Poem-a-Day Survivor

I need a T-shirt that says Poem-a-Day Survivor. Technically, I bowed out while the rest were still posting, but I'd been posting for 30 days--27 posts. I posted many poems without titles (which I almost never do), a list poem, prose poems, poems circling the sonnet size, a twitter-sized poem--140 characters, poems built on words that had an interior hard g sound. And when I read through them I noticed repeated themes/images/ words--curiously enough one being butter!

I need to think outside the poems and inside the poems, a little conversation on paper. I need to  read through and see if they're any good, if they're parts of something longer, what needs to be revised, what needs to be thrown away, what needs to be thought about or rethought.

This morning
--I sent poems to three magazines electronically
--I sent my manuscript to one contest
--Notes towards a poem kept intruding while I read one of Larry Levis's elegies

I'm glad I have two more free days.

Day 22

My poem a day pledge is whipping my butt. It's day 22 and I've written 19 poems. Or maybe poem parts? But my poem-maker feels like a shaken bottle of pop! (I don't know what my poem-maker is.) Since I seem incapable of thinking about my poems, my process, my plans for the next few months (maybe on MLK weekend?), I'm trying to send it all out--poems, book, probably not chapbook. And I want to go on record that I'm outraged that I would ever have to pay to make an electronic submission to a magazine (not a contest).

Consulting The Writer's Chronicle and Poets and Writers for new places to submit, I notice there are far more ads for MFA programs than almost anything else. Yesterday, I also looked at what journals had poems in Best American Poetry and scanned the mags a successful poet-friend is published in. I also like to send to local-ish journals. (It feels neighborly.)

Now I have to figure out the clumps--which sets of 3 to 5 poems to send to where. Faux logic and all voodoo in the laying on of paper.