In April, for the first time, I did one of those ridiculous online writing challenges. A few friends from a brilliant online group of children’s poetry writers called ZigZag agreed to take on writing a poem a day for the whole month and I surprised myself by deciding to give it a go. There was a WhatsApp group, so with up to fifteen poems a day to read and comment on, as well as writing and posting your own, it was a lot, especially as life inconveniently carried on as if NaPoWriMo wasn’t happening as well.
Some people used prompts from the Poetry Society and elsewhere, which meant we were bombarded with Triolets on one day, Sea Shanties on another, negations on another (an especially fun one). Some picked a theme to take them through the month, which could be organised (leading a reluctant creature into the joys of poetry) or random (pulling an old postcard from a box of charity shop finds each day and riffing on it). Others just wrote.
For a long time now I’ve been trying to write about the environment for children, and struggling to get beyond let’s notice nature, isn’t it amazing? so I wanted to use the month to try to make some progress with that project.
For me, it’s been fantastic, and here, I think, is why.
1: Re-learning that producing something – anything – every day is a good idea, even if that something is rubbish, is salutary. The idea of regular discipline is clear in most of our minds but in practice there are so often very reasonable reasons for not-producing-anything-today that begin to creep in, and the part of us that knows that these are really excuse-wolves and not reason-sheep gets silenced over time. Having to share your stuff, no matter how rubbish you think it probably is, adds another layer and is even more salutary because what other people pick up on can be surprising – or not. What you really liked but didn’t have the confidence to believe in might actually be worthwhile.
2: If you are trying to develop your practice you have to have a practice – and a practice is a practical thing. I want to move my environmental writing on from paying attention to the environment to considering human engagement with it, including the political dimensions, without getting grownup-preachy and without losing the wonder and the poetry. I am not going to get there by thinking about it until the perfect poems leap out onto the page, but by practising writing poems. Looking over my output for the month, there are some lazy days and some uninspired days, but it gets better as my poetry muscles and synapses strengthen; I also experiment with different ways of achieving my goal, and I start go get closer to it. I have made progress. There are missteps and there are many poems I want to go back and do more work on. Great! I am so much further on than if I hadn’t done this.
3: The community of friendly poets is the pearl beyond price that you would sell everything you have for, and when you find the right online community it can work really well. In ZigZag we are used to critiquing each other in our regular meetings, but we knew that what we were posting here was raw stuff so we kept it positive, and because we all understand process that meant we drew on that support to keep going rather than just to coast. It felt, once we got going, a bit like a pilgrimage, a journey together of mutual influence.
I learned so much this month. I hope I keep these lessons close to my head, my heart and my hands. The picture that heads this post is of some of our celebratory treats at the end of the month, and the poem to end it is the final one I wrote, which diverged from my theme a bit but I wanted to capture the view from this particular mountain-top. And now, onward, poetry athletes!
