I, Poet, Therefore I Am
I wrote 30 poems in 30 days. Here's the recap.
I just completed a 30 poems in 30 days project.
Thoughts are fresh, the cringe has settled. Which means it’s the perfect time to share some insight and reflections on this project: why I did it, what I learned, and where I hope to go from here. I’ll also share favourite poems and lines and then the entire chronology of poems near the end (also viewable in the “free to read” archives). And, give you a little sneak peek at what else you can expect from this newsletter going forward.
Why 30 poems in 30 days?
Let’s start with why I decided to do a daily poem sprint: I wanted to, quite simply, write more poems.
At the beginning of the year, I decided I wanted to write (at least) 100 poems in 20241. My reason for that is I wanted to improve my craft, make a solid attempt at catching up on all my lost years not writing, and discover who I am as a poet. But by March, I’d written fewer than ten, almost all of which were from my 2023 backlog of poems.
I’ve only fairly recently starting writing professionally and as each year passes, I find myself coming around to the idea that I am not here just to make content, but to make art. Part of that is, well, actually making it. And then once you’re past making it once or when you feel like it, the act of consistency is the next hurdle, one that I still struggle with. Thus, a time-bound sprint to rewire my creativity, because I’m not yet trained for the marathon.
And, April being National Poetry Month felt like the perfect container for me to push myself in increasing my poetry output and starting to build a body of work, not just continue forever down the path of the wishful-thinking wannabe.
Why a poem every day?
One of the axioms that is oft-cited not just for writers or creatives, but for life, is: quality over quantity. And it sure sounds way more pleasant to aim for something good than to aim for making lots when most of us are already living in a sea of too much of everything. It’s such a pervasive sentiment of our culture.
But, disregarding nuance for a moment (because actually, there are some things I want less of): the area becomes grey when it comes to creative work. Although Malcolm Gladwell’s famous 10,000 hours rule has been heavily debunked multiple times, it seems obvious that in order to get good at something, you have to put in The Time. To achieve quality (hard to measure and often subjective), we have to achieve quantity first. But here’s the thing: The Time gets scarcer as we get older until we get to retirement. We fill our lives up with work for 40/50/60 years. When you’re not used to it, and there’s no prize, making art usually takes more than a resolution. Maybe it takes “one’s own room”, as Virginia Woolf said. Maybe it takes the security of a paycheck or a trust fund. Maybe it takes the force of a daily habit that once complete, can be repeated as necessary and as life sees fit.
Not that there’s a linear path to poetry, but I wanted to make a bit of a dent in my creative growth, forcing myself out of the vague space of “when I feel like it”. I wanted to see what I could write if I couldn’t make it perfect, if the filter of “not good enough” disappeared for a month, forced to be accountable to nothing else but measurable output. It had to be every day for a short period of time. (That’s just for me, you may be a naturally gritty marathoner or among those for whom a poem a day is as regular as brushing your teeth.)
So did I achieve my goals?
I think so. Well, to start, I definitely wrote more poems. 30 in 30, the most I’ve written in that stretch of time.
And I definitely feel like I know a little better who I am as a poet and therefore, as a person too. Previously, I felt a bit like “basic poet” for my over-reliance on flowers and stars as images and metaphors. But leaning into those things, and making them sometimes a bit uncomfortable, is me. Looking directly at the world around me, and not trying to be “cool poet”, is me. Sometimes there’s humour, and sometimes things get dark. But the more I write, the more I am.
While the time constraint means there’s almost no editing and refinement (most poems were written in about 30 minutes, some in less time than that and some a bit more), I do like a lot of the poems I wrote. I also don’t like some, too. I look back and can immediately spot lazy lines: Do I really “pity” Courtney Love? No, not at all. I like the final poem I wrote, but something about the way the end sounds doesn’t feel right to my ear.
None of the poems feels done to me but I think about the quote by French poet and essayist Paul Valery:
“A poem is never finished, it’s simply abandoned.”
And this kind of daily poem project encourages abandonment for the sake of moving on. Well, we’re not totally moving on yet because this post is all about looking back.
