A Poem a Day

I'm finally done teaching my literature course (at least until the next session begins), and I've finally settled into a schedule at the cafe. So what does this mean for this blog, you may ask?

Fortunately, I'll be writing here more often, baking more often, job hunting more vigorously, and writing a poem a day!

Writing a poem a day is not a new idea. I first heard of it while researching David Lehman's The Daily Mirror (1996) for a class in college. He wrote the entire collection by writing a poem a day for 140 days. Some poems, he has said, were awful and were scrapped, but some were good enough to be published in the final manuscript.

Lehman's idea has spread rapidly since then, and writing 31 poems in a month is popular enough to have caught the attention of Writer's Digest and to have inspired at least one independent web site supporting the project.

So I've decided to finally try my hand at the Poem a Day project as a way to make good use of my new free time. And, folks, I'm depending on you all to keep me honest! So I'll post a few lines from each day here. (I can't post whole poems in case I want to publish them elsewhere later!) The lines will be rough, I promise you, and they may not make much sense on their own, but the whole point of the project is to create frantically, joyfully, and consistently, all without paying too much attention to my internal editor!

So here are the inaugural lines of the PoemsAboutOranges Poem A Day project. I hope you enjoy reading along with me in this process!

"This time of year, geese fly overhead,
soft white bellies, brown-black wings,
trailing out flawed V's, branching figures,
aerial charts like family trees . . ."

Copyright Lesley Owens, 2010