Diane Lockward's Blog, page 21
May 21, 2014
West Caldwell Poetry Festival: A Photo Tour
The West Caldwell Poetry Festival was held on Sunday, May 18. This was the 11th year I've run this event, but this year I made significant changes to the format. It seemed like time for a change. In the past the focus was on literary journals and the event was called Poetry Festival: A Celebration of Literary Journals. Each of 12 journal editors invited two representative poets to read, so we had a total of 24 poets reading.
This year I changed the focus from journals to poets with new books. I invited six such poets. I invited journals but only eight this time as I knew I would need table space for the four book publishers I also invited. Then I structured the day into four time slots: two for readings, one for a publishers' panel, and one for a creative process panel with the six poets. I built in twenty minutes between each time slot so that visitors would have time to purchase books and journals.
The day was absolutely exhilarating. I could not have been happier with the entire event. We had a much better turnout than last year with a number of people coming for the first time. We sold more than twice as many books as we sold last year. And everyone seemed to have a good time. I only wish we'd had a bit more time to soak up even more poetry and poetry conversation.
To give you a sense of the day, here are some photos.
I welcome the audience
Priscilla Orr reads from Losing the Horizon
Gary J. Whitehead reads from A Glossary of Chickens
Michael T. Young reads from The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost
Publishers' Panel: Anna Evans (Barefoot Muse Press), Roxanne Hoffman (Poets Wear Prada Press),Joan Cusack Handler (CavanKerry Press), Ellen Foos (Ragged Sky Press)
Visitors peruse the journals
Visitor poets Deb Gerrish and Chuck Tripi
Teresa Carson reads from My Crooked House
Maria Mazziotti Gillan reads from The Silence in an Empty House
BJ Ward reads from Jackleg Opera: Collected Poems 1990-2013
Visitors browse the journals and talk with editors
Creative Process Panel with Priscilla Orr, Michael T. Young, Gary J. Whitehead, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, and BJ Ward
Editors Christine Waldeyer, Tom Plante, and Matt Ayres
Joan Cusack Handler and Maria Mazziotti Gillan
Poets Teresa Carson, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, and BJ Ward signing books
Michael T. Young signing his new book
Poets Maria Mazziotti Gillan and BJ Ward in conversation
BJ Ward signing his new book
Cookies for everyone!
May 14, 2014
May 7, 2014
The Crafty Poets at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival
Last Thursday I headed up to Salem, Massachusetts, for the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, organized by Michael Ansara and January O'Neil. I then spent the entire weekend immersed in poetry. I was reminded all weekend how important it is for us to do this sort of thing from time to time, that is, to just indulge ourselves in poetry without the distractions of work and home.
Back in the fall I'd sent in a proposal to present The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop Group Reading. I sent out a query to all 101 poets in the book and asked who would like to participate. I was overwhelmed by the response. A number of my poets live in the Salem area and others were willing to travel there. I cut off the list at twelve as we'd only have one hour. Once my proposal was accepted, I notified my poets and at that point two had to back out. That was fine, though, as I'd been asked to pare down the group a bit. We ended up with a total of nine poets, including me.
My plan was to go through the book using the Table of Contents as our agenda. This would allow us to give our audience an idea of how the book had come together, offer them some craft tips, and read them some of the model poems and the sample poems. The poets all showed up a bit early. Then the people began to arrive and arrive. We needed to have more chairs brought in—twice! We packed the room and even had a few people on the floor.
I could not have been happier with our presentation. Each of my poets (notice how possessive I am about them?) used just the right amount of time. Each of my poets was wonderful. The audience remained engaged the entire time, perhaps because of the variety in our presentation. As the last poet was in process, an arm appeared at the doorway holding a "5 minute alert" sign. I had exactly enough time to send our audience off with one of the bonus prompts.
Here's how our presentation went:
1. Section II: Diction. After introducing the book and telling a bit about how it evolved from this blog and my Poetry Newsletter, I talked briefly about my own Craft Tip, "Finding the Right Words."
2. Section III: Sound. Claire Keyes talked about her sonnenizio, "Sonnenizio on a Line from Yeats." First, she described the form and gave us the "rules." Then she read her wonderful poem.
3. Section III: Sound. Jeffrey Levine gave us an overview of his Craft Tip, "The Devotions of the Ear," and read some lines that illustrated music in poetry.
