captured appropriately the ephemeral heart of the assignment." In plain terms, this meant that we were reading staggeringly beautiful poems, then were turned loose to create our own little awkward masterpieces. And when I was finished, no matter how good I thought my efforts were, it always felt like I was plunking down a 20 year old lawn chair with several of the nylon seat strips missing next to an ornately carved chair made of one piece of wood: my poems were just white trash versions of the greats I had read as examples.

It seems to me that this was a backwards way to teach. Of course, I think it's important to read, be inspired by, and then attempt to match the stunning poems that made you love the art in the first place. And identifying what makes a poem work is a worthwhile endeavor. But if a poem is really incredible, I think there's always going to be an element of magic to it, something that you won't be able to identify and that is very hard to replicate without years of practice and hard work.

I always thought that if I taught a poetry class, the first thing I’d have my students do would be to bring in the worst poem they could find. We’d read poems culled from college literary magazines, Jewel’s book of poems, the worst poems of some of the best poets. And then we’d talk about why they were bad. Because it’s a lot easier to see how a poem is bad than to explain why it’s good. Maybe we’d even write bad poems and get the awkwardness of trashing each others’ poems out of the way before it became embarrassing. Maybe if we pointed out what exactly was shitty about shitty poems, people would write fewer of them.

Some of my favorite literature and poetry was created by people who made a very simple decision about what their work would not be. Simply removing practices that were taken for granted helped certain writers become giants of their time. Removing what was already there didn’t inhibit them, but it showed them what else they could do. They were required to imagine, an act that I think has disappeared from much of the contemporary poetry I read.

The following poem is by David Wright, a Midwestern poet who I saw read a few years ago. This poem stuck out to me, and I think it fits in well with the whole theory that we should establish what a poem should not be before we make major decisions on what it should be. I think it’s a relevant poem in a time when poetry seems to be primarily for greeting cards or academic publication, and when most other poetry being produced seems all to be the same: pseudo-Bohemian, yet completely confused about its sincerity.

I’m not sure what poetry should look like or what it should say, but I think this poem pretty much captures what it a lot of it does look like today.

Poems Should Not Be

About protest marches,
about newspaper photographs,

(even if the man shielding his son from bullets has a name,
and looks eternal, even if the blood dipped hands, spread wide
at the window, look eternal)

about elections, about television screens,
about fathers, especially, dead ones,

about domestic tasks, about vices,
about children, about God, about paintings,

(enough with the mystery and art, divinity tucked into words,
mucked onto canvas, enough with epiphanies in museums
or churches, on roads and old barstools)

about drinking hard, about getting hard,
about getting lucky, about waking up unexpectedly calm,

(already seen that man’s round, unwieldy stomach, this woman’s
delicate breast, already known the sweat and wine scent of
bodies in the morning)

about worry, about worry, about worry,
about flowers, about, especially, roses,

about what will be missed by the living,
about what will be missed by the dead,

(too many anecdotes, devoid of music, devoid of rhythm,
devoid, too many parables, disguised as music, disguised as
rhythm, disguised)

about poetry, about language,
about reading, about poetry.

Poems should not be about.

________________________

(This is the part where you guys tell me what you think.)

Welcome to Twelve months | Twelve poems. The basic idea behind this project is simple: I write twelve poems in twelve months. They don't have to be good. They don't have to be moving. They don't have to mean anything at all. In fact, they can suck more than a hooker with the cheapest blow job rates in town, so long as they're written.

But if this were all about just writing poems on a timeline, what do I need a website for? Because I'm sure as shit not going to post those finished poems. No, sir. I have a Blogger site, not a Livejournal.

The great, big, awesome purpose for this site was the idea that it could become some sort of a virtual workshop. And not just a 'here I'll post a poem and you can all dissect the lines and tell me how awesome and moving and blah blah blah it is except for that one anonymous poster who keeps telling me that my poetry is crap and it makes him want to dropkick the English language' virtual workshop. No.

The idea is that I do some writing about writing (I know, this could unravel pretty easily), and you all chip in and tell me what you think. I'm hoping that each month I have at least some sort of idea of what I want to write about, or how I want to write, or some sort of glimmer of how to start. But I want to know what you think; I want to know what ideas you have, what sorts of devices you use to get yourself going, what things are standing out to you. I want to know what phrases have made you stop dead in your tracks in the last few weeks, and I want to know what you think poetry even is.

Sure, it's a selfish endeavor when it comes down to it. I want to write at least twelve good poems this year. I want feedback on how to do it (think of this as sort of a backwards workshop...we talk about how the poem is constructed before it's even written, rather than beating it to death afterwards), what you think, and to just have a space to talk about poetry without it being uncomfortable or silly or pretentious.

But, I think it could also be a pretty neat experiment in how to communicate about and create poetry without a formalized institution (because let's face it, without a class and a deadline, it's flipping hard to get yourself to write a poem; and, if you're not inside of it, the academic system is a completely self-sustaining entity that doesn't really allow for amateurs or hobby writers or people who just truly enjoy the art but don't want to teach other people how to write).

From your end of things, I encourage you to use this site how you like. If you want to join in and participate with me, that's awesome. Please continue to share, and I'll share right back. If you just want to watch what happens, that's cool too, but I will ask that you occasionally chime in, because it's kind of dull if I'm the only one saying anything.

So, welcome to Twelve poems | Twelve months. I hope you enjoy your stay.