b.read.crumbs: Soaring

My partner in b.read.crumbs, Julie Herman, thought our topic for February should be short poems, since February is a short month. She kicked it off with her post a couple of weeks ago, in which she wrote about haiku. Julie loves her some haiku.

Me? I love to read haiku, ponder haiku, and drift along on the breeze of haiku.

Writing it, not so much.

I had no idea how I’d spin this idea into a blog post I could manage, but lo and behold! the universe provided. By universe, of course, I mean Janisse Ray and Gianna Russo.

Janisse’s Facebook post about Gianna’s desperation form, The Daily, came along just as Julie’s b.read.crumbs piece went live. How could that not be a sign for me to give The Daily a try?

The guidelines are simple (but check Gianna’s site for full details):

Add up the month and day (and year, if you’d like) of whatever day it happens to be. Example: February (2) + day (21) + year (2023) = 2+2+1+2+0+2+3=12

The sum is 12, so your poem will have 12 words. You get two words per line (one word in either the first or last line if you have an odd number). There must be at least one concrete image in the poem. Russo says this is an unrhymed poem, but she probably allows you to rhyme if you want.

Here’s one of my earliest attempts:

Turkey vultures
find thermals
by instinct,
another name
for practice.

I scribbled out my ten words in a few seconds, then revised intermittently as I went about my regular routine. There’s something about this form that gives me the freedom to fly, to dash out a thought without effort or expectation. Once the words are on the page, I can hover over them, swoop in now and again to delete or modify, and then soar again until the air lets out.

Aside from just being fun, The Daily is literally designed to encourage writing every day. That’s like making biscuits–the more often you do it, the easier it gets and the better the end result. I’m just too danged lazy to write ten pages a day, though. But a short poem every day? I haven’t done the math, but I think every date adds up to a manageable number of words, so…yes, I can do a Daily daily.

Will you try it? Even if you’re not a poet, will you jot down a few words to match your day just to see what the breeze allows?

C’mon. Write something.

And then I’d love it if you’d share your Daily in the comments here.

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You can read previous issues of b.read.crumbs here.

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