4. Section IV: Voice. Joel Allegretti described the acrostic form as modeled by Jeanne Marie Beaumont's "After." Then he read "In a Station," his sample poem written to the prompt.
5. Section VII: Syntax. Jeffrey Harrison gave an overview of his Craft Tip, "Fooling with Syntax." In the book, this is followed by his own "Swifts at Evening," a syntactical marvel of a poem that consists of one extended sentence and is formatted as a concrete poem.
6. Section VIII: Line / Stanza. Nancy Bailey Miller first read "Two Gates," the model poem by Denise Low. She then told us a bit about what the prompt required and read "Face to Face," the sample poem she'd written to the prompt.
7. Section VIII: Line / Stanza. Matthew Thorburn read "Still Life," one of the book's ten "Poet on the Poem" poems. Then he talked about the Q&A that follows his poem and gave us great insight into ekphrastic poetry.
8. Section X: Writer's Block / Recycling. Kristina England told us about Jeffrey McDaniel's model poem, "Compulsively Allergic to the Truth," and then a bit about the prompt that follows the poem. She finished by reading her own sample poem, "About Today."
9. Section X: Writer's Block / Recycling. Nancy White read "beauty," another of the book's "Poet on the Poem" poems. She shared with the audience some of the Q&A that follows the poem.
After the reading, many books were bought, and I later learned that the bookstore had sold out. Very cool.
I then had lunch with poets Joel Allegretti and Matthew Thorburn. We were joined by poet Susana Case who had a reading later in the day. This added to the pleasure—a lunch filled with poetry talk.
As I approached the Hawthorne Hotel, my temporary home, these signs were displayed all over the place. (photo by Susana Case)
Me and crafty poet Kristina England
Crafty poet Claire Keyes reading her fabulous sonnenizio
Crafty poet Matthew Thorburn and Susana Case in the bookstoreIf you have an opportunity to attend the Massachusetts Poetry Festival next year, seize it! The three day event is filled with readings, workshops, and panels. The place is crawling with poets and poetry lovers. Plus Salem has lots of nifty restaurants and historical attractions. And Salem has the Peabody Essex Museum which is probably the most beautiful museum I've ever been in. I am very grateful to have been included this year.
April 29, 2014
It's National Poetry Month; Therefore, Buy Books. Part V.
This final week I'm posting two new anthologies and three of my favorite poetry journals. All of these are worthy of our support and guaranteed to give you many hours of pleasure.
Helen Vitoria, editor
Thrush Poetry Journal: an anthology of the first two years
Click Cover for AmazonPoems included in Thrush Poetry Journal: an Anthology of the first two years are the complete works from the Thrush Poetry Journal Online Editions. Poets include Maureen Alsop, Mary Biddinger, Karen Skolfield, Rachel McKibbens, Simon Perchik, William Greenway, Philip Dacey, and dozens of others.
Read "Dear Thanatos," by Traci Brimhall
Read sample poems by Ada Limon
MaryAnn Miller, editor
St. Peters B-List: Contemporary Poems Inspired by the Saints (Ave Maria Press)
Click Cover for AmazonThis soul-stirring collection of more than one hundred poems—composed by a wide variety of contemporary award-winning poets—awakens readers to the beauty and humor in the broken, imperfect striving of the saints for holiness. Featuring poems by Dana Gioia, Mary Karr, Paul Mariani, and Kate Daniels, as well as many new and emerging poets, this anthology invites readers to view the saints as they've never imagined them, reaching for the sacred, doubting, bumbling, and then trying again. The collection features wide-ranging poems on ordinary topics, such as a mother trying to get her newborn to fall asleep, an older brother concerned about the marriage of his sister, a lonely man trying to meet a woman in a bar, and a burn victim's compassion for a small child.
—publisher's note
Read “Miracle Blanket” by Erika Meitner
Read “Limbo: Altered States” by Mary Karr
Poet Lore
Click Cover to SubscribeIf Poet Lore has a character that’s remained constant across generations of editors, it’s not a shared aesthetic but an openness to discovery. And in that way, we think it’s true to say that Charlotte Porter and Helen Clarke’s founding principles have guided the journal’s editorial stewardship all this time. In the years we've worked together as an editorial team, many poets we know and admire have told us that their first published poems appeared in Poet Lore. What these poets have in common isn't a way of writing. What they have in common is the fact that an editor at Poet Lore read their early work with the respect it deserved.
