Tupelo Press 30/30 Poetry Marathon Commentary Days 6-10

For the month of January, I will be writing one poem in a “poetry marathon.” The poems will be posted here: https://tupelopress.org/the-3030-project

You may also find out more about the poets and their fundraising campaigns here: https://tupelopress.org/the-3030-poets

As part of the marathon, I will be providing commentary on each of the poems every five days.

General Context:

For Days 6-10, I will talk a little about how a poet drafts a poem. The Project’s overall goal is to have poets write a draft of a poem each day. These aren’t meant to be finished poems (as showcased by the typos I keep finding) so a lot of these are my first go at it.

I keep a list of poems idea (usually a short premise which sometimes serves as the poem’s title as seen in Day 6) on an online document. I type most of the poems so it is easier for me to keep them all on one document so I can also see if I accidentally wrote the same idea twice (it happens more than you’d think).

My general philosophy is that if I can’t write it in one sitting then the poem would be too long to be interesting so I try to write a poem within twenty minutes. This may be hurting or helping me but I honestly can’t really tell because they’re all my babies.

Day 6: Getting twenty-seven cards about you didn’t make me feel better 

This is written in a series of nine haiku stanza, totaling 27 lines. Initially, I considered written this poem in 27 haiku but that felt like it would’ve been too long. The poem’s title summarizes what the poem is about. I know that there is a name of this technique but I can’t think of it off the top of my head. The content of the poem is based off an event that happened in 2010. I don’t know if I really received 27 “I’m sorry for your loss” cards but 27 is a number that works for this poetic form.

Day 7: Online Orders 

This is a mimesis of this poem by Ocean Vuong: https://www.reddit.com/r/Poetry/comments/103wl4e/ocean_vuong_amazon_history_of_a_former_nail_salon/ (only could find a Reddit posting of it). Vuong’s original is a variant of a litany using to show the life of his mother via her online orders. My version is much more condensed (being only a week) and more focused on a snippet of the subject’s life via the same format. I also focused more on the medical aspects of online orders.

Day 8: Inaccessible 

I’ve seen this form of poetry done a lot recently. I’m not too sure of its name. A quick google search said it was a haibun, which it’s not(?) because it doesn’t end in a haiku. Regardless of what it is, the poem uses a double slash to signify the end of a phrase. It mimics the “sprung rhythm” style popular in early Modernism. The poem’s subject, in particular, is a red wheelchair which is determined to make the accessibility problems even worse than they are in the United States.

Day 9: Song of Yourself 

This is a mimesis of this Walt Whitman poem: https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/content/song-myself. I’ve, in particular, mimicked the earlier stanzas of the poem. Whitman tended to write an entire phrase as one line of poetry which I have replicated in this poem. Nature is pretty common in these kind of poems so I have used the four seasons as a base image for the metaphorical language of the poem. The poem is written in a direct address to the subject during a hospitalization.

Day 10: Conestoga

This is written in a form called a pantoum. Pantoum use repetition as an organizing principle. When I looked at the draft of this one, I wasn’t to keen on it. I gave it some time to marinate before looking back at and feeling slightly better about it. Well, I thought to myself, at least it plays with rhyme and submitted it to Tupelo. The poem is (at least trying to be) about the subject pointing out a unique thing as a common place thing.