Today Lady Glamis at Literary Lab posted a follow-up to her poetry discussion and it got me thinking about what it is that I love about poetry and why some of it resonates with me and some of it doesn’t.  In other words, why did I go from having such a visceral hatred of poetry to suddenly rediscovering its beauty.  Let me sum it up.

It’s not that I dislike poetry, I just dislike bad poetry.

Let me backtrack a little bit.  For starters, I should be the last person to complain about bad poetry because I was a purveyor of bad poetry myself, once upon a time.  When I was a teenager I was obsessed with poetry–in particular sonnets.  I scribbled hundreds of terrible sonnets in the margins of my textbooks, all of the poems about how unjust the world was and how misunderstood I was.  Of course, at the time, I thought they were seriously deep, but now I’m glad those textbooks have long since been recycled.  To tell the truth, writing poetry was my way of passing the time during boring classes and looking back, while the fruit of all this writing was pretty awful, at least it kept my brain working.

My resistance to poetry began when I started taking writing classes.  The tricky thing about poetry is that there are so few words and language is boiled down to its barest essentials so when it’s good, it can be very very good, but when it’s bad it’s horrid.  This makes poetry especially challenging to discuss in a workshop setting.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m a firm believer in the workshop process; I think everyone should be free to submit rough, messy drafts in a workshop and learn to make them better.

The trouble with poetry began in one of the classes I took some years ago, where I sensed a certain defensiveness around the poetry submissions that I didn’t get when reading fiction pieces.  It was as though everyone in the class would back away in deference.  After all, this wasn’t fiction, it was poetry and poetry was personal so who were we to critique it?  And when I raised my hand and said “Um… I’m sorry, but I just don’t get what the poem’s trying to say” the class struck me down so fast I thought I hallucinated the whole thing.

Thing is, as a result of repeated exposure to less-than-wonderful poetry, for several years I assumed that the only reason I didn’t “get” these poems was because I was too dumb.  Then, I discovered Kim Addonizio’s Ordinary Genius (which I reviewed earlier this month) and this book is in large part responsible for my change of heart regarding poetry.  Suddenly, I realized that I wasn’t too dumb and I could make sense of poetry if I really tried.  Better yet, I enjoy it even if I didn’t understand it completely and simply relish in the language.  The best part was, I could even try my hand at it and write some poems of my own.

And here, of course, was where the real journey began.

I’ve decided to put my Writing Challenge on hold for the month of May because… *drumroll please*

…I’m participating in Story A Day!

I first learned about this challenge today through Inky Girl’s blog.  When I read the rules of the challenge, I was terrified… a story a day?  For all of May?  My thesis is due on May 10th!  Will I even survive that first week?  But then I thought… if I’m resisting this idea, maybe that’s because this is exactly what would be good for me right now.  Not to mention, it would be a fantastic way to start the summer if I manage to succeed.  Before I got a chance to change my mind, I signed up and now I’m doing it and I think I’m about to freak out!

Here’s the plan: I’ll be writing one short story per day, most likely of the flash-fiction variety and I’m giving myself Sundays as an optional day off.  I’m also going to try writing first thing in the morning, before my inner censor wakes up and before I have time to procrastinate too much.  On Wednesdays I’ll check in here and at StoryADay.org to let you all know how this is going.

Last Thursday, Literary Lab published a post about blogging, aptly titled: Who Cares if You Blog?  This post dispels all those myths one might believe in about how a meek little writer-blog suddenly gets a book deal simply on the merits of it’s wonderful blogginess.  Sure we’ve all heard of bloggers who ended up with book deals but in many cases it’s tough to know which came first: the hefty blog readership or the book.

As Literary Lab eloquently puts it: “you’re just another person with a blog, and we all have blogs and it’s nothing special. What is special is writing a good book.”  Which then begs the question: why do we blog?  I blog because it keeps my otherwise unstructured life on a schedule and gives me focus.  I blog because I love being part of a community of writers and readers.  I blog because it gives me a low-pressure venue for my writing.

Who cares if we blog?  Clearly, we’re here because we do care, because the blogosphere gives us something of value, whether it be simply a procrastination tool during a dull workday or something more.  So now I turn this question to the blog authors out there: why do you blog and why do you read blogs?

Looking over the last several reviews I’ve done, I realized that they are heavily weighted toward books about writing.  In part this is because I love reading about craft or reading authors’ advice to new writers.  At the same time, since the semester is drawing to a close–and with the end of semester comes my thesis deadline–I haven’t had nearly enough time to read fiction as I would like.  So today will be another writing book and with luck, by two weeks from now, I’ll be done and ready to start reading for fun again.

This week’s book is The Writer’s Book of Matches by the staff at Fresh Boiled Peanuts.  This book is a collection of writing prompts that range from the normal to the absurd to the hilarious.  There are 1001 prompts so even if you did one each day, it would take you three years to get through the book.  At the end, the editors include a handy-dandy guide on how to reuse the prompts and keep them fresh.  Overall, this book has the essentials for a useful writing book.  There’s plenty of variety and it’s small so it’s easy to carry when writing on the go.