Let’s start with the easy stuff.
The post-mortem
In numbers (and colours, and people, and etceteras.):
11 poems received likes from passersby and followers (none from email subscribers because I chose not to send out these poems via email during the project so no one would be bombarded with daily emails), meaning 19 poems received no external validation.
Blue was the most common colour mentioned.
There were eight mentions of famous people, four perfumes, four movies (two thrillers, two horrors, who would have thunk!), and 1 tv show.
The shortest poem was 4 lines and the longest poem was 56 lines.
In total, excluding titles, I wrote 3972 words.
Most common motifs, patterns, and themes: flowers, stars, colours, escape, aging, gender, moving, home, smell, war, making art.
A lot of the poems start with or are inspired by the season I’m living in right now, both literally and metaphorically; it’s been a really beautiful one so far.
Some thoughts, insights, and surprises:
Aside from the kickoff poem on April 1, as of this writing, the two most “popular” poems (from a very small sample size) were April 8 and 9. I was surprised to see these two as the top poems, though I don’t put too much stock into it. I had a traffic surge to my other newsletter on these days and it trickled over. Coincidentally, these two poems are very similar in style because I wrote them back to back. And in fact, I was actually pushing myself to try something different, noting that these were my versions of Insta-poetry. Prior to this project, I very rarely finished a poem in one sitting so I was looking to expand my style to suit the time constraint. Despite its distaste among literary circles and “real” poets, is this a sign of the power of Insta-poetry (shorter lines, less density)? I definitely want to explore this more.
I initially wanted to post a weekly recap, but well, that didn’t happen. Which is why, partly in its lieu, I present to you this giant post-30 days recap.
My P.S. notes were for the most part, lazy. Aside from moving (more on this in the chronology below), I also started a new freelance client project for a major brand during the course of this project (a poet’s gotta make money), leaving little cognitive processing power after writing the poem. I wish they were more eloquent or insightful.
I wrote almost all these poems by hand on a notepad first before transferring them over to my computer to finish. This is not necessarily the way I usually write. But I have a brand new writing room (tiny but all mine) and desk setup so I kind of just reached for a notebook that was close to me on the first day and stuck with it because it seemed to work. I think it helped things feel a little less precious. On a related note, I think it helped any time I was feeling stuck with a line or unsure of what to write about, to just change my environment. I moved from room to room, desk to desk, even from notepad to iPad.
The poems: a selection
If you don’t want to read all 30 poems I wrote, here’s a selection of my personal favourite poems written during this period, with brief notes.
In no particular order:
Poem for May 11 (“LOVE SONG”)
Chrome hearts and teeth-chatter, Blue skies of mid-May. The tenants still trip, violence tender, And muscles are out of touch After a season of motionless rage. Here it comes: sun splat and the breeze, the idea of chiffon dancing the last signs of winter away. It’s a wish then it’s a wave cresting, It’s like falling in love Every fossil and feeling dipped in rose ink Oscillating like a pulse: Blooming, Wilting, The smell collating into hymn Ushering us into every new age More lush and tragic than the last.
I was sitting in my living room, looking at my new chrome-framed coffee table. I wrote a few lines but moved on to a different poem when it wasn’t “working”. The next day, I came back and wrote this poem.
Poem for May 3, 2024 (“THE CONJURING”)
Chanel No. 5 dipped in a vat of cherry coke; "Attempt that nonsense", they said, and the offhanded remark stayed, an etch in my mind, smoke on an eternal rift, wanting so much to be more than a pitless rabbit hole, of yearnings not yet configured into sense. And when the grey mist drifts, all Red Sea like, would I find myself plummeting from a cloud on a sunny day? I know this sunny day. I know it too well.
This poem is inspired by a perfume sample, which to me, is an easy way to write a poem when you’re sitting there unsure what to write about. It’s Perversion by Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, which doesn’t even contain any of the same fragrance notes as Chanel No. 5. I tend to have remnants of the same notes in my head that don’t always fully disappear after writing one poem, so if you read the poems in order, you’ll probably notice more of these little “Easter eggs” connecting unrelated poems. Similar lines, similar themes, etc., and in this case, two poems that feature a Chanel No. 5 mention.
