Pabloguy

Hey Pabloguy, who are you? Just curious.

The day before the first poems

First of all, greetings to those of you that signed on over the last day or two.

To those of you who heard P. and I cry "May Day!" in our urgent emails and voicemails, but haven't committed, do consider signing yourself up.

All of that said, let's get down to it: Sunday is Day One of May Day.

That means that those of you that stay up late can post your first poems anytime after midnight on Saturday. Conversely, if you need the day to come up with your first poems, you can post up until 11:59 pm on Sunday.

For myself, I'm looking forward to the days when the poems come easy but also to the days when I have nothing and have to work at it, think hard, scrape.

Both kinds of day will be useful to me as a writer and poet, I think.

I'm PARTICULARLY looking forward to reading everyone's work over the month.

See you soon.

Yours,

A.

Others can Play in May!

Hi there -

Other poets are cordially invited to join Ariel and me in this project! Whoever wakes up first (or stays up latest) will create a new post every day after midnight.

To clarify, we won't be looking for feedback at all during this month, though "you go girls" is welcome commentary. The idea of the exercize as I understand it is to just get out a whack of fresh material and not get caught up in a "is it good enough?" mentality. At the end of the month we may post some of the drafts or revisions up for critique.

So if you'd like to play, respond to one of these posts and commit to 31 Poetic Days of May!

The first post but not the first poem

Polly and I got the idea to do this based on a couple of sources:

UTNE Magazine's online weekly 10-word poetry contest (24/04/05's words: familiar, doubt, brick, delight, incomprehension, river, tortured,boulevards, praise, murmuring, flame, iron)

&

Contemporary Verse 2's annual 2-Day 10-word poetry contest (2004's words: gossip, emanate, trellis, marble, street, orbit, bodega, chesterfield, figure, vent)

&

The annual labour-day 3-Day Novel Contest (no assigned words, per se, but the expectation that entrants will finish the weekend with 100 + pages)


but especially


The Perfect Day for Poetry website where people attempt to write thirty poems in thirty days.


But instead of adopting fey usernames (Perfect Day, UTNE) or the martial stance of competion (CV2, 3-Day Novel), we will recognize this for what it is: an exercize.

Hopefully, it will be a useful exercize, a generative exercize, but we're content to keep it semi-private.

That said, we'd be thrilled if any of youse cared to drop by every coupla days and browse what will be very rough, very tentative first drafts.

But that's not until May 1st.

Until then, P and I are limbering up, doing deep knee bends, computer-keyboard scales & laps around the living room, anything, ANYTHING to prepare us for the month to come...

We're calling it A Poem A Day in May. Isn't it lovely?

See you soon.


A.