Poem-a-Day March

Today is the first of March.  If anyone was wondering, that means it's the day after Leap Day, and days before St. Patrick's Day and Spring Break.  March 1st.  The first day of a new month.

And a new month means a new Poem Keeper for Brianna.  I'm not sure if I've explained the concept of the Poem Keeper, but the idea originated with the Poem-a-Day Project because my friend, Katie, and I thought that we would write a poem every day in September.  We were going to exchange poems and then at the end of the month we would exchange back so the poet got her poems back.  This is all in past tense because we were going to exchange, but life got in the way for Katie, so she kept my poems, but I didn't get poems from her.  It was good for me to have someone to give my poems to though, because I had an audience for them and I could surrender control of the poems after I was done writing them.  They were out of my hands and I didn't have to keep myself from reading them over and worrying about them.

When October rolled around and I resolved to continue the project, I thought I would switch Poem Keepers each month.

I've found that each month I change Poem Keepers, I've changed the things I write about.  Not on purpose, at least not all of it is on purpose.  So I find myself catering to my audience to some extent.  This is interesting to me because it means that sometimes I have to get more creative if I want to talk about something in particular, and other things I can just go crazy with.  It's a challenge that I enjoy.

This month, my Poem Keeper is going to be my friend Claire.  She's a fellow poet, and she graduated from my school last year.  As March takes over, I'm going to have to start even more getting used to the idea of The Future, so asking Claire to be my Keeper this month is my first acknowledgement of The Future because she's out there in the world already.

And this month, Claire set the challenge for me to write 1 form poem a week, one of which must be linked haiku.  I was thinking of doing a challenge like this because I'm generally less confident with my form poetry because it feels so constricting, but we'll see if I can prove myself wrong on that front this month.

So here we go!  Poem-a-Day March commences today!

"If you cannot be the poet, be the poem."

- David Carradine