—editor's statement
Southern Poetry Review
Click Cover to SubscribeSPR is the second oldest poetry journal in the region, with its origins in Florida and subsequent moves to North Carolina and now Georgia. Continuing the tradition of editorial openness and response to writers that began with Guy Owen in 1958, SPR publishes poems from all over the country as well as from abroad and maintains a worldwide readership. Past issues feature work from Chana Bloch, Billy Collins, Alice Friman, David Hernandez, Andrew Hudgins, Maxine Kumin, Heather McHugh, Sue William Silverman, R. T. Smith, Eric Trethewey, and Cecilia Woloch.
—editor's statement
The Cincinnati Review
Click Cover to SubscribeSince its inception in 2003, The Cincinnati Review has published many promising new and emerging writers, as well as Pulitzer Prize winners and Guggenheim and MacArthur fellows. Poetry and prose from our pages have been selected to appear in the annual anthologies Best American Short Stories, Best American Poetry, New Stories from the South, New Stories from the Midwest, Best New American Voices, Best American Essays, Best American Fantasy, Best American Mystery Stories, Best Creative Nonfiction, and The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses.
—publisher's statement
April 22, 2014
It's National Poetry Month; Therefore, Buy Books. Part IV.
We're already at Week 4 of National Poetry Month. I hope that your mailbox has been loading up with new poetry books. I also hope that for every book you buy two of your own will be sold.
Susan Elbe
The Map of What Happened (The Backwaters Press)
won the 2014 Julie Suk Prize
Click Cover for AmazonSusan Elbe's "Map" is an elegant work of starkly-hued reminiscence, a love letter to the city that raised her and an unflinching exploration of the littered personal landscape we all must travel. These deftly-crafted stanzas will conjure home for you—wherever that home is, whatever shape it has taken.
—Patricia Smith
Read sample poem at Zocalo Public Square
Read sample poems at diode
Rachel Dacus
Gods of Water and Air (Aldrich Press)
Click Cover for AmazonIn Gods of Water and Air, the humor and irreverence of a 1960’s rebel mix with feminist, expressionist, and lyrical motifs as the author openly explores her feelings, relationships, and spiritual musings. Inheriting her late painter father’s artistic eye, Dacus paints with words. Her writing can be indirect and slant, but is always transparent, clear, and immediate, eschewing the often impenetrable poetic structures one frequently finds elsewhere.
—Ann Wehrman
Read sample poems
Read sample poems from Prairie Schooner
Sally Rosen Kindred
Book of Asters (Mayapple)
Click Cover for AmazonSally Rosen Kindred has a gift for creating poems I wish I’d written. Here is a garden of witness, of forgetting, of memory and music and love s bright blare. Aster as metaphor, aster as ghost bouquets of common weeds and wildflowers haunt us in these poems, and teach us to lean toward their mysterious light, to blossom with their stories, and to grow bruised, but fed by their songs.
—Meg Kearney
Read "Confession" in Waccamaw"My Son Asks" featured at Linebreak with audio
Jeffrey Harrison
Into Daylight (Tupelo Press)
Click Cover for AmazonThis book gets better each time I read it. Harrison is very skillful in a way that's almost passed out of existence: only a handful of writers can do what he does in handling the line and understanding how syntax and line work together employing the plain style with great virtuosity.
— Tom Sleigh
Read selected poems from Into Daylight
"To a Snake" featured at The Writer’s Almanac
April 14, 2014
It's National Poetry Month; Therefore, Buy Books. Part III.
Put money in thy purse! It's time to buy some more poetry books in celebration of National Poetry Month. Be generous to yourself. And don't forget that poetry books make great gifts.
Martha Silano
Reckless Lovely (Saturnalia)
Click Cover for AmazonMartha Silano’s poetry is gloriously street-smart and fully roaming and ripe. I want to stand up and slow-clap when she fixes her exacting gaze on warthogs, space probes, millipedes or miracles.These stunning pages, like a "land-less landmass, [a] dollop-y desert dessert loosed," fold moments of joy into Reckless Lovely with inventive, chewy language, and a relentless appreciation of music and delight.
—Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Read 2 poems with audio at Terrain
Read “House of Mystery” at The Journal
Natalie Diaz
When My Brother Was an Aztec (Copper Canyon)
won the Debut-litzer Prize
Won an American Book Award
Click Cover for AmazonThis debut collection is a fast-paced tour of Mojave life and family narrative: A sister fights for or against a brother on meth, and everyone from Antigone, Houdini, Huitzilopochtli, and Jesus is invoked and invited to hash it out. These darkly humorous poems illuminate far corners of the heart, revealing teeth, tails, and more than a few dreams.
—publisher’s note
Read sample poems at Drunken Boat
See Natalie's Sunday Poem feature at Gwarlingo
Carl Dennis
Another Reason (Penguin Books)
Click Cover for AmazonThese poems enact a drama of attempted persuasion, as the poet confers with himself, with intimates, and with strangers, if only in the hope that by defining differences more precisely one may be drawn into a genuine dialogue. As the poet asserts and questions his own authority, encountering a wide range of competing claims from other voices, we find ourselves included in a conversation that deepens our notion of the human community.
—Publisher’s note
Read 2 poems at Plume
Read “Introduction to Philosophy” in Ploughshares
Karla Huston
A Theory of Lipstick (Main Street Rag)
Click Cover to PurchaseKarla Huston's poetry is both brainy and sensuous, and the whole is underwritten by a musical ear attuned to the American idiom at its jazziest. From the title poem, which is a tour de force of naming, to the linguistic highwire act she performs in "O Hair," Huston writes the way her mother wore lipstick—"red was her color. . .and she was taking all of it with her"—this poetry is bright red, and the poet has firmly in her sights nothing less than everything.
—Phil Dacey
Read Karla's poem featured in Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry
Read Karla's Pushcart winner "Theory of Lipstick" at Blogalicious, with Q&A and video
April 7, 2014
It's National Poetry Month; Therefore Buy Books. Part II
Here's my second round of poetry book recommendations. I hope you find something here that makes you want to hit that Buy button. Let's do more than just read poetry. Let's support it with our purchases.
Oliver de la Paz
Requiem for the Orchard (Univ of Akron)
Won the University of Akron Poetry Prize
Click Cover for AmazonOliver de la Paz’s Requiem for the Orchard is a love letter to memory and its ability to both sustain and shatter us beyond the “dust of ourselves,/ cold, decisive, and purely from the earth.” de la Paz renders in beautiful and exacting language the tenderness and ferocity of boyhood, alongside the enduring vulnerability of parenthood. Out of such intimate recollection a generous wisdom blossoms.
—Jon Pineda
Read 3 poems with audio
Read 4 poems at Diode
Ellen Bass
Like a Beggar (Copper Canyon Press)
Click Cover for AmazonObservant, curious, honest, not fancy but beautifully measured and crafted, Ellen Bass’s poems take on the whole cloth–she looks at wasps and bad habits and infidelity and old Jewish ladies, tomato fungus and the million other phenomena of our average lives. Plenty of bad news, here, plenty of heartbreak. Call her a midwife, call her a priest, if you’re from Berkeley, call her a life coach: in some way her poems talk us through it. She has a radiant, capable heart, a sense of humor, and knows her art. Reading her poems fills me with respect and gratitude.
—Tony Hoagland
Read "Pleasantville, New Jersey, 1955" on Poetry Daily.
Read sample poems.
Susan Laughter Meyers
My Dear, Dear Stagger Grass (Cider Press Books)
Click Cover for AmazonThese keenly inventive stanzas, unfurling like fragments of film, infuse the literary landscape with a refreshing and commanding cadence. With one swift, memorable stroke, Meyers has assured her place in the canon.
—Patricia Smith
Read "Coastland," Q&A, and audio at Blogalicious.
Read "Dear Atamasco Lily" featured at Linebreak with audio.
Adele Kenny
What Matters (Welcome Rain Publishers)
Click Cover for AmazonIn Adele Kenny's finely wrought meditations on grief and loss, she never forgets that she's a maker of poems; in other words, that the poem in its entirety is more important than any one of its utterances, phrasings, or laments. What Matters straddles two of the exigencies of the human condition: diminishment and endurance. It abounds with poems that skillfully earn their sentiments.
—Stephen Dunn
Read sample poems.
