Why I "Failed" at the Poetry Challenge and Why it Doesn't Matter

I started the April Poem a Day challenge and shared some of my work here, but as you noticed I quit after a few poems. This tends to happen to me a lot when I try this kind of challenge. I toodle along pretty well at first, then I find other things demanding my attention and I move on to those things. It happens with NaNoWriMo too. But in the long run, it doesn't really matter.

Why doesn't it matter? I mean, I set a goal and I didn't meet that goal. So I should berate myself and feel bad, right? Yeah, I'm thinking no. Because what did I accomplish? I wrote some poems. I probably wouldn't have written them at all if I hadn't started the challenge. So I have some bits of work that wouldn't have otherwise existed. That's not a bad thing at all.

Also, who's to say I won't finish the challenge eventually? I did last year, though I didn't write the last poem until some time in May or June if I remember correctly. I like the challenges and I'll probably go ahead and tackle the rest on my own timeframe. So, in my mind, rather than failing the challenge, I've produced some new work, challenged myself, and now I have some new pieces I can market later, with more likely to come.

In fact, the thing I'm most worried about regarding this challenge isn't that I didn't write all the poems in the time allotted, but that I can't seem to find the notebook I wrote them in. Now that's a catastrophe...

April PAD Challenge--Day 12

Yesterday I finished my taxes, and the theme for the PAD challenge was "broke," so for most of the day all I could come up with was this:

I just did my taxes and now I am broke
All of my money just went up in smoke.

But I couldn't figure out where to go from there. Which is too bad because that really could have been poignant and literary and eventually made me the Poet Laureate of Colorado.

Anyway, later in the day I came up with something else:

April PAD Challenge--Day 12
Prompt: "broke" or "broken"

Pieces of broken hearts lay
All around where he sleeps at night
And he doesn't understand
Why even now
At ninety-six
He can't get anyone to stay as long as breakfast.

PAD Challenge--Day 11

April PAD Challenge
Day 11
Prompt: "In case of______"

In case of apocalypse there will be
17 cans of Spaghetti-Os
14 boxes of Muesli
47 cans of beans
In case of apocalypse, break the glass.
Behind it is the can opener.
In case of apocalypse gather
All the guns
All the dogs
All the knives
And go to the second-floor bedroom
Where you will eat beans
And Muesli
And Spaghetti-Os
Until the fallout starts.

More Poeming--PAD Challenge Prompts 7-10

I got hung up on Day 7 of the Poetic Asides PAD Challenge and ended up backlogged once I finally came up with something for that one, so I'll just post a few at a time here instead of backposting to put them all on the right day, because that's kind of annoying, anyway. So here we go:

Day 7. Prompt--Sevenling (this is a particular poetry form, which is why I got hung up on this prompt)

A gold ring
A silver chain
A locket

The cash
and the cards
From his wallet

She tosses them in after his body.



Day 8. Prompt--Instructional

This is how it works:
If you turn the crank to the right
The heartbeat slows.
To the left, the constriction is lifted.
Turn to the right, farther and farther,
and the bands tighten.
The pressure is even, so
The heart does not exactly burst.
It is only compressed
Until
Finally
It becomes incapable of human emotion.


Day 9: Prompt--hunter and/or hunted (twofer Tuesday prompt)

The soft whiff of denial hits the air
And she knows she is on the wrong path
But she presses forward.
The branches tangle around her.
Thorns tear her skin.
She knows it's the wrong way.
She keeps going.
Going.
Into the darkness, through the swampy quicksand
Until finally
There he is
Entirely the wrong man.


Day 10: Prompt--suffering

How much longer can it hurt this much?
How much longer before the body rebels completely
And organs shut down
The blood stops flowing
The breath stops breathing?
How much longer?
Six more years
Then five
Then four.
Then they're counting down to three
Because then it will be
Their silver anniversary.

PAD Challenge--Day Six

April PAD Challenge
Day Six
Prompt--"Post"

There was a day when
We waited by the mailbox
Wondering what treasure the day would bring
A postcard, a note, a letter, a check
Now we hunch over flickering screens
And hit refresh
Again
And again and
Again

PAD Challenge--Day Five

April PAD Challenge
Day Five
Prompt--"plus"

Who is your + one?
It asks on the invitation and you
Hesitate wondering what to say
Because your + one is you
Your heart your soul your life
The identity you've carved since you became one on your own
Who is your + one?
You write in the blank: Not Applicable

PAD Challenge--Day Four

April PAD Challenge
Day Four
Prompt--"Hold that ___"

Hold that
Tighter it might get away
Slip through your fingers
Fly off the curve of your open hand

Hold that
Tighter; don't let it go
If you let it move
Or breathe
It won't be yours anymore

Hold that
Tighter
And when you open your hand
It will stare at you
With glassy eyes

PAD Challenge--Day Three

April PAD Challenge
Day Three
Prompt--"tentative"

There's always that moment
Before
The thumb cocks the trigger
The fingers loose the arrow
The nib strikes the paper

When you wonder

Why

PAD Challenge--Day Two

April PAD Challenge
Day Two--prompt "dark/light"
This was a twofer prompt--we could write a dark poem or a light poem. I put 'em both in there.

God said let there be light
So in the beginning there was only dark
And out of the dark crawled everything
All the bugs and worms and tentacles and the dark slime that birthed everything.
So we are all children of the darkness
Because the dark came first
And it's still there.

National Poetry Month--April Poem a Day Challenge

I've been waffling about doing this, but I think I'll take the plunge. I'm doing the April Poem-A-Day Challenge over at Robert Lee Brewer's Writer's Digest blog, and I'm going to post my poems (eek!). These are first drafts, please be warned... Basically I'm just barfing up a poem based on the prompt and hoping something cohesive comes out of it at some point. I did this challenge last year and came up with thirty poems of varying quality, one of which I actually sold, so hey! Success!

Anyway, on with the poeming:

Day One
Prompt--"new arrival"

In the beginning was the word
What word was it?
Words tangle and scrawl and earthworm their way across blank paper
Becoming something
Something new
Something that has never existed before
Words define and delineate, limit and logic
Words break you and batter, query and question and turn things inside out and outside in and challenge every belief we've ever held dear.
Words are the matter at the heart
The Higgs boson
The God particle
The graviton

God said let there be...
And there was.
I say let there be...
And there it is.