Poem for May 7 (“ORGASM”)
Case in point: there’s this recurring motif of glass that comes up in this poem and also in Poem for April 11 (“VOLKSWAGEN BLUES”)—also one of my favourites but at 56 lines and with a trigger warning for violence, I didn’t include it here. So instead here’s a poem about makeup.
Weary fuchsia slapped on powdered cheeks, avoid the oil-slick mess of youth to become dry and pinched, pallid as a corpse at prom. Dead by the weight of their fictions, she’s ghost-adjacent, a projection made of glass and bubble dreams. & years later, as it shattered, their shadows lifted like honey: sweet victory with a languid dis-ease. Now in the light, skin pale, hair black, more witch than Snow-White, brought to life by a Nars peach, keen to make a subtle place among the living, glittered cheekbones marvelling at how far the paper-gods went to bring her back.
Poem for May 5 (“WELCOME HOME”)
Writing a poem every day I think is a great way to explore different styles. Some of the poems I’d written were more abstract. This one I particularly enjoyed writing and reading because it’s about a very tangible (and somewhat strange) experience: moving back to the neighbourhood I grew up in.
“Welcome to East Van”, I remarked with uncharacteristic pep on our last twilight stroll, sixth total so far. There’s not much for me to show him, even though my baby bones were sharpened just a few blocks over, even though this is where I grew up, that’s how I walked every day from school, that’s how I dodged the niceties to get on with my evenings filled with trying to take over the world. Now, somehow, we’re both new to the abundance of best donair, more pizza joints than Starbucks (grand total of: none), more joints in high-gloss machines than big box stores, joints once grown in secret basements, caused frenzies of shame, once made a grown man cry, the first time I offered a hug because there was nothing else, now sold by chill shop guys behind beige counters next to some hotshot Millennial's typographic talent. More to do here for me, newly ordained artist type, because I tried, I really did, to make it big, but this town painted me so red I wanted to leave and I came back to notice that all the colours had changed.
And some lines from poems
I read once, I can’t remember where, that it is blasphemy to isolate a single line in a poem because to do so is to destroy the whole of the poem as intended by the poet.
But, there isn’t a way to preview a poem. Think about it: before you read a novel, you at least see the cover, you might read the blurb, someone might recommend it to you and tell you roughly what the plot is. A poem doesn’t have a plot. While short, a poem can’t really be skimmed. So how would anyone know if they’re going to like a poem until they actually read it? We can’t make the leap of trust without a way in first.
So I isolate lines. Like good movie trailers, you’re not supposed to give it all away. It’s not supposed to be “the entirety”. And I don’t know, although Drake’s recently poetry book consisting of one-liners got called out for being more IG caption than poem, a single line can be a poem called a monostich (which my spellcheck has underlined in red to denote: not a real thing). But I digress.
Here are, outside of the poems shared above, a few favourite lines I wrote during this project whose entirety didn’t make the cut of “favourite”:
“A canyon worm-holing around my gut” —Poem for April 11
“Rose-coloured violence popping off like / every delicate matter at the edge of its patience” —Poem for April 1
“Violets quietly blooming like some galaxy in the palm of my hand of my living room of my tiny wonderful life puncturing the space between dust and death before the cats wake up waiting to swipe this slice away / perfect blue and glass splayed like sky slivers on the ground.” —Poem for April 4
“No one is looking at you, we’re all looking at stars / trying to find ourselves” —Poem for April 9
“From here, so wonderful, like carving stars / and labelling them “mine” —Poem for May 1
“The scene is flung into a muddy, fluorescing bruise / every dream and wake, bone and break abandoned—” —Poem for April 2
“Meanwhile, tulips churn in the fields / beside my bones” —Poem for May 6
“Maybe the fish was already in heaven / and its body was just hanging out in hell for 8 minutes and 23 seconds” —Poem for April 15
“Now that the dying is done / I wake up to ripe sounds, strawberries and milk, a concept of self halfway to blonde.” —Poem for May 13 (the final poem)
Now that you’ve been sufficiently teased, let’s get into the actual roundup of poems!
