​Sometime tomorrow, less than twenty-four hours from now, I will summons together a poem representing the 365th day of this long poem-a-day episode. I remember starting in the middle of the month out of fear that the crazy idea would slip away from me if I had to sit on it and wait another half month to officially begin. I remember the sensing that the ease of those first few weeks would not last, knowing the coming desert of ideas and energy would test me. I remember think: Half a year’s good enough, isn’t it? I remember wondering if even a single poem from the entire experience would be a good poem. I remember sometime along the way losing some self-judgement and better realizing that what I considered good, and good for me, usually didn’t have to match up to anyone else’s vision. I remember hearing my own voice, clearer and clearer, losing it, then hearing it again, over and over. I remember leaning on others to get through this.  
 
One Last Thought:
 
I don’t know if I’m able
to turn off this new habit.
What was once a clumsy chore
is a mostly working limb now
only I can see, reaching out
from the body,
                        like an alien
sensory organ only something
as alien as poetry could have
nourished from nothing:
 
Combining sight and smell
and a portion of spirit, empty
elements when alone, curious
and jetting out away from the self
when comingled, conjoined,
newly fabled creatures,
one hearing the other’s babble
about other worlds interpreted.  

​Tomorrow begins the last remaining fifteen days of my yearlong poem-a-day journey. We started on September 15th of last year and will end on that date this month. I say we because it’s been an effort accomplished only with the help of several fellow writers along the way. I’d team up with one or two writers every month or so, all of us encouraging each other to trade a new poem by midnight every day.
 
Was every poem a masterpiece after its 24-hour birthing? I hope not. Was every poem ready to publish upon entry into this often harsh literary world? No. Did every poem deserve a second look for revision when time allowed, to maybe get cut to pieces in the editing process down the road, to be melded with other poems to find its true self, to be turned, perhaps, into a short story, or just stared at after some months with wonder as to what one was thinking? All of the above and much more.   
 
One of those lovely partners along the way, Melissa Helton – a gifted poet and trusted friend – mused once that we’re all kind of writing the same two or three poems over and over no matter how many poems we write. I agree with her in one respect, but after having to find something to say well over four-hundred-and-fifty times (I’ve written more than one or two a day on occasions, especially when at residency and at generative writing events) over almost a year, I hope I’ve busted out of some of that habit’s pitfalls.  
 
And if I have, it’s only because I’ve managed it through the influence of these other writers I was cross-pollinating with through their writing styles, personalities, energies, reading preferences and influences, voice rhythms. All of it. (I’m pretty sure, however, in the end when reviewing the work as a whole, I’ll find, just as Melissa says, a few themes, over and over)
 
We give each other energy. We feed off each other in the creative world, whether writing, painting, or making music. I think we’d all agree on that. Moreover, we help one another with the material necessary, the raw material of creativity. Perhaps that’s the same thing as trading energy, but it’s a more tangible consideration, isn’t it? We’re in collaboration with each other even when we’re not “teaming up” to do so. But when we are specifically there to help the other persevere, to create alone side them, to suffer and celebrate along the way, we do a mighty thing.  
 
Fifteen days to go. And yes, I have a partner to help with what might be the most difficult days yet. Here we go. 

I’m struggling today. I’ve struggled on many days, but this morning is a fatigued sort of, dare I say, block. I dislike that term: block. I don’t believe in it. I’ve proven to myself over nearly a year that I can be bigger than some simple phrase like “writer’s block.” Yet, this morning, in a universe full of rich material, when things usually flow pretty well, I am challenged. This is when the learning happens, isn’t it? What would I deeply learn when process isn’t some painful? Discomfort helps along growth. I am struggling.
 
I just don’t want to write about Trump this morning. Politics. Or about crashing warships. Or the recent amazing eclipse (though I have lots of notes for that later). Or how there’s a tinge of early autumn working into the air these last few days. Or how deafening our friends the cicadas persist. Or how I’m looking forward to the pretty mums we’ll plant soon. Or the taste of smoky bourbon. Or another poem about something odd at the antique store. Or how my wife’s perfume lingers after an entire day along her collarbone.
 
I am not at a loss of “things” to write “about.” I’m staring through the computer screen, it seems. The poet’s “thousand-yard stare,” if we’re allowed to claim such an ailment. I’m not getting past a first line or two of inspiration. We’ve all been there. Have the ragged t-shirts tucked away to drag out and pull on occasionally. After 342 days of writing a poem or more a day, mine's getting pretty worn. 