Read "Like I Said," with Q&A, video at Blogalicious.
April 1, 2014
It's National Poetry Month; Therefore, Buy Books. Part I.
Throughout this month I'll be posting poetry books that I have bought, read, and admired—and that I now recommend to you. Poets need support. Nothing lifts the heart of a poet more than a book purchase by a new or returning reader. Keep in mind as you juggle pennies that a poetry book is one of the best bargains around. Let's say a book has 40 poems in it and sells for $16. That means you're getting each of those poems for a mere forty cents! The poet labored over each one of those poems, probably spending days, weeks, months on each one. Each one of those poems can be read and enjoyed over and over. So this month treat yourself to some wonderful books and, at the same time, make a poet happy.
Patricia Fargnoli
Winter (Hobblebush Books)
Second Place for the Julie Suk Book Award
Click Cover for AmazonOpen this book, and you will find "a blind woman / who tells us / the dreams of the blind." You will sense the snow in your hands and the "scent of raspberries and lime, / a wooden chair rocking." You will see a man who "stands in a salt marsh up to his knees in the black water" and "some stranger waving to another stranger, / waving." Who are these strangers, reader, if not ourselves? Patricia Fargnoli loves this delicacy of suggestion, tells us the dreams of the blind, which are perhaps our own, tells us of the natural world, which around us is vanishing. This is a book where, "before all the bridges have burned / the cows will come home." Yes, for those who wait "Cometh the hour, cometh the cows." And so, "in the silence of horses," one perhaps, hears one s own voice more clearly. And then come "blind horses" with the naked woman, and also "six white horses eating gray sky" and "the horses rear and bolt with the wide-eyed children." This is a bestiary of the spirit.—Ilya Kaminsky
Read Pat's poem "Hunger" on Poetry Daily.
See Pat's Sunday Poem feature at Gwarlingo.
Susan Rich
Cloud Pharmacy (White Pine Press)
Click Cover for AmazonIn Cloud Pharmacy, Susan Rich transforms unease into beauty--sensual and marvelously conflicted poems of romantic love, memory, and identity. These poems weigh gorgeous evidence but never offer simple decisions. The recurring image of a wildfire never lets them rest. In a central sequence of original poems, Rich explores 19th century photographer Hannah Maynard's images, looking in grief-heavy places for revelation. The result is wonderfully strange and unsettling; this is Rich's most haunting collection yet.
—Kathleen Flenniken
Read Susan's poem "Blue Grapes," with Q&A and audio at Blogalicious.
Read two sample poems from Cloud Pharmacy.
Kathryn Stripling Byer
Descent (Louisiana State University Press)
Recipient of the SIBA award
Recipient of the Roanoke Chowan Award
Click Cover for AmazonFrom the glorious opening poem, the mourning sound of the morning train weaves through Kathryn Stripling Byer’s new collection, as much a part of the hills of home as are its sins and beauties. Oh, the longing to shed forever what we are and what made us, at the same time hugging the litany to us that brings it all back: Cullowhee Creek, Buzzards Roost, hay bales, blackberries, grandmother’s gladiolas and lace doilies, and the earth that knew us better than we knew ourselves. Such longing in these pages, such hunger, such "grabbing at air."
—Alice Friman
Read selected poems from Descent.
See Kathryn's Sunday Poem feature at Gwarlingo.
Julie L. Moore
Particular Scandals (Cascade Books)
Click Cover for AmazonThese are poems that span our daily lives and ask the hard metaphysical and theological questions living brings. . . . They are alert (without sentimentality or false transcendence) to the grace and beauty, both ordinary and commonplace, that open our hearts and mouths in hallelujah. I so admire these poems that quietly refrain from false claims and extravagances, but patiently bring us—in their detailed evocations—closer to [our] paradoxical and mysterious lives.
—Robert Cording
Read Julie's poem "Clifton Gorge" on Poetry Daily.
Read Julie's poem "Abundance" on Your Daily Poem.
It's National Poetry Month; Therefore, Buy Books. Part 1.
Throughout this month I'll be posting poetry books that I have bought, read, and admired—and that I now recommend to you. Poets need support. Nothing lifts the heart of a poet more than a book purchase by a new or returning reader. Keep in mind as you juggle pennies that a poetry book is one of the best bargains around. Let's say a book has 40 poems in it and sells for $16. That means you're getting each of those poems for a mere forty cents! The poet labored over each one of those poems, probably spending days, weeks, months on each one. Each one of those poems can be read and enjoyed over and over. So this month treat yourself to some wonderful books and, at the same time, make a poet happy.
