Actually, all through the project, I've spent every month going back and forth about whether I would continue on. Would I write more than one month or would it stop after September? Would I do more than six months? Might as well finish up the school year, should I continue over the summer? I'm not sure where all this indecision comes from, but if I had to guess it would be because of the endless doubt in my ability to produce more poems. Because some months are just altogether rotten, and some of those months I'd really like to forget. Oh, that and the fact that continuing the project always sounded crazy.
Stranger: You've been writing daily poems for how long?
Me: A year.
Stranger: (wide eyes) No way.
A professor at the university I just graduated from told me that he was considering creating a class around the idea of writing one poem a day with the thought of producing sheer quantity of material to work with. He said that he wasn't sure that a college student could handle it with all their other commitments and things, but that hearing I had been maintaining the project for months on end, he thought that maybe he could create a class like that after all. These are the things that make me happy.
Additionally, I'm trying to get my friends to pick up on a Poem-A-Day Project of their own. I've sent out a challenge to my poetically minded friends to write one poem a day for the month of September, just like how I started out a year ago. If they continue after this month will be up to them, but I'm hoping the experience in and of itself will be as good for them as it was for me.
Stranger: But what are you going to do with those over 300 poems and poem scraps that you've written?
Well, like any good writer, I'm going to keep them. I plan on also revising them, but since I'm miles and miles away from my collection of poems, that's going to have to wait until I return home. I'm excited about the prospect of revision, but I'm not quite sure where I'm going to get feedback and critique. We shall see.
Stranger: What now?
Since I'm still participating in the Disney College Program, and there are still tons of poems to be written about that experience as well as the experience of living away from home for the first time out of college and all of that, I'm going to continue the Poem-A-Day Project into the rest of 2012. Once January 1st rolls around, I'll probably go back to flip-flopping about whether I'll continue after that, but for now I want to keep going and that excitement for the project will hopefully keep me going for the next couple months.
This month my Poem-A-Day Project challenge will be to revise 2 poems a week from either my freshman year Creative Writing class or my sophomore year Writing Poetry class. The first being when I was still grumpy about writing poetry, and the second being when I started thinking that poetry was a little bit better than "okay." My style has changed quite a bit since both of those classes, so I'm excited to go back and read what I wrote originally and also to see what the new revisions will look like.
No matter what this project has in store for me, I know it's going to be an adventure, that's for sure.
"Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn."
- Thomas Gray
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