So, for the month of March, I wrote a poem every day—or, almost every day, that is. Yes, I missed the 16th, and that does hurt me.
Nonetheless, these are some things I learned, some things I hated, some things I loved, and some things that I hope will inspire you.
why poetry?
Why did I choose poetry? Why not run every day for 30 days? Or draw? Or journal? Or sing? Or whatever else people challenge themselves to for 30 days??
I’ve always loved poetry. I love reading classic, old books and my favorites are the ones that have a little line or two of poetry before each chapter; I am always taken by the peaceful, deep, romantic ideas and feelings reading a lovely poem invokes. Something about them is hard to explain—which I find fitting because I’ve found that writing poetry is the same, it’s hard to explain in mere words the things poets often write about; poetry attempts a very brave thing: to capture beauty. Truly appreciating beauty at any given moment is, at best, extremely hard, but trying to capture that beauty in its fullness and joy seems nigh impossible. Yet is that not what a poem does—or at least, as I said, attempts to do?
That’s what draws me to read them and furthermore, to write them. I didn’t (and still don’t really) know how to write a “proper” poem, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to capture a special moment or experience; to capture the bold colors of a sunset or the careless tune of a songbird at dawn; the feeling invoked when someone says something kind when they didn’t have to; the joy one feels at something small and seemingly insignificant, like a morning cup of coffee in a quiet house—to capture something beautiful and relate it in a way that offers an accurate glimpse of what you saw and felt and heard in a lasting way.
Towards the end of February, I wrote two or three. I loved it immensely. I had no idea I would enjoy it so much, and I found that writing poetry came easier to me than it ever had before. I even went back to some that I’d written in years past and revitalized them, finding that I was effortlessly making poems I’d despised before actually rather nice. I even finished one that had managed to completely avail my efforts to write an ending for last year.
I knew I was tapping into something I never had before. This wasn’t like writing a story at all—naturally, they do have similarities, but the style is vastly different; when I write a story I think about the whole thing in a very basic format to start, outlining an idea that has struck me with plot points and eventually forming a rough draft, which will evolve into a final product; a journey I will take one on to teach something or to simply entertain with a fun tale. But poetry felt quite different. I couldn’t sit down and think up a good “outline” for a poem—the ones with which I attempted to do that mostly failed. I couldn’t see to the end of the “tunnel” and therefore create a rough draft (or seven). Perhaps this is just me, but I found that poems are more sporadic. I often started without knowing where the poem would take me, following the path blindly until I knew exactly where it was I wanted to go. I often started and had a mere line to work with, a word that I’d heard that I wanted to expound upon, a color that hit my eye in some way that I wished everyone could see…
I was finding that inspiration for these poems was all around me, and was delighted to realize that “capturing” beauty had never before seemed so accessible.
And so it began. I knew it was an undertaking the likes of which I’d never committed to before, but I felt I had it in me.
part one: smooth sailing
As you might expect—or as you may have experienced—when beginning an exciting new project, it starts out as just that—terribly, wonderfully, exciting. The motivation is there, the inspiration is there, the commitment is there, and things couldn’t be better.
One of my first poems came to me when I was listening to my mother talk about how she loved the budding trees in Spring. The vibrant yellows and greens and whites. I knew I had to capture that beauty; I had to try. The words welled up in my mind and flowed effortlessly onto my paper. In ten minutes, I was satisfied that I had done the trees at least a little justice.
Poem of the Trees
White tuffets are their hands Their shoes are filled with clay. Their voices are soft and elusive But they greet the dawning of the day. Their kin they bond with gladly They see each other from afar. Their hands reach out in trust Their arms withered and scarred. Greens, newly born, follow suit Yellows take their first breath. Their ignorance is bliss They know not that in a year is death. They sing their songs; They tell their tales. They dance with grace Bodies flowing in the gale. A moment to them is their life They do not care what tomorrow brings. Their feet are tied, they are anchored Yet they fly as though with wings.
I didn’t know what my style was quite yet, but that poem was orchestral in helping me find it. Nearly all of the poems I wrote in the first quarter of the challenge had a similar feeling, and they all came so easily; I would get up in the morning ready to write another, looking eagerly for some beautiful piece of inspiration to hit me—and it did. Every time.
part two: the first cloud in my sky
I got a part-time job. I wasn’t just doing school and the little work here and there, I was striping parking lots two to three to four times a week and was still trying to keep up with school (hoping to graduate in a month), and was still trying to oil paint a couple of times a week, and if I was lucky, stay on top of my workout schedule and occasionally learn a new song on the guitar. Work contributed—only contributed, mind you—to my first obstacle: a daunting lack of inspiration.
I got up early. It was a 5:30 a.m. type of early. The kind that’s only fun when you’re like eight and you’re not even allowed to get up that early. We were going to Oxford, MS, which is three hours North of Jackson (where I live) to stripe the parking lot of a car wash place.
