A poem, a day
Since January 17, I have been writing one new poem every morning. First thing, before I face the tasks of the day. These are drafts of poems, some with more potential than others, but I take them all. I do not expect too much of them; all they seem to expect of me is that I listen.
I do not try to make them work hard. I write them down, then I close my notebook and let myself forget what I have written. On Sunday or Monday evening, I type up the drafts, in one document, that have come that week, and I listen again. Some draw extra attention, and these I copy and read again. I revise. I listen some more. There is no hurry.
I have been writing first thing in the morning for a long time, but what I write now has changed. I have filled many other notebooks with dreams from night and pondered their meaning. I also have filled notebooks with feeling—frustration and blame—thinking this was way to free my system of a particular negativity. And maybe that’s true, but I would not want others to read what is there.
These new pages, which are more like the notebooks of dreams—I’d be glad for someone to find them in my attic someday. What changed? A man in Oregon, Brian Rohr, a storyteller, a father, wasn’t writing as much as he wanted to. He had an idea and decided to try to write a poem a day for just for one year, and anyone could join him, could commit to this kind of daily writing, the writing of a poem each day, as William Stafford did. Those of us who read Stafford’s writing (he died in 1993), who see him as a kind of mentor in spirit and work, understood right away. Pretty soon, more than a thousand of us signed up for Brian’s program. No class, no fees (which makes me think of Stafford’s phase, “no praise, no blame”). It started on January 17, Stafford’s birthday.
It jolted me, but the real shift came when Stafford’s son Kim, who was written into the will as his father’s “literary executor” (no definition), gave the first monthly Zoom talk to our group, with a breakdown of his father’s daily pre-dawn pattern. It goes like this, he said:
∙ You get a blank sheet of paper and write the date at the top—this is a start;
∙ You do just a little free writing, not much, about something that happened the day before, or maybe a dream you had (not five pages of emotional dump)—your mind is open;
∙ You write a sentence with a clear thought, something a little more definite—some topic has come to you;
∙ And you write a poem.
That might sound easy, or it might sound impossible, but it worked for me, this structure. It helps that I studied literature (as in taking classes) for ten years and have studied writing and worked with sentences for a living my whole adult life. Just as a matter of familiarity with poetry and writing.
But that can get in the way of the most important part, which is to start by letting the imagination go and write whatever it brings back, without trying to make formal sense of it. The subconscious and the imagination know more than the makers of rules.
The first writing is like being awake and listening to a dream. It is more like channeling than writing. It is not work. Coming back to the poems a week or two later, I read what I have written and forgotten. It is as if there is a whole part of my mind that I haven’t been hearing—or as if I have found a pathway to a teaching source I haven’t known. It says, “Look, you can have all this,” and there is more than I ever would have believed.
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Why not share the poems here? Well, the work is very private, and I want to be careful. And back in the conscious world, it would mean any poem that I post here first I could not send to any magazine that wants poems, and I must consider that.