by Carolee Sherwood and Jill Crammond Wickham
We are saturated with resolutions. We can’t assemble even one more accomplishment-based, goal-oriented construct. Already, we have good intentions overload. The only thing we know is that we want to get back in the habit of writing poems again. Regularly. With abandon. Until our fingers bleed. The holidays side-tracked us. (Did they distract you, too?). And we’re ready to start over with our poetry practice.
That’s the theme for this Poetry Mini-Challenge: starting over.
We’re going to capitalize on some of the energy of the New Year without wading through any more resolutions. This is not the place for your PowerPoint presentations on the changes you’re going to make in 2010, and it’s not the place for you to show off the line graphs you’ve set up to track your progress.
This is the place to explore those occasions when you’ve scrapped everything and attempted new beginnings. Here are some possibilities: throwing away the batter and starting the dish from scratch, crumpling up a drawing and starting a new one, splitting up with someone and getting back together under different terms (or jumping into a new relationship), packing up an old apartment and finding a fresh start somewhere else, digging up all the flowers and replanting them in different configurations, starting an emotional letter over and over because you can’t get it right.
Use any of these scenarios (and some of your own, real or made up) to launch your poems. You’re going to have to dig deep because we’re shooting for six days and six poems. You can stick with one scenario for all six poems (entrench yourself in all its elements or tangents), or you can play with six different ideas, one in each piece.
As you write
Please visit the forums for the January Poetry Mini-Challenge. They will be marked #1, #2, #3 and so on — one for each poem you write for this challenge. Jump into the forums and post links to your poems (or the text of the poems themselves if you don’t have a blog), and be sure to visit your fellow poets’ pieces to cheer each other on.
About the poetry mini-challenge
If you’ve signed on to Read Write Poem recently or if you missed the other challenges, you’re welcome to visit the original post for background. Here’s the short version:
A mini-challenge is a poetry-writing, poetry-reading or poetry-process prompt that you respond to with a new poem each day for a set number of days. The idea isn’t to warm up the poetry muscles, it’s to feel the burn. Go deeper. Explore further. Pass the place you may have stopped initially. See what comes next. And as if that weren’t juicy enough, you do all of it with the support and encouragement of the other crazy hardworking Read Write Poem members who take on the challenge.
Note: Please save the comments section of this post for discussion on or questions about the process. The poems and links go in the forums associated with the Poetry Mini-Challenge group, located here.
Carolee Sherwood is a poet and artist who lives in Upstate New York. She is co-editor of Ouroboros Review, mother of three boys and a veteran Read Write Poem columnist. You can find her rambling about the creative life at Carolee Sherwood and drafting poems at I Am Maureen.
Jill Crammond Wickham has discovered that the frantic pace of motherhood has driven her to write more, not less. Jill writes at Mom Trying to Write. She is a co-editor for Ouroboros Review and a senior contributor and columnist for Read Write Poem.
good idea. the baby and the bathwater.
I usually hang on to my resolutions until about the sixth or seventh of January so this should work out well.
love this prompt. I started mining my memory and naturally, all sorts of gunk is coming up.
Fabulous and G-r-o-w-l….
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this is an important one for me. i need to jump start my writing practice. start it over.
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Superb!
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