Icarus Cannonballed: A Lesson in Cave Diving in the Bahamas

by Mary Ellen Sanger, Yvonne Garrett

In April of 2010 (National Poetry Month for those of you who don't this already), Mary Ellen Sanger and I agreed to take part in the annual "Poem-a-Day" Challenge - a project wherein poets (and other brave souls) write at least one poem a day for the entire month of April. There are myriad blogs and websites that encourage posting these poems but being the private people we are, Mary Ellen set up a Wiggio site that only she and I could view. Here, over the course of the month, we posted a variety of poems - sometimes only one a day, sometimes more. These poems were written during breaks at work (we both work full-time and part-time jobs), during lunch hours, on long subway rides, in parks in the rain or sun, in front of the 11pm news (or the 4am news), while avoiding conversations in the Laundromat, instead of doing our taxes (or because we'd just done our taxes), and so on. April soon became May became another summer and then fall and winter and finally on into another April. In 2011, we selected 25 poems from the year and put them into a book-length collection which many of you now "waiting for the end of the thoughts of bullfrogs and guerillas." Instead of ending it there, we continued on that April and wrote straight through, every day, for another year. This book is the culmination of that effort. Out of many, many poems we have distilled this new collection. Again, the only every poem must have been written between the two Aprils (2011 and 2012) and no editing allowed (except for obvious typos). The idea again is not so much to show that we are great poets (there are already enough people in this world claiming that) but instead to simply show friends, family and fellow writers something we did over the past year - in spite of or because of everything else that fills our lives. Themes in these new poems are broad in range and yet, often repeat over the course of days or NYC, summer, Mexico, loss, love, sex, food, mountains, rain, injustice, sleep, nightmares, politics, sex, food, the ocean, grief, family, loud guitars - you get the idea. Like lovers or meals or rivers, some poems are better than others. Some are only a few lines, some cover pages. What is important here is not that this is "great art" but instead that we once again set out to write a poem every day. And we did. We have. We still do. As we move into our third year of poem-a-day, certain themes repeat, new ones are introduced, but again, what is important is that we do this, every day (or nearly so) and we will keep doing this until we run out of things to say about Mexico, NYC, Arizona, food, sex, the ocean, the world, loss, injustice, family, music, sex, and so on. We hope you will enjoy our words as much as we have enjoyed writing them and sharing them with each other.

70 pages, Paperback

Published June 19, 2012

About the author

Mary Ellen Sanger lived in Mexico for 17 years, and has published short stories, creative nonfiction and poetry in Spanish and English in Mexico, the US and online. She led bilingual workshops for New York Writers Coalition for six years, and is currently Associate Director with Colorado State University’s Community Literacy Center. Since leaving Mexico, Mary Ellen has been involved as a mentor and member of the fiction and poetry committees for the PEN Prison Writing Project, and as a post-production coordinator for the Emmy award-winning Mexican documentary "Presunto Culpable” (Presumed Guilty).