It’s the first day of a new year and I’ve decided on something new.
I’ve been running this blog for over a year now, just over a year. November of 2014, I decided to try to write a poem every day. At least one poem every day. I wanted to do this for a couple of reasons. First, my novel writing wasn’t going anywhere. Everyone would tell me my writing was good, but no one wanted the novel I had produced. t was discouraging to say the least. And I had this old WordPress blog for years that had been sitting silent and getting dusty. Why not use it to put my poems out into the wild?
So I did.
And two, I really had an itch to write poems. Maybe it had been building up in me for years. Maybe all those embarrassing self-indulgent poems I wrote in high school weren’t out of my system. Whatever the cause was, I had poems that needed to come out.
The result? A little more than a year’s worth of poems, almost one every single day of the year. I think I may have missed less than a handful of times, and I posted other things too. Pictures. Songs that got stuck in my head. The occasional post baring my soul on one or another topic. But really, it all came down to the poems.
Now, with a new year upon, I’ve decided take the WordPress blog and squeeze it into my other social media accounts. Facebook. Twitter. Google Plus (is that still really around?). Even Tumblr. Why?
Because I am indulging myself. The poems here are not to everyone’s taste, but they are to mine. Some are not good at all. In fact, some are downright bad. Most are okay. Some are spectacular.
And that’s not just me having a big head, though everyone who’s ever encountered me knows, my head needs its own zip code.
So enjoy the poems if you can, hide them if you can’t. Because every day for a year. I’m going to crank them out. Good. Bad. Mediocre.
The internet is my notebook in 2016. Thanks for reading.
Words and Feathers 
It might also be an idea to review the poems you already have. Then decide which ones you could use for a collection.
Taila has a great idea. Look forward to what unfolds from the bird’s mouth. 🙂 Happy New Year!
Thank you, to both of you.
I’ll have to try and figure the particulars of that. Like, how many, and how I should organize it.
I just started looking into the whole e-book, self-publishing thing myself. Then there is the decision as to how much time to give to going back to old poems vs writing new ones.
I had one professor who gave us as a last assignment to go back over all of poems we had wrote for the quarter and find the unifying “theme” and then to produce a work that directly addressed that theme.
Of course, going back over a year is more daunting than about 10 poems.
One more note to add. The post I reblogged today had me searching for a poem by one of my profession, James Bertolino. I ended up finding his web page. He has retired and now offer “mentoring and editing” services, three to four poems, minimum $100. Not necessarily recommending him, but if you do have some discretionary funds, having a person who really knows poetry and how to give quality feedback can be a tremendous help. In part because areas for improvement on a small sample of one’s work usually can be applied to one’s other poems.