I make a little blue star on my calendar for every day I write something creative. Creative counts as poetry, fiction, lyrical essays, and reviews of media I consume. I don’t count these posts or the writing I do for work.

I have 19 blue stars on the calendar for January. Hallelujah for that. These past several months have seen such pitiful output that any number above like 3 would’ve been a step up.

What’s become clear, however, is that I’m not very emotionally engaged during these writing sessions, and it makes the products of each session feel disposable. Yes, my past 3 posts have documented the small joys in this now month-long poetry experiment. What I’m leaving out is the writing surrounding them, the days when I feel no spark of creativity and resent myself for enforcing such an unfocused, arbitrary regimen.

I’m playing both parts of a familiar mother/child script: mother urges child to make bed; child complies in grumpiest way possible, flinging and yanking sheets like they owe her money.

No, I didn’t expect to love this process. But writing poetry has been a natural outlet for me since childhood, and I hoped, through repetition, to find that place again. Un-self-conscious, unworried about taste or form or “artistic integrity” or or or. Just raw word-songs my unconscious saw fit to scribble on a page.

Every night our unconscious communicates to us through dreams. We find ourselves flying a pink airplane pantsless or boxing Pikachu before an audience of orcs. In my last post, I joked about the idea that writing in the morning means we’re closer to our dreams. I didn’t mean to contradict that idea, only to comment on my own cranky idiocy and resistance to routine. Anyway, for me writing poetry is indeed to dream awake. I click my favorite pen, open the doors of my mind, and wild associations come creeping out.

Featured Download: For a quick tutorial on how to write your own poetry, click here.

Both dream interpretation and poem interpretation seek to understand the connections one person has made between unlike things. The difference with dreams is that Pikachu isn’t going to tell you what he symbolizes, even if you box Pikachu. The poet, however, is prone to dropping hints, if not spelling it out altogether. Hope is the thing with feathers and whatnot.

We’re not always so lucky, of course. We’ve all read poems hermetically sealed against interpretation. But I’m more forgiving of these poems now than ever. I’ve written poems even I can’t decode. Sometimes your own unconscious outsmarts you. Sometimes it makes for really interesting writing. Sometimes your unconscious confounds you, and the result is unusable gobbledygook.

A perfect example—three lines, in order, from January 31’s poem (9:48 am):

Do I whistle down the castle stairs like a cockatoo?

Can a horse trot on silver shoes, affixed with silver nails?

Can I have a divan and four strong women to carry me?

This is straight-up nonsense, and not the “Jabberwocky” kind. I’m definitely in dream mode here, but that doesn’t mean the ideas are good. No one can blame me for throwing this one in the garbage. Right?   

On the other hand.

As my own reader, maybe I do myself a disservice to reject the dream-logic poems I don’t understand, even though I’m their author. Maybe I should try bending them according to their own logic and resist the urge to unlock them first. I do, after all, discard about 80% of my raw drafts.

Maybe that’s normal, healthy even. But even if the poems aren’t great, shouldn’t the process be more fun? Shouldn’t dreaming awake feel like having a superpower? Depends on the dreamer, I guess.

Aha! Flipping through my journal, I found some nonsense I like much better. November 9:

It’s a sin,

loving this much sand in a white teacup.

I find that compelling, worth cultivating. So there! Progress…?

In these posts I keep using the word regimen, a word we associate with diets and medical treatments and workouts, for my 2019 writing routine. (Dude, 2019 Writing Routine sounds like its own blog. How am I just now putting that together?) It might seem an odd choice, but I prefer regimen to habit or routine because I believe writing can heal me.

It feels foolish to admit that, but even more foolish not to try. I’ll use my friend Marie, also a poet, to back me up. In a letter to me, she wrote something to the tune of poetry will save us all. 

Seems as good a way as any to sign off.

Featured Download: For a quick tutorial on how to write your own poetry, click here.