I don’t quite remember when my dystopian state of mind sneaked in as a way of thinking. It was like a filter someone infiltrated into my mind over time, of course, partially of my own doing, I admit, and that I now deal with like a permanent pair of attached light and mood goggles, shading the world off and on oddly and darkly.
            It’s the result of a formula, no doubt, something akin to:
 
Early 21st century social political upheaval + the democratization of personal artisanship + generalized apathy + a zombie / monster / world failure pop culture fascination + Appalachian fatalism + a mind in constant fictional writing mode = interpreting the natural world alternately as dystopian / post-apocalyptic.
 
It’s a state of mind you really can’t turn off once you’ve arrived it. Everywhere you go, especially as a writer, invites the application of this aesthetic template.

I was writing zombie and societal collapse stories well before falling in love with The Walking Dead. Add this to a fetish-like attraction to urban and rural decay photography, and you can image where my aesthetic eye and mind gravitated to for years.

I grew up with easy access to the coal boom and bust culture, so a dying mountain town or an abandoned cabin or house was just around the corner wherever you wanted to look. When I was writing stories about a world, either naturally unraveling or tearing itself apart, I was looking to spaces around me for the raw materials, for characters and mood. In today’s times, of course, all I have to do is look to the headlines for evidence of political sado-masochism and perpetual chaos. 

Eventually, it was habitual to apply the template of disaster and decay over the mundaneness of everyday life. I knew something strange had turned when one normal day I was driving down a busy highway and wondered how I’d manage maneuvering through the traffic if all the cars around me were suddenly driverless or found abandoned on the spot. I was evaluating the road shoulders and medians and ditches in my head, laying it all out as a scenario for story plot, a man on the run, surviving, dodging through dead cars and worse. Or was I?This was how I was spending my daydreams apparently.

Maybe I was just becoming a dystopian. A proper definition, if we need one at all, of A Dystopian might be someone that expects the world to fall apart into misery, but I’m not sure that’s quite me. Yet. Perhaps I’m more of a psychological dystopian futurist, seeing the world for what it might become and not quite as pessimistic as one might need to be to give up completely on the world.

I want to hold on to some shred of optimism. I know that in many of my imagined scenarios and out there in popular culture, there's a limited roll call of heroes and the world is usually on fire, literally and metaphorically. Everyone hurts. Most perish. After all, everyone can’t play the main characters that survive in a good story. It wouldn’t be a plague then, would it? Zombies must consume. Vampires must drink. Wars must destroy. The world eats itself up. 

I do a lot of antiquing in search of oddities. Some of the coolest items I’ve found are out of thrift shops and Goodwills, buried among the knickknack discards of a million lives both living and dead. I can’t shop in these places without hearing these voices, without hearing their fading steps in the stores. 

People die. These widows and widowers, their children, empty their closets and out from under their beds and bring those heavy boxes of lives as donations. Out of sight, out of mind, right? It’s all spread out like ashes, across shelves, and the floors, on tables: shoes, suits, dresses, furniture, records, books, jewelry, figurines, brass vases, baskets, workout equipment, and quilts. And it sits, densely, waiting on a showering of skin dust of thousands of passers-by, browsed and evaluated for a second or third life. Or to remain in this limbo of suspended decay, just short of forgotten. 

Some of these places look like our homes and business will after it all ends (apply "ends" as you will). Leave your house unattended for a year and come back. See if it doesn’t look like the shelves of a thrift store, waiting on someone to happen in and breathe life back into each and every item. Or perhaps it looks like an  abandoned home, emptied of goods, ruined by the plague, everything left as it was when life was nice and tidy. 

Maybe that’s why I love about hanging out in these places. It comes easy for me. It doesn’t require that imagined layer of dystopia. It’s here already. Whatever’s coming is past and here’s the evidence. There’s a new story in every aisle and I seldom go home without a new voice in my head from the world of the fallen, someone refusing to give up where the world feels given up on. I think they suspect I’ve not completely given up them, though only a thread of civilization hangs on. 

​The fifteenth of June was the nine month mark of my poem-a-day trek. A poem. Every day. Not just some tossed off few lines so you can get through it. A solid poem with revision and potential. Every freakin’ day.
 
As you might imagine, the experience can be a mental obstacle course, with plenty of walls to get over. That’s code for running out of things to say and the energy to generate the work.
 
But a recent eleven days on the North Carolina coast re-enthused my inspiration.
 
Sometimes we need new raw material to dwell on when creating.
 
There’s a point on the seven hour trip from Johnson City to Kure Beach when the mountains vanish. Appalachia melts away into a flatness that creeps up and is suddenly alien. It signals something drastic has happened geographically, topographically. Even culturally.
 
