habits

I can tell that this quick poem-a-day thing is going to be good for me. I have, as a past teacher once told me, a habit of liking tidy, poetic endings. Everything wrapped up together, like being haunted by the spirit of a sonnet's final couplet. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, I think, but neither should I be bound to it. Eventually, that need for sweet, rounded closure can damage a poem, lead it in a direction that isn't true, for the sake of tidiness.

This roughshod sort of writing has really loosened me up, and I'm only five poems in. I also want to start playing with formatting a bit, see where I can go with it. The hardest part is letting go of the need for all the poems to be "good." I've completely fallen out of the habit of writing everything - most of the time I do extensive editing and even discarding of ideas and lines in my head before I ever set a word down. I think that I'm rediscovering the value of writing crap. Because every failure is a tool for learning, and if all I accept as worthy of writing is the things that I feel succeed, then I am crippling that learning.

I expect that I will fall on my face quite a bit this month. I just have to train myself to regard it as a good thing.