Here are all 30 poems written during this project:
The chronology of poems
#1-7
This is when I officially started the project writing original poems. #1-7 were written in the weeks prior. At this point, I decided it wasn’t going to be a mix of old and new poems (more of a “hit publish on 30 poems in 30 days” project) and I wanted to challenge myself to actually write 30 brand new poems in 30 days. Also, I kind of ran out of new-ish poems to post. Poems from here on out reflect this slight pivot.
#8-17
At this point, I packed my computer and all writing supplies preparing to move. On April 19-21, I moved. The two weeks following were spent buying furniture, picking up furniture, building furniture, after selling most of our furniture so we could downsize for a year. I was physically beat and thought about stopping the challenge altogether. After all, who was really paying attention? Around this time, someone commented on my other newsletter and after calling out that I was writing a poem every day, said to “keep it up”. Someone was reading! (Shoutout to
.) So I kept going. At first I thought about backdating poems to appear as if I hadn’t stopped at all, but I decided just to keep going by restarting on May 1 for the remaining 13 days.#18-19
I had signed up for a scent writing class that started right around this time and although my schedule prevented me from attending the live workshops, this is when I watched the recording of the first workshop. So starting here, you’ll see a shift towards poems about fragrance, some inspired by actual perfumes (as part of the class, we were sent perfume samples to write about).
#20-30
There you have it. All 30 poems.
I have to say, when I decided to do this project, I hoped that I’d learn how to be consistent and that I’d slowly edge my way towards becoming a “real” or “better” poet. I didn’t quite expect much more than that, certainly not a series of neatly summed up epiphanies. But in the process of putting this post together and thereby placing my attention here, I’ve realized I do have some lessons to share. Maybe they’re not so much lessons as they are reminders.
Here are some “poetic” thoughts on what I’ve learned writing 30 poems in 30 days:
Poetry rewires us.
I have at one time wondered: does poetry make people sad? One of my poems started with this thought. (I’ve long avoided reading Sylvia Plath for her association with dramatic and tragic exits.) When I started dabbling in creative writing a couple of years ago, I thought I’d be writing about wonder. I named my creative studio Wondermachine, after all. But many of my poems were coming out sad and angry and prickly even though I am not really any of these things in person, at the surface at least. I had a strange sense of imposter syndrome: was I pretending to be someone because I thought that was what poetry was supposed to be? Brief related sidebar: Arrival is one of my favourite films, based on a short story by Ted Chiang called “Story of Your Life”. In it *spoilers*, humans start to be able to see time non-linearly (aka being able to see the future, present, and past at the same time), thanks to aliens who offered not some engineered technological device, but the gift of their language.
Because of the intense and uncharacteristic way of perceiving the world that poetry enables, I feel like I opened up something in my brain and that I can “see” more, sort of in a visual way though not technically—in the same way that nothing about time as a concept changed in Arrival, and yet, its perception, and therefore the reality of it, is fundamentally different. I have not changed as a biological being, my atoms are still where they are supposed to be (for the most part). But I feel different. I feel more alive to the real world, a world in which I am, frankly, sad and angry and prickly sometimes—because I am also more of an entire spectrum of feelings. It’s like I hacked my way back to being human.
There is metaphor, meaning, and magic in everything.
On most days, it’s not like I sat down and immediately knew what my poem was going to be about. So for the sake of completing the challenge, I had to look around me rather than inside me for “inspiration”: buying furniture, going on a walk, smelling a $500 perfume sample that reminded me of the dollar store, reading the news. I started line by line, feeling by feeling, until through twists and turns of attention, the poem was eventually revealed. I didn’t worry about trying to appear deep or smart or creative. Everything revealed itself wherever I placed my attention and was as deep or smart or creative as I was and not more and not less. (Not that it always worked out; I had some false start poems.)
Looking around me didn’t feel like forcing poetry out of “nothing”. It felt like dissolving the boundaries of human experience.
