The one-month poetry challenge that took almost three months to finish!

Done!  It's done! 

If you've been following along lately, you'll know that I gave myself a challenge in April to write one poem per day.  It was a concentrated effort in the beginning, because I had to write several poems just to catch up with the month.  I started on the sixth day of April, so I had to find six poems.  I found the six poems (or they found me), and I found all of the remaining 24.  I had a great time and forced a little discipline into my writing.

While I managed to write one poem per day (mostly), I struggled with finding the time to post them.  Today I have completed the posting of the poems.  You can visit the poetry challenge page to read 29 of my 30 poems.  When you reach the bottom of the page, you will see a link to the 30th poem, Movement, which is posted on my facebook page.  I invite you to click on the link, read the poem and add your own line.  I also encourage you to invite your friends to add a line.

Challenge over.  There, see, Despina--it wasn't so bad, after all.

Kay Ryan & Conrad Aiken & the Pulitzer

Yesterday, the 2011 Pulitzer Prize recipients were announced. A new poet for me to study, Kay Ryan, was awarded the prize for poetry. She's been around and writing for a while (1983), she served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 2008 to 2010, but not until now in her 65th year, is she awarded an international prize. This stuff takes some time, folks! Here, for you enjoyment, is a link to her poem, A Hundred Bolts of Satin.

In 1930, Conrad Aiken won his Pulitzer for poetry. I am familiar with the work of Aiken and I am inspired by some of his work. Yesterday, a friend shared with me an interview with Aiken that was published by The Paris Review. This is a quote, which reminds me of my self-appointed poem-a-day challenge for this month. It is a reminder that the drudgery of trying to push it out every day, no matter what it is that you do, can be useful. Don't give up!

Yes. I compelled myself all through to write an exercise in verse, in a different form, every day of the year. I turned out my page every day, of some sort—I mean I didn’t give a damn about the meaning, I just wanted to master the form—all the way from free verse, Walt Whitman, to the most elaborate of villanelles and ballad forms. Very good training. I’ve always told everybody who has ever come to me that I thought that was the first thing to do. And to study all the vowel effects and all the consonant effects and the variation in vowel sounds. For example, I gave Malcolm Lowry an exercise to do at Cuernavaca, of writing ten lines of blank verse with the caesura changing one step in each line. Going forward, you see, and then reversing on itself.
INTERVIEWER
How did Lowry take to these exercises
AIKEN
Superbly. I still have a group of them sent to me at his rented house in Cuernavaca, sent to me by hand from the bar with a request for money, and in the form of a letter—and unfortunately not used in his collected letters; very fine, and very funny. As an example of his attention to vowel sounds, one line still haunts me: “Airplane or aeroplane, or just plain plane.” Couldn’t be better.

Symmetry in a poem?

Lewis Carroll wrote a poem--a square poem. It's only a few lines and it is not remarkable as a poem, except for the way that it reads. It's written symmetrically, so that you can read it from left to right and top to bottom. Now, that is remarkable!

This is not an easy thing to duplicate. I've been working for several days on my own symmetrical poem, as part of my one-poem-a-day challenge. Perhaps you'd like to try to write one too?