Month Two

I’ve written a poem (sometimes more) a day for two months now.

In the last three weeks I also finished reading Mary Oliver’s book Upstream, which I can’t recommend enough for those of you who enjoy the nonfiction works and essays of poets and other writers. A book can be a compact course on life, and this was one such book. Oliver writes a lot about the natural world around where she was living at the time. There are also essays about other poets that inspired her like Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson. 

When I started this project, I picked poetry as a medium because poems can be short, and word choice in poems is almost everything. Writing poetry has made me a more lyrical thinker, and rhymes and alliteration come to me faster now in my daily communication, but obviously there’s more to poetry than that.

Some questions I’m asking myself lately: 

1. How does one communicate one’s experience of existence through language alone?
   
   
2. How does one write poetry without being so literal that it may as well be a story instead of a poem?
   
   
3. Does that matter? What is it about the form of a poem that makes it unique, special, setting it apart from prose?
   
   

While reading Oliver’s book I also returned to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, which I first read in tenth grade at the urging of a student mentor and friend. At times, Whitman’s prose poems might really just be considered prose, or short declarations, but I was so fascinated with his writing that it still informs my style to this day. For example, since first reading Whitman, I feel no particular pressure to rhyme my poetry or force it into any one of the innumerable poetic forms (except as a fun challenge, and sometimes because I favor Shakespearean and Italian sonnets).

The subjects of Whitman’s poetry are also incredibly freeing. What I first took to be haughtiness in his poetic voice I now recognize as a celebration of individuality at large, from the experience of carpenters, factory workers and dockside laborers, to housewives and mothers, to soldiers on the battlefields of the Civil War (whose grisly injuries he witnessed firsthand), "For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you."* To Whitman, each being's experience of this world is equal in value to every other.

So, having finished Upstream, and before getting back into the fantasy and science fiction I tend toward in my recreational reading, I think I am going to read Leaves of Grass again cover to cover to see what new gems leap out at me now that I am almost twenty years past my last full reading.

I’ve decided that this poem-a-day project will end after exactly one year. After that, I will maintain the blog, but slow my writing pace to maybe one poem a week, in addition to some other art and photography projects. 

I hope everyone is staying safe and well. Today’s poetry post will be up as usual before midnight. 

Thanks for reading. Be good to each other.

- MS

*Quote from Walt Whitman's poem "Song of Myself" in Leaves of Grass.