Be it so resolved: a poet lives in you the way I knew it from every episode of Mr Roger’s Neighborhood. My go-to television as a kid in Chicago, I came to realize then and every year thereafter, that:
what you see
around the neighborhood—that has meant the
world to me, putting
words to poems already
there, hiding in the haystacks.
Where to start? Within, without. And when? New Year’s Day – sooner or later.
Inspired by many imaginers, I have written a poem a day since January 1, 2020. Six years now adds up to 2192 poems, yet if each on average has required less than an hour to compose, I’d still only be 20% an ‘expert’ in the field, according to Malcolm Gladwell’s popular metric that 10,000 hours of anything would do that trick. In other words, I have twenty-four years left to go.
Of those imaginers, my older brother Jonathan spurred me on in late December, 2019. We wouldn’t have imagined the Covid quarantine soon to come, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the zillion things to write about on any given day. Jon’s own poetry had been formative to my sense of semantics, themes personal and probing of the wider world. He and our younger brother Joshua played Scrabble together as often as they could, searched the hardest daily crossword puzzles, shared mirth in these routines.
Somewhere I heard that Sylvia Plath had written a poem every day; I assumed as much for Emily Dickinson. You likely know a guitarist who explores new riffs as often as the sun slants in a certain angle. Billy Collins, when asked about his process (daily or not), divulged that he jots down a line, appreciates its lightness or weight, then follows with another, then… walks the dog or some such other task. Eventually, there’s your Billy Collins poem.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, advises us to “write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem”; he implores more of this activity in schools, the only requirement to have the verses rhyme: “no fair tennis without a net.” Well, all due respect, I won’t extend such strictures in my own poems, let alone those I read from students or friends. My only ‘rule’, if more a multi-species muse, is to include an animal in some form (noun, verb, adjective, etc) to reflect our own ‘anima’ and ‘animus’ as human beings.
My anthology online, then, takes on the ascription of a ‘Lost Menagerie’ – a Noah’s Ark of sorts, floating to be found as much as to find whatever’s out there. Hopefully to do no harm to the natural aesthetic, as we must admit that ‘art’ is somewhat artificial to the world we happen to inhabit.
Feel free to browse that daily almanac – from lousy to profound, veiled sometimes with journeys only those who’ve taken them would recognize. The sidebar has links to other genres I’ve drafted, largely thanks to writers’ groups in Prague, like the one hosted at Globe bookstore for over 9 years. I suppose, like when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Turkmenistan before the advent of the internet, I could write without such camaraderie, but I’m counting blessings that they’re here and, in their own ways, writing every single day.
Daniel Martin Vold Lamken