By Thomas Page
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. Thank you to my father and Jim Bates for donating to the campaign!
If you would like to write your own marathon, you can find out more here: https://tupelopress.org/3030-application. The press is accepting for runs up to May. If you have any questions about the application, please let me know via our submission email.
As part of the marathon, I will be providing commentary on each of the poems every five days.
General Context:
For Days 26-31, I will talk about the planned future for these poems. I have been working with Kirsten Miles over at Tupelo Press for the past month. She has been giving me some tips and tricks for different forms of poetry. She also went over some information about how to promote manuscripts to publishers. I’ve reactivated my Goodreads account after 12 years as part of this plan.
For Terminal, there are some other poems I want to add to the collection (of the 30 that I have written for the marathon) to make it a full(er) manuscript. Most poetry manuscripts tend to be around 30-50 ish poems. I do write shorter poems so my goal is to be around or over 50 before I consider the manuscript completed. I will also revise and send out some of the stronger poems (based on feedback) to publications to get more exposure on the collection.
Once I feel like Terminal is polished, I will send it out to publishers.
Another bit of information I will add is what I consider to be the strongest three poems which are:
- Inaccessible (Day 8)
- When they don’t know what “hospice” means (Day 17)
- A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Your Celebration of Life (Day 15)
This is based mostly on feedback I’ve received plus what I consider to be the most well-crafted of the bunch. There are some that I may like more but that I consider to be “lazy” but I have found that I’m not a good judge of my poems.
Day 26: Unglamorous
This is a combination of a sestina and a pantoum (it’s all but the envoi in structure but uses the repetition of a pantoum). I felt like the repetition conveys the idea of what it is like to be the one who cleans up messes every day. I tried to class it up by using the medical terms such as “emesis” instead of someone more vulgar like “vomit.” This general idea was a request from my parents who deal with a lot of emesis, urine, and excrement.
Day 27: Greenway
This is a golden shovel, a form pioneered by Terrance Hayes. The form uses the words from another poem as the end words for your poem. The poem I’m (shoveling?) is Robert Frost’s “Home Burial.” When I first began writing poetry, I did a lot of golden shovels (all archived here on AHM). A greenway is a road that is lush with vegetation and includes the one between Orlando and Titusville, Florida. It’s generally the fastest way to get to the Space Coast from the Gulf Coast.
Day 28: Cabin Fever
This is the poem I’m thinking of when I think that I was “lazy.” The poem deletes a word from the initial line until it ends with a question mark. I actually wrote this before us Marylanders were stuck in the house because I was afraid that the power would go out. It must’ve been prophetic, haha.
Day 29: Waiting Room
This is a variant on a litany using a timed catalogue to go over the events. I tried to keep it as clinical as possible to make it feel like more of a review of events. I felt like that maybe the echo should’ve been first and last (not second and last) but that is more accurate to the event. I felt like that adding “I want to vomit” wasn’t a poetic way to end the poem.
Day 30: Movies
Last poem of the marathon (that I wrote by myself)! This is a form, based on googling, an unrhymed couplet(s) poem. One of the things you can do with someone with limited movement is watch movies. When I have active role in watching this person, I tend to put on a movie (or NCIS if the person has decided that my recent choice was too artsy) which we can talk about. If you look at my letterboxd, you’d see that around the time I moved in to take care of this person, my logged movies went up exponentially.
Day 31: The Group Cento Poem (arranged by Haley Bosse)
I actually don’t know how Haley Bosse is going to arrange this but it is a tradition that a cento poem using lines from our previous poems will be posted on the last day. The lines that I added to the poem came from the following poems:
- (Haley Bosse – Day 5)
- (Joanna Lee – Day 1)
- (Sarah Paley – Day 15)
- (Amy Snodgrass – Day 15)
This poem will be posted tomorrow so it’ll be interesting to see what it looks like!
Academy of the Heart And Mind 