I Wrote a Poem Every Day for a Year and Here's What Changed
Not my writing. My eyes.
On the first of January last year I made the promise everyone makes: a poem a day for a year. I didn't tell anyone. I didn't post them. I wrote them in a notebook, one page a day, and I closed the book and went on with my life.
Most of them were bad. That is the first thing to say, and the most important. Of three hundred and sixty-five poems, maybe thirty are worth keeping. The other three hundred and thirty-five are the cost of the thirty, and I would pay it again.
What changed was not my writing. What changed was my eyes.
After about a month of daily poems I started seeing differently. I noticed the way the light fell on a fence post. I noticed the specific sound a bus makes when it brakes at a stop it doesn't usually use. I noticed the way my mother's hand rested on the table when she was thinking. The poems were the excuse. The noticing was the point.
I started to understand that a poem a day is not about writing a good poem every day. It is about training the eye to see a poem every day. The writing is the record; the seeing is the skill.
The year ended and I stopped the daily poems. I don't miss the discipline, but I miss the eyes. I still see the fence post and the bus and my mother's hand, but I see them less often now, because the muscle that noticed them has gone slack.
I started again this January. Not a poem a day. Just the noticing. The poem comes when it wants to. The eyes are the thing that has to be trained, and the training is the only part that matters.
The notebook is on the shelf. The eyes are in my head. The year changed one of them, and the other one is still here, waiting to be used again.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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