The “working environment” was sunny and loud with trucks and people. Big trucks were moving dirt in some places, and other trucks were just in our way. People were swarming about in neon orange and yellow shirts; some were putting in windows, others were building signs, others were laying sod, others were standing there and we weren’t sure why they were there, and we were striping—also in neon orange and yellow shirts, of course.
Needless to say, I was having a bit of a hard time finding inspiration for a poem. This was a first that I wasn’t excited about. And I’m usually excited to have “firsts.” From the time I left home to the time we left the job site, I just wasn’t feeling it. I even tried to start one in the car while on my lunch break. I ended up scratching it out. The flow wasn’t there. It felt forced instead of natural. I didn’t want to force myself to create something beautiful. It didn’t feel right.
And then we started home. I tried to read a bit on the journey home, which was considerably difficult because my boss constantly played music or the radio and never stopped talking; not the ideal place to write a poem either.
Then the truck ran out of diesel.
We were stranded. Forty minutes from home. On the side of the highway, we’d barely been able to stop the truck before it would have hit the side of the bridge ahead of us. I would probably miss the movie I was gonna see with the fam. My boss was gonna miss the pageant his kid was in, the one that made him rush through work all day because he wanted to go so badly. It seemed like everything was ruined. The day was a failure.
But my poem wouldn’t be…
All at once it struck me, the inspiration was right there.
I dug through my bag and found my fountain pen and one of my leatherbound journals and took off down the grassy hill beside the highway; it was just past golden hour; the tree line at the bottom of the hill snaked like a fence guarding something—something beautiful. I sat in the tree line in the tall grass and watched the sun illuminate the sky and the grass around me; I watched the wind gently blow at the trees here and there; I saw a chipmunk run in the underbrush and noted the tiny bugs playing near my shoes. I saw the web of some harmless spider nearby and thought, “When inspiration is shy, when all is over and not a thing can be done for it, that’s when the poet webs his words…”
(My view just beyond the treeline behind which I sat. This was taken about thirty minutes later, so the sun wasn’t quite there like it was when I started the poem. Nonetheless, it’s a beautiful scene.)
When the Poet Webs his Words
When the clock stops ticking When the bird stops her song. When day no longer breaks When feet refuse to move on. As the laughing river stops laughing As the creek stops running laps. As Mother Nature quits whispering It would seem all is collapsed. That’s when, after valor and glory The minstrel composes his ballad. That’s when, after whole hearts are broken The knees of prayers are bended. That’s when, after the sun closes his eye The painter must paint a starless sky. When the babbling of philosophers and commoners is stilled And the age of silence is nigh. Then the romantic poet will take up his quill And web words like those on high.
I wrote one of my favorite poems on the most non-inspiring day I’d experienced in my challenge to that point. That’s when I started the hardest lesson I would learn: when inspiration is simply not there, one must write about the lack thereof.
And so, I did.
part three: the mundane and monotonous
I’m not saying it got boring. I’m saying by day fifteen, it wasn’t easy. It was a chore. Was I happy about that? No. Was I still committed? Of course.
The second and third weeks of the poem challenge were vastly different from the first. I was writing a poem five minutes before I fell asleep, often nearly forgetting due to a very real need for sleep and a very real busy life that was putting all the fun things like poem-writing on the shelf.
And then it happened.
That dreadful sixteenth day; the day I forgot to write a poem. I suppose one would say that means I failed the challenge. I still won’t admit that but… I guess it is true. Moving on, haha.
At first, I was just plain frustrated with myself for forgetting. I knew it was only natural with how busy I’d been the 16th and I had been working all day; by the time I was finished, I was dead tired. It hadn’t crossed my mind and didn’t until the next day. But regardless, it was frustrating. I continued on, using this failure as fuel for motivation. I knew I could do better, and I would do better.
But as it happened, in another day or two I was just as busy and poems were just as much in the backseat of the proverbial car of priorities and todos I was driving.
The day following my failure, I wrote a poem about writing about inspiration. Yes, you read that right. On the eighteenth, I wrote about leaving tomorrow’s worries and tomorrow’s work for tomorrow. On the nineteenth, I wrote a cute little poem called coffee date—not my date, though, someone else’s I watched when I was at a coffee shop. I found on multiple occasions that the shortest ones are best; without extensive information to process, one has only a small portion to pour over, and may benefit more from it, especially when it’s deeply philosophical and emotionally rich; when a short poem is done right it feels like a little hug and food for thought—and I wanted to be able to give that to someone in a poem.
Coffee Date
He follows her eyes He catches her smile. Her excitement is noticed Time’s irrelevant for the while. They order a coffee Maybe two, or three, or four. It'll be tomorrow Before they make it out that door.
