5 Years, 100 Poems
Apr. 28th, 2026 05:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swan_towerWhen I sold my twentieth poem recently, I found myself wondering: how many poems have I written?
Several other questions instantly followed in its wake. How far back am I counting? (All the way to that poetry book we did in second or third grade, that I only remember because my parents found it when they moved?) Do I count failed-but-complete drafts of poems I later wrote very differently? (Or are those the same poem . . .) What about incidental things I've tossed off that don't really feel like they should count, like that senryu about jet lag written while, yes, horrifically jet-lagged? (There are probably things in this category I don't even remember: I keep good records, but not perfect ones.)
I finally decided on three rules:
1) Only poems written since I Began Writing Poetry (with "The Great Undoing") count.
2) Early failed drafts of later poems do not count.
3) To count, I must consider the poem "successful" -- meaning worth either posting online or submitting to markets.
By those metrics, I had ninety. And then I asked myself the last, fatal question:
When did I write "The Great Undoing," anyway?
The answer, my friends, is April 2021.
A mad plan instantly proposed itself. I had eleven days left in April, and I was a mere ("mere") ten poems away from one hundred in five years. (Ish. I've attempted to find out when in April I wrote "The Great Undoing," with no success. I decided the anniversary month was good enough.) Could I get myself to that line before the month was out -- understanding that I needed not only to write ten more poems, but ten I considered successful?
As you can guess from this post, the answer is "yes." In part because I got a sizable boost when I remembered four haiku/senryu I'd written for an exchange last summer, which I'd never done anything with; upon examination, I found they were in fact not bad and I should send them somewhere. But I've written six poems I think are successful in the last week: a rate that would have seemed inconceivable to me just a few years ago, when one a month was about all I could manage. And I didn't go only for low-hanging fruit, either; this includes a garland cinquain, elegiac couplets (a Latin meter English does not play nice with), a fifty-six-line nonce form that rhymes throughout . . .
. . . and a sestina. Specifically, the sestina that has been my white whale since 2007, long before I Began Writing Poetry, when my crit group gently told me that a flash piece I'd written was not very good but yes, my vague thought that maybe it should be a poem? was probably right. I've taken several runs at it over the years, though none in the last five. So of course I decided it needed to be Number One Hundred. (Quoth my sister: "Call Me Ishmarie.")
I finally did it. And so, in celebration, I leave you with Poem #101, with apologies for hopping on a bandwagon only slightly less overloaded than Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah":
This Is Just to Say
I have written
the poem
that I've failed at
for nineteen years
and which
had become
my
white whale
Actually
it turns out
it wasn't
that hard
(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/hhzpX6)
Several other questions instantly followed in its wake. How far back am I counting? (All the way to that poetry book we did in second or third grade, that I only remember because my parents found it when they moved?) Do I count failed-but-complete drafts of poems I later wrote very differently? (Or are those the same poem . . .) What about incidental things I've tossed off that don't really feel like they should count, like that senryu about jet lag written while, yes, horrifically jet-lagged? (There are probably things in this category I don't even remember: I keep good records, but not perfect ones.)
I finally decided on three rules:
1) Only poems written since I Began Writing Poetry (with "The Great Undoing") count.
2) Early failed drafts of later poems do not count.
3) To count, I must consider the poem "successful" -- meaning worth either posting online or submitting to markets.
By those metrics, I had ninety. And then I asked myself the last, fatal question:
When did I write "The Great Undoing," anyway?
The answer, my friends, is April 2021.
A mad plan instantly proposed itself. I had eleven days left in April, and I was a mere ("mere") ten poems away from one hundred in five years. (Ish. I've attempted to find out when in April I wrote "The Great Undoing," with no success. I decided the anniversary month was good enough.) Could I get myself to that line before the month was out -- understanding that I needed not only to write ten more poems, but ten I considered successful?
As you can guess from this post, the answer is "yes." In part because I got a sizable boost when I remembered four haiku/senryu I'd written for an exchange last summer, which I'd never done anything with; upon examination, I found they were in fact not bad and I should send them somewhere. But I've written six poems I think are successful in the last week: a rate that would have seemed inconceivable to me just a few years ago, when one a month was about all I could manage. And I didn't go only for low-hanging fruit, either; this includes a garland cinquain, elegiac couplets (a Latin meter English does not play nice with), a fifty-six-line nonce form that rhymes throughout . . .
. . . and a sestina. Specifically, the sestina that has been my white whale since 2007, long before I Began Writing Poetry, when my crit group gently told me that a flash piece I'd written was not very good but yes, my vague thought that maybe it should be a poem? was probably right. I've taken several runs at it over the years, though none in the last five. So of course I decided it needed to be Number One Hundred. (Quoth my sister: "Call Me Ishmarie.")
I finally did it. And so, in celebration, I leave you with Poem #101, with apologies for hopping on a bandwagon only slightly less overloaded than Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah":
This Is Just to Say
I have written
the poem
that I've failed at
for nineteen years
and which
had become
my
white whale
Actually
it turns out
it wasn't
that hard
(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/hhzpX6)