Quantity > quality, most of the time.
Coming back to the beginning where I had mentioned part of the reason I did this in the first place is because I wanted to write more. I know it’s not about choosing quality over quantity (a deterrent for living a creative life for many who are too concerned with perfection and never break past the elusive but comfortable idea of potential). It’s about using quantity to eventually get to a place where the chance of quality becomes much higher.
Could I have spent an entire month workshopping a single poem? Yes. Would that poem be better than any of the poems I’ve written so far? Probably. But I think that I learned a lot more about myself having written 30 poems. And that self-awareness and authenticity is so much of what poetry is, more than the pursuit of a (very subjective) idea of what is good or bad, real vs fake poetry.
There is always more out there.
Die empty. I have this phrase ingrained in my head from the title of the self-help book by Todd Henry, which I read many years ago. If there is even a single poem still in me on my death bed, I would rather it be out of me than inside. But in practice, there’s still anxiety around how creative I really am, how much I really have in me. Having to write a poem every single day, I was worried that I’d use up all my good ideas or lines and that I’d have nothing left. But I suspect the opposite is happening.
It’s like a vacuum. When the vacuum’s full, nothing can get sucked in. You have to empty it out first to make space. Or like the head of the Hydra, for a more visceral analogy. You cut off one head (poem), two more grow in its place. As I emptied myself every day, I felt more inspired, not less. So it’s true: creativity begets more creativity. Now of course I have no objective gauge of this, only how I feel. This is it: I’m so excited to continue poking the threads I evidently gravitate towards while pushing myself in new ways. No more “save for later”.
I write, therefore I am.
I’ve realized, through this process, that it’s less “I think, therefore I am” and more “I write poems, therefore I am”. Insert with whatever art you make. I don’t know, maybe the former used to be true before the age of the internet but I don’t think it is anymore. (I don’t poem it is anymore?) Because what I think is a constant stream of chatter that is influenced so much by the world around me, so much so that I can’t distill the truth. Every side, every argument, every possible angle, all the time. What I write with the specific intentionality of a poem is both filter and truth, excavation and interrogation.
Thoughts are blurs. A poem is crystallization. Writing poems hasn’t just felt like self-expression the way writing in a journal does. Through the intense focus on deconstructing abstraction and defamiliarizing the mundane, it’s a lens that helps me really pay attention to how I feel and therefore who I am.
Would I do this again?
100%. Now that I’ve done it once, I feel like I know what to expect of myself. I know that it takes me about 30 minutes to write a minimum viable poem. I know what’s on the other side. I know that I probably shouldn’t do it in the midst of any major life changes. I know that it was fun. And though the lack of editing and revision time means it might not appear obvious that I’m a better poet, I definitely feel that I am.
In fact, I’m thinking about making this (at least) an annual practice, like many others who write poems every day during National Poetry Month. And I love that it conveniently fits into a tidy 30 in 30 in 30. 30 poems / 30 days / 30 minutes.
So what’s next?
Aside from accomplishing my current creative goals, this project also served as a way to seed this poetry newsletter or blog or publication, whatever you want to call it, with a body of work, imperfect as it is. Because I have by now realized this: one person’s imperfect is another’s treasure. You never know what people will respond to and enjoy, and if my plan was to write poetry solely for myself, I wouldn’t be up here putting all of this on display. Might as well keep things moving.
In one short span of time, I have given people a taste of who I am as a poet: what I write about, how I write, who I write for. 30 poems that give you a sense of what you might be able to expect. My original plan for Pink Slip was to publish one poem a week for paid subscribers, and one poem a month for free subscribers—and this schedule will officially start next Friday, May 31.
I let myself be “open and loose”, as
recently wrote as point #8 to writers struggling on Substack. Yes, that is how I want life and art and poetry to feel. Poetry is highly precise as an art and literary form, but that precision is invited in by looseness, not a tight knuckle grip on perfection. At least for me.In terms of the poems themselves, that looseness pushed me into trying new things within the context of what I already gravitate towards—recurring narratives, motifs, and themes (and some surprises), less concerned with trying to sound like a predetermined version of me or “poet” and more interested in playing with the many ways (my) voice manifests: it can be shorter, it can be longer, it can be colloquial, it can be a bit of a mystery. I’m even more excited to keep writing, and keep writing as often as I can. I’m excited to, when the time is right, return to another 30/30/30 challenge.