I found myself frequently writing about what I was looking for but couldn’t find—beauty, inspiration, motivation, love; the things one looks to write poems about, I often wrote the opposite: I wrote about what it felt like to look for beauty and come up with nothing, to look for inspiration and feel empty inside. In this way, I kept myself going, I found worth in writing poems because it was no longer imbalanced; one cannot have good without evil. While I was trying to write merely about the good but was ignoring the darker side we all deal with; I found that balancing the two left me far happier and more able to find the beauty, inspiration, etcetera, because I wasn’t ignoring the problem at hand. Addressing the reality of the darker side was the key to realizing the beauty of the “light side.”
On beauty: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GtqPy3Tttd2h9xW8VaGEdYX99tDSVuzHdwib_0iqO78/edit?usp=sharing
On indifference:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-5uFutKimVD5dfTuZ3O11tub0WNAGxkvVTLxNIrL-pE/edit?usp=sharing
On the beauty of the search for beauty:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A-Mo3j9epc9fQy4zVNKIXUVePGlEmB_NL05s_nFWHWs/edit?usp=sharing
part four: the final days
In the final days of the challenge, I found a rejuvenated soul; I wrote about beauty once more… But it was a quiet beauty, a sublime, lovely thing. A satisfaction in what I had done, and a nervous anticipation of calling it a finished work.
So, I wrote about quiet beauty, the beauty of quiet, the beauty of a new day, and the beauty that will be when are no more new days.
Today and Tomorrow
Today was long and busy as a bee Today was quick and fast as the wind. Today was cozy and cold and free Today was nice but I’m glad this is the end. Tomorrow I’ll awake to a new sunrise Tomorrow I’ll hear new words never spoken. Tomorrow I’ll laugh at my finite size Tomorrow I’ll find a rose to keep as a token.
Here’s to the Silence
I am tired from days of coming and going My heart is busy with emotions that dance and twirl. The winds of change haven’t blown in an age But here they come, their wings unfurl. After all, listen for the silence. My head tilts and my eyes mist over Look at the rolling clouds and hear the threat of rain. My hands feel strong and hot and tight I’m ready to listen to the tune of toil’s refrain. After all, here’s to the silence.
The Stars That Pass
I hope one day when the skylines are blurred I’ll fly in the clouds o’er waters of blue and green. No poetry or amateur song will sound absurd No pretty girl will say, “If only I was seen.” I hope one day I’ll swim in the deep ocean caves I’ll watch the sky when the stars fall from their towers. I won’t remember the hurts I forgave But the pain I caused requires divine powers. The sands of time will blow away The earth will fall and shatter like glass. All is healed when He comes to stay What was will die like the stars that pass.
part five: here’s what I found
I would do this challenge again. In fact, just now I’ve decided I would like to do this challenge once a year.
I don’t feel I can even begin to describe all the little benefits I reaped in sowing this “seed” of poetry. When I started, I began as all new things do: with enthusiasm, motivation, inspiration, courage, and naivety. I enjoyed the short-lived reward of seeing life through rose-colored glasses, beautiful and untainted. As those glasses faded in their sweet color, it felt like the clouds had come down and I could no longer see much at all; I felt like seeing beauty in everything was wistful and unrealistic, at least that’s how it felt at the time; I didn’t know how to get back to where I was at first.
But then I realized something.
My “glasses”—to continue with that analogy—weren’t cloudy, in fact, they were simply clear. But I wanted them to be “rose-colored.” I chuckle now as I write this. Something about this analogy seems too accurate.
In the end, I took my “glasses” off completely. I wrote about whatever came my way. I wrote about anything and everything that hit me, and I stopped looking for that which wasn’t in front of me; I learned to be in the moment instead of looking for future, better moments. But there is an important thing here I need to clarify.
I stopped looking ahead thinking I could find a better, more beautiful thing to write about tomorrow or the next day should my circumstances be a bit better—rather, I wrote about the beauty immediately in front of me; if it seemed there was none, then I wrote about the lack therefore.
In truth, I learned more about life during this poem challenge than I did about writing poems. If any of you know proper poem structure and all that jazz then I’m sure you have some words for me about mine—I don’t much care though. I started this, not to learn about poetry, but to learn about life; poetry was a means by which that goal was accomplished.
Life has many beauties to enjoy; don’t stop enjoying them when it becomes difficult, and don’t stop looking for them when they don’t come.
Whatever you’re doing, whatever job you’re in, or hobby you’re pursuing, whatever relationship feels like it’s falling apart—don’t give up; it gets hard before it gets better, but when your troubles are done, you will be better for it.
Wishing you a lovely morning, day or night,
benji
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Music Recommendation:
Author Recommendation: David Baldacci
https://www.davidbaldacci.com/
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This was amazing. Thank you for taking us on your journey. You are inspiring in so many ways. And your writing is just beautiful to read. It’s all like poetry. ❤️