Patricia Fargnoli
Winter (Hobblebush Books)
Second Place for the Julie Suk Book Award
Click Cover for AmazonOpen this book, and you will find "a blind woman / who tells us / the dreams of the blind." You will sense the snow in your hands and the "scent of raspberries and lime, / a wooden chair rocking." You will see a man who "stands in a salt marsh up to his knees in the black water" and "some stranger waving to another stranger, / waving." Who are these strangers, reader, if not ourselves? Patricia Fargnoli loves this delicacy of suggestion, tells us the dreams of the blind, which are perhaps our own, tells us of the natural world, which around us is vanishing. This is a book where, "before all the bridges have burned / the cows will come home." Yes, for those who wait "Cometh the hour, cometh the cows." And so, "in the silence of horses," one perhaps, hears one s own voice more clearly. And then come "blind horses" with the naked woman, and also "six white horses eating gray sky" and "the horses rear and bolt with the wide-eyed children." This is a bestiary of the spirit.—Ilya Kaminsky
Read Pat's poem "Hunger" on Poetry Daily.
See Pat's Sunday Poem feature at Gwarlingo.
Susan Rich
Cloud Pharmacy (White Pine Press)
Click Cover for AmazonIn Cloud Pharmacy, Susan Rich transforms unease into beauty--sensual and marvelously conflicted poems of romantic love, memory, and identity. These poems weigh gorgeous evidence but never offer simple decisions. The recurring image of a wildfire never lets them rest. In a central sequence of original poems, Rich explores 19th century photographer Hannah Maynard's images, looking in grief-heavy places for revelation. The result is wonderfully strange and unsettling; this is Rich's most haunting collection yet.
—Kathleen Flenniken
Read Susan's poem "Blue Grapes," with Q&A and audio at Blogalicious.
Read two sample poems from Cloud Pharmacy.
Kathryn Stripling Byer
Descent (Louisiana State University Press)
Recipient of the SIBA award
Recipient of the Roanoke Chowan Award
Click Cover for AmazonFrom the glorious opening poem, the mourning sound of the morning train weaves through Kathryn Stripling Byer’s new collection, as much a part of the hills of home as are its sins and beauties. Oh, the longing to shed forever what we are and what made us, at the same time hugging the litany to us that brings it all back: Cullowhee Creek, Buzzards Roost, hay bales, blackberries, grandmother’s gladiolas and lace doilies, and the earth that knew us better than we knew ourselves. Such longing in these pages, such hunger, such "grabbing at air."
—Alice Friman
Read selected poems from Descent.
See Kathryn's Sunday Poem feature at Gwarlingo.
Julie L. Moore
Particular Scandals (Cascade Books)
Click Cover for AmazonThese are poems that span our daily lives and ask the hard metaphysical and theological questions living brings. . . . They are alert (without sentimentality or false transcendence) to the grace and beauty, both ordinary and commonplace, that open our hearts and mouths in hallelujah. I so admire these poems that quietly refrain from false claims and extravagances, but patiently bring us—in their detailed evocations—closer to [our] paradoxical and mysterious lives.
—Robert Cording
Read Julie's poem "Clifton Gorge" on Poetry Daily.
Read Julie's poem "Abundance" on Your Daily Poem.
March 27, 2014
Poem-a-Thon: Are You Up for a Challenge?
Could this be the year you take on the 30-day challenge for April? Take a look at this one from the journal, Tiferet. Your participation will help raise funds for the journal. If you see the project through to the end, publisher Donna Baier Stein will send you the gift of a free copy of The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop. Read the information here. Then send your response to: editors@tiferetjournal.com
Similar to other fund-raising marathons, you get other people to commit to a dollar amount per poem. If you complete thirty poems during April, you send the pledged amount to the journal and receive your free copy of The Crafty Poet. Then you can use that to keep on writing in the months ahead. Your poems do not need to be finished, polished poems. According to Stein, drafts are fine. And if you can't complete the challenge, so what? At least you will have tried and helped support a worthy cause.
Good luck!
