In July of this past year, I challenged myself to write a poem a day for a whole month. 31 poems in 31 days, this was the goal that I had tasked myself with. Throughout the month, I found that, while I did not, in fact, write every day, I was able to end up with a total of 31 poems written. Out of these 31 poems that I wound up with at the end of that month, there was only a handful of poetry that I felt that I could work with and actually sculpt into something greater as well as a pile of poetry that could be thrown into the trash. However, I kept coming back to those few selections, and revision after revision, a select few of those poems started to take shape. Now, they are at a place where I feel comfortable sharing them with the world.

In order to accomplish the task of writing a poem a day for a whole month, I adopted different projects in order to do this. The one project that I put the most energy into was in attempting to write poems as a sort of self-portrait, a painting with words with a focus on myself as the subject. These poems ranged from detailing my physical features in my work to looking inward at my own thoughts and feelings in as objective a manner as possible. The following poem was written with that goal in mind. It has been given the admittedly unimaginative name Self Portrait #3.

Self Portrait #3

Pirouette--

Pirouette--

The hills and valleys

and concrete sea

filled with teeth.

Allegro--

Adagio--

That rubber mass

of flesh and headache,

dull,

headache.

Crescendo!

Crashing end,

chaos and life!

Life!

And what of her?

That mistress

with flowers in her hair,

gossamer hanging

off her breasts.

Life!

Let us make love

once more tonight.

Let us embrace

one another underneath

the milky light

of the new

moon.

Self Portrait #3 represents a movement, a transition, from the physical to the insular. I found that after writing a handful of physical descriptions about my features, another sort of self-portrait became necessary. This is where I found my most interesting work of the month lay. After finishing the self-portrait project, I was able to distinguish my own thoughts and feelings in my writing as compared to the cursory off-the-cuff observations. This provided me with a unique view and helped me write the remaining poems for the rest of the month.

Having accomplished the task of writing a poem a day for a month, I learned a few things concerning myself and my writing. The first would be the necessity of abiding by a strict writing schedule. I have found that I was able to surprise myself in my own creative process the more I simply found time to focus on my writing. Whenever I would sit down to write a piece, I would always be able to draw upon something produced in the future, whether it was simply an idea or a whole poem, I could always come back and rework something. I would encourage anyone reading this to put themselves to a semi-strict schedule regarding their own creative work because you never know what you might be able to come up with.