Drive long enough east and all the senses solve the mystery. Salt air. New species of flora and fauna. A morphing of accent. Names of towns. Then the immeasurable ocean staring your mortality in the face. The constancy of water beating the sand.
                                                               
This is the sort of new material we need as a jolt to the senses when we’re hitting the wall in our writing.
 
I’m still “riding the wave,” so to speak. The coast: beaches, sand, the sound of waves. The land of flatness. It’s all a different planet than the mountainous dwelling I usually run in. Upper-East Tennessee provides a world all its own. Just as your unique world does.
 
We need to get out of our comfortable worlds on a regular basis. Breath new and challenging air.
 
I remember the first time I traveled to Arizona and the desert. I exited the filtered and false environment of the plane into the filtered and false environment of the indoor airport at Tucson. I had no idea what to expect. I exited the building through the automatic double-doors and was hit in the face with that “dry” hundred-degree heat along with that distinct desert scent. My senses overloaded. It was so foreign to me. Pleasurable, yes. Stunning. I was instantly in love with the desert. And I’ll never forget that first, literal, in-my-face experience.
 
When I write of my desert times I start back at that first assault on the senses, when I fell in love with that new world for me, something I could have never done just reading about the desert, about Arizona and New Mexico. Of Mexico. Of Death Valley. Vegas. The Yuma dunes. The graves of Boot Hill at Tombstone.
 
Hitting a wall with your writing? Get out of your literal comfort zone. Travel somewhere that changes the raw material you depend upon, be that a thousand miles away or ten miles down the road. 
 
Happy travels. 

The act of submitting your writing is a mixed bag of emotions. 

Well, hold on. Let's establish something first. You ARE submitting, right? You're not pouring yourself into these worlds you're creating (that applies to poetry, too) and then hoarding all the fun for your own? 

Do you have journals full of work that's "just not ready"? Writing that "just doesn't feel right"?  

Ask yourself a serious question: In all that work, is nothing ready, or are YOU not ready? 

Sending our writing out is an act rendering us quite vulnerable, especially as the fragile writerly being we often are. Our work might be criticized, rejected, misinterpreted, lost, or ignored. All that will happen. Often. That's the inevitable life of a writer. 

You might be waiting to submit when everything feels perfect: the perfect top tier journal, your perfect poem, the perfect timing, the perfect needs of the journal based on their space and themes, your perfect mood and confidence, the perfect arrangement of your writing space aligned with the moon and stars and the weather, etc.

I'm afraid that's a formula for a thin-skinned let down. Most of that's never going to come together for anyone. Not for me. Not for you. 

Submitting successfully is about getting over our fear of "the send" or "the mailing." The actual doing of the act. Most writers, I believe, have work that can go out NOW, but are sitting on it, hesitant for every reason necessary NOT to send it out. 

This is not to say send work that's not ready. Never. But there's a difference between work that's ready and a hesitant writer. What's wonderful is that once we realize that the world doesn't really come to an end no matter the outcome of a submission, we can do it over and over, revising at our leisure, learning how things REALLY work out there in the land of publication. 

Send out something today. Today. 

Yesterday (the 15th of April) marked seven months of my poem-a-day journey. 

I'm feeling the weight of this self-challenge as of late. I'm staying on task, but I'm realizing more frequently, "Oh yes, I've done that. Let's do something new." 

Who wants to be a broken record, even if it's a good song? A one-trick pony? Even when deferring to what comes easiest when the idea of digging deeper and deeper every single day for another many months feels suddenly impossible?

I think my current pause in confidence has a lot to do with not wanting pieces birthed from a mechanical roboticism of the task. It would be obvious to the right eyes. To me later.

At the same time we need to be able to write when we don't feel like it. When we're not inspired. Sometimes we write inspired. Sometimes we revise inspired. Tenacity, when it hurts, is a poet's friend. 

I'm not without prompts. Ever. No one is: 

The spider struggling right now, out on the deck, to strap down its flopping web in the wind.
How perfect today's weather seems for an Easter day.
The combined scent of bacon and eggs out of the kitchen at this moment.
The milk chocolate cross someone bought us for Easter (how freakin' strange).
The white blooms of a dogwood falling like snow flurries in bright sun.
The cat purring on my wife's lap so loudly I can hear it, almost feel the vibration, across the room.
The disappointment of coffee cooled lukewarm after I'd forgotten it trying to knock out this blog post. 

Or a combination of these, some piece placing any of these in juxtaposition. A loving of any of these, or hating. An attempt to understand them, or to simply smash them into ugly abstraction. 

