458 Poems in One Year - Enough?

In 2013, I challenged myself to write a poem every day. I didn't quite make it. I missed four or five days. I'm not exactly sure, and for once, I'm not going to go back and try to figure it out because that is beside the point.

I ended up writing 458 poems for the year. Well, technically, I wrote a few more than that because I accidentally deleted a couple, and I threw away a few that just never quite got where I wanted them to go. I don't know how many of those there were though, so I'm not counting them toward my total. I also co-wrote two poems with a poet friend, Joshua Timothy Simms, and I didn't include them in that total either.

It broke down like this

January	42
February	33
March	35	plus one collaboration
April	73
May	34
June	30
July	36	plus one collaboration
August	37
September	34
October	33
November	39
December	32
Total	458

When I created this self-imposed challenge, I questioned my purpose. I had no idea what I hoped to learn from the project. I felt like it would at least force me to write something every day even if what I wrote was less than perfect. Many lessons came my way though.

One lesson was repeated through my poetry and my life over and over this year - start from where you are. I've always been goal-oriented; so much so that in the past the first time I missed a day, I would've deemed the challenge a failure. Instead this time, I took a deep breath, meditated on my options, and then decided to start from that moment and write a poem every day for the rest of the year. I did the same time each time I failed to write a poem on a particular day. 

I even decided to give myself a day off when I had knee surgery, but by the end of that day, I ended up writing a poem - according to the save dates on my laptop - 2 actually. Drug induced as they may have been, I they're not bad at all. I'm not even sure they need much editing. But I digress...

Part of my goal with this challenge was to live with my imperfections. By writing a new poem every day, I often didn't have time to fret over them. I didn't have time to perfect them right away. I am a perfectionist, so this was a challenge for me. To consider something "written" when it felt less than perfect even knowing I could go back and edit it later forced me face my fears of not being good enough. I had moments where the words I wrote weren't what I thought I wanted to write, but later when I read them I discovered they worked. Re-writing them to death as I would have done in the past would've taken the soul out of the piece.

There were days when I had no inspiration to write about anything. There were days when I felt like all I could do was repeat myself. There were days when I found myself staring at the blank screen at 11:55pm (yes, right before midnight) wondering what I would write only to type something short just to make my deadline. Oddly, these poems often needed little editing when I went back them. It was almost as if by turning off my internal editor just to get something on the page, my voice spoke louder than ever.

I learned much about letting go of my internal censor and my internal judge through this process. I learned to always start from the moment I stood even if I was looking back or fantasizing about the future in order to write. I learned my inner strength floods onto the page mixed up with my vulnerabilities when I turn off my censor and my judge.

I learned that I can write a poem every single day if I so choose. I learned that perfection is seriously overrated... Yet, as I type this I wonder just how many times and in how many ways I'm going to have to learn these same lessons in the coming days, months, years...

Some of the poems I wrote early in the year appear in my book, Strength in Silhouette: Poems. Others will appear in forthcoming books.