What else? My work experience included, for a short time, cataloguing information and building systems for accuracy and usability in the crisis and PR department at a tech company where said information is constantly changing. (Certainly doesn’t sound anything like poetry, hey?) “Knowledge management” is an increasingly urgent field given the overload of content we have to contend with nowadays. While at some point, there may be a time and place for my ✨ musings ✨ on the UX (“user experience”) of poetry, for now, I want to start with being the change I’d like to see. And I’ve felt that more poetry would be discovered, read, and enjoyed if it were organized better. If it felt less like content of things begging for attention and more like a catalog of things to browse. As in: tell me what your poems are about, tell me what they feel like, show me the map of the world that you’re building with your poems. I want a way in similar to how I prefer to shop. I want to be able to find what I’m looking for, to browse with intention, and of course, to once in a while leave room for serendipity and the power of pure impulse and surprise. But mostly, I want it to be more clear.
My immediate next step is starting to organize/catalog/index my poems, now that I have (at least) 30. This is not an overly complicated project and will probably take a couple hours. But it’s my next “experiment”. Innovation isn’t always big and disruptive and shiny, sometimes it’s just making things more easy and accessible—and I mean, it’s not entirely innovative either, but I don’t really see anyone else thinking about the organization of poetry. (And if you are, yay! Drop a comment!)
I might also format the poems that I feel are reasonably done via Canva and seed them on social media to drive traffic back here, specifically Pinterest and maybe Are.na. I haven’t been on Instagram since last September other than occasionally logging into my cats’ account (stop the Millennial) to look up restaurant specials. But I discover a lot of poetry from both well known poets and totally obscure ones on Pinterest so I’m thinking it would be nice to assert myself among them to see what serendipity I can invite. (I’m also a TikTok devotee so I might do a vlog format roundup but I’m not putting my hopes up: chances are I’ll be over this and onto the next by the time I get around to filming a video.)
After that? Thinking more about poetry “beyond books and blips”, both here on my own personal poetry blog and over at
, which looks at poetry from broader industry and cultural lens. I am especially thinking about multimedia experiences, poetry as art, and reawakening my lens as a former fashion designer and photographer before I went into tech and then came back to wherever the heck I am now, this glittering inferno that is “becoming a poet”, if not by profession then at least by self-designation. I miss all those things I left behind until poetry came back for me. And my creative self is out for blood.If you made it this far, thank you so much for reading! I didn’t think I’d have any subscribers at all when I soft-launched this newsletter by adding links in a few discreet spots—and secretly hoped I wouldn’t get any to avoid, for as long as possible, the uncomfortable feeling of being seen and read by the internet. I already danced with that devil when a post I wrote recently was seen by thousands and liked by (as of now and still counting) 500 people, including real live poets.
This post ended up being way longer than I intended. It’s not a how to nor a proclamation of expertise (after all, there are people who write and publish poems every day without the pat on the back I just gave myself). It’s simply my experience and I hope you enjoyed it.
Ana
I really enjoyed this. I found myself nodding along to so many of your insights (having discovered similar things myself), as well as finding brand new ones. Thank you so much!
I've settled into a pace of posting 3 poems a week here on Substack, and it feels incredible. It feels almost like the first time I'm truly doing something because the little voice inside me wants that, not because of any external expectations.
I've read several of your poems for now, and enjoyed them thoroughly. I'll be looking forward to more.
Thank you for bringing us along for the journey! I love how you pushed against perfectionism and went with a quantity of quality approach to honing your craft.
Although they were sub-headers, these lines felt poetic in and of themselves:
"I write, therefore I am."
"There is metaphor, meaning, and magic in everything."
Beautiful stuff Ana 👏🏽