WIP: Unnamed Verses

This is just a short accountability post, as much for my benefit as anyone’s. 

Over the past three weeks, I’ve kept up the habit of writing one poem a day. A few are a mere few hundred words long, but most are between to 500–800 words. I’m counting “poems” in the following way: individual poems in a linked series are counted individually. There are a few of those kinds of linked series, and I wrote each section on a different day. All told, it’s probably about 40-some pages total. 

The routine is basically that I open up my file, read what I wrote the day before and then edit it a bit, before moving on to drafting the day’s new poem. Most of these—the ones I don’t leave out of the collection—will need some further polishing down the road, but I’m treating that as a problem for later, as right now I’m keeping up a good pace and want to maintain it. 

It’s been interesting to experiment with forms. I’ve got a villanelle, I have a couple of poems that use the troubadour technique of coblas capfinadas1—where the last word of one verse recurs in the first line of the next verse—some haibuns, and quite a few free-verse poems that use internal rhyme, alliteration, or other schemes of organization. It’s been a while since I’ve written verse, more than a decade in fact, and I guess this explosion of formal experimentation has to do with that. 

Anyway, I’m enjoying the process and it’s getting my creative juices flowing. I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep up my current pace: it’s been a challenge, and some of the things I want to do with this collection will probably be more taxing than earlier parts, especially the longer narrative verse section I’ve realized will come at the end of the collection. But anyway, this project is still a go for now! 

Another nice thing is that this project has gotten me back to reading verse. I have a lot of poetry collections and books, but for a long time I didn’t really look at them. Now, I am. Lately I’ve been reading Arthur Rimbaud, Medrie Purdham, and Seamus Heaney (the latter of whose work has directly affected a few bits of my own project).