Challenges

Is it an epidemic, a way to avoid the often arduous, but enthralling, process of revision? It's easy to become ensnared. April lured poets, some accomplished and others desirous of writing poetry, to blog challenges. Write a poem a day for the month of April. There’s no time to ruminate, to unearth the right word, to listen to the music inherent in the words. I've put those thirty poems in my desk and I'll return to them.


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Call it discipline. Take the 250 words a day challenge, or the 500 or 1000 words a day challenge. Start out your day by free writing 250 words without expectations. It's a warm-up, it's the pre-golf swings, and it’s a way to "prime the pump." It's a way to find out what you want to write. This morning I wrote about the salt I spilled which led me to salt cellars, salt licks and The Salar de Uyuni, the world's largest salt flat, a white baked desert.

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I've discovered two more poetry sites offering challenges. Each week another prompt ; each week a new poem. Seven days. Six days if you honor a Sabbath. There's time built in for revision. What about reading the other poems? If you want comments, you need to give comments. All this is time consuming, taking time away from revisions. And what do we say to one another?

"I loved the line about the iguana."
"So poignant."

It takes time to critique and do we always want critiques? And if there are no comments, what does that mean? What happened to the writer who sent out a manuscript thirty or forty times before an editor recognized the gold?

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Since I brought an iguana onto the stage, I must write something about the iguana. (Chekhov’s dictum, "One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it." )

Years ago one of my students, a young man of dubious scholastic interests, expressed a fascination with reptiles. After prolonged family discussions, everyone thought they could live with an iguana. Napoleon, the name selected by the young man, was welcomed into his new home. He measured less than an arm's length.

I didn't know anything about the creature, but the young man spent hours researching iguanas. He wrote a long research paper, brought in photographs of Napoleon’s growth spurts, and even kept a journal. All my students wrote journal entries and often shared one or more entries with the class. We followed the travails of Little League teams, the birth of a calf, 4H projects, and the life of Napoleon. By May the green iguana's size and girth took up page after page of the journal. By late June Napoleon outgrew confinement in one room and one day the young man left his bedroom door ajar; Napoleon explored the house.

He sprawled his six-foot frame on the living room rug and waited for the family to come home.

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Which brings me back to challenges. I’ve signed on, at least for a spell, to two poetry sites. My relationship with prompts is not straightforward. I eschew following the directions in a precise fashion. Instead I allow the prompt to take me somewhere—and write from that place. Perhaps I am being recalcitrant, or maybe I love the idea of following an idea and seeing where it leads. One word beckons and another word meanders while another word asks for quiet, conjecture, contemplation.

Suddenly I find myself thinking about writing a midrash, a psalm, a prayer. Who knows where a prompt may lead.

"How can I know what I think until I read what I write?"