None of us are ever without material. Inspiration? Perhaps. Energy. Perhaps. But learn to keep writing we must, come storms or perfect alignments our needs.

Today - Easter - a day representing renewal - begins month eight. I'm ready. 

Isn't it great when you end up talking yourself through your own frustration?  

When I run out of steam for material I can always fall back on an old reliable writing prompt: "The Unexpected Visitor." That little phrase opens all sorts of possibilities, doesn't it? The obvious metaphor is death. Death comes knocking, etc., etc.

But death isn't unexpected in the end, is it? Death is expected, of course. Death is usually surprising, but not unexpected. Death is truly "The Surprise Visitor."

Surprise! You're dead. 

Not funny. Right? Sort of. You can't say, "Oh, hi there...um, Death. I wasn't expecting you. Ever." You can say, "Oh, hi there, Death. You surprised me arriving so soon. Like today. Why can't you be fashionably late like my wife insists we be all the time. I know I prefer to be early usually..."

I doubt there's any use in having that conversation. There's probably no negotiation, though death is probably not pressed for time and could argue for as long as necessary. 

I do have a theory, however, why many of us writerly types are, in fact, writers in the first place, or, at least, what motivates us to keep on writing when writing is the last thing we want to do or seem to be figuring out. The next time someone asks you why you became a writer or why you write, tell them you're dying. That you have things to say before your last visitor. 

I doubt I'm leaving large accounts of cash to anyone. Besides, having been the victim several of the poor folks with lots of it, I don't think it's much of a blessing in the category of one's Karma. A big house that will saddle someone with a continuing mortgage? No thanks. A beat-up car? My last name in cheap plastic letters on a building (that was a tax-shelter to begin with) no one bothers to look up at when they enter? Again, no thanks. Some call that a "naming opportunity."

How about leaving what you thought about the world in words in thousands of books circulated in stores and libraries and home bookshelves? In the region of your hometown? Your home state? With friends and acquaintances across the world? That's a legacy, I think. When you're gone and someone misses you, but you've put every atom of your soul into your writing and they have it in their hand, you're there with them. Whether you've had that last unexpected visitor or not.

Let death be a friend to the energy of your writing. Not an anxiety.  

It's the end of March. I've been writing at least one poem a day (sometimes more), every day, for over half a year now. I started living in this little oasis of insanity on the 15th of September, 2016. 

I feel a little like a lone astronaut stranded in an orbiting craft, drifting to the dark side of a planet every day, losing contact, doing my thinking and writing in the dark (which I do a lot of in the early mornings and late night), until communication is restored with the light and I hear from my writing partner(s) before midnight with their daily poetry dispatch. 

Of course, along with that drifting existence is the regular flow of rejections (submissions are a regular part of life after all, right?). I liken these to failed communications back to the planet. Something I've sent, something important. Something that failed to be understood, that has fallen flat, been scrambled beyond sense of my original language.

​But then, occasionally, the math works out and someone returns the call: We hear you. We hear what you're saying. We will let them know you're message. 

So there's nothing new or crazy about doing the Poem-A-Day (POD) Challenge for a month. I've enjoyed this with writer friends on several occasions. What I realized some time ago, however, was how I often managed a poem every day normally and that I could learn something (and maybe others, too) over a more formalized timeline of that natural process.  

My admittedly crazy plan is to write at least a poem every day for a year and live to tell about it. 

I'm well down the road already. I've been exchanging a POD with a partner poet or two every month since September 15th, 2016. My first writing partner joined me up through the end of October. Two writers joined me for November. Another single writer joined the challenge in December. I had a few folks help me start the year off. Now we're here in the middle of January and my current partner and I are planning to write until at least the middle of February if not through the entire month. 

And just like that, the project is already closing in on half a year.  

I'm meeting new people through their work and getting to know people better. Exchanging with so many others over the months exposes me to their writing styles and voices. Believe me, I've been influenced by these good people. I'm learning better discipline in my writing routine. I'm learning to work with prompts whether I want to or not. I'm learning to write when I don't want to write. I'm learning a higher level of awareness since such a challenge requires constant streams of inspiration and / or material. Inspiration is never guaranteed when you need to work, is it? 

I'm having to prioritize my time since I have a regular life (though writing IS my life): I've actually started a fiction semester with my MFA program, so on top of having to have my poetry brain going, my fiction head is running full-bore as well. I have non-writing projects to keep up with. I paint, enjoy photography daily, and have other life obligations. 

I'll definitely be writing a book about this personal writing quest once it's over and I've had time to process how the experience turns out and leaves its mark in my life. That's a little over half a year from now, though. 

"And miles to go before I sleep."