Happy end of napowrimo, where in honor of National Poetry month, we write a poem a day. It was a so/so experience for me. On the good side, I did write 34 new poems though that's with a very loose definition of poem. Most of them have no emotional intensity or musicality. A few of them may some day because real poems.

I had three goals with this project: write a lot, generate things I might not have otherwise, and write to every prompt on two different sites which would have given me at least 60 poems.

With only 34 poems to my name, obviously, I bit off more than I could chew. I mean if I had followed the directions and just cranked out a poem in 15 minutes, I probably could have made the numbers goal, but I kept getting frustrated and bored by how vacuous those attempts were. Just flat. Just yuck. I'm not against forcing yourself to create something fast as a way to circumvent the guards of the subconscious, but I was not going around them; I was writing on the outside of the walls. I don't even think I wrote that much compared to how much I expect myself to write anyway. The only big triumph was being forced to write to prompts, especially the ones about form, that aren't in my regular lexicon. Hey everybody, I wrote a rubiyat.

My goal now is to get back to those prompts, still force myself to write to them, but take them more slowly.