An end and a beginning

Hopefully, this will be among my last posts about the ridiculousness that is my job. One of our authors let us know that she had taken a publication elsewhere. It is an illustrated children's question and answer book about the Aurora colony, entitled IS ANYBODY BURIED IN THE CELLAR?

...

So, April is national poetry month. There's a challenge to poets to write a poem a day for the entire 30. I'm going to do it. I'll try to post a few here - not promising them all, I can't put myself up to that yet, but I'll try to get a good handful out on the web where everyone can feel free to not read them. Zing!

I will probably compose a lot of them based on an exercise I've used before - namely, imitating an already published poem's structure, diction and line breaks. I've picked up Billy Collins' "180 More" to use as inspiration, as it is a collection of poetry from many disparate authors using really different styles. I like the practice because it not only gets you to read and really absorb a bunch of verse, but it also forces you out of habitual patterns of ... well, everything - word choice, line break, even tone and rhythm. And right now, I'm really into breaking out of patterns. Stretching. Moving forward. Making progress. Broadening. It's definitely equatable with learning and growing, this process of inching away from comfort, challenging complacency.

So, here I go. Maybe I'll even sneak some non-poem writing up here. Life's an adventure, right?