Welcome - let's play!

Welcome to a new year and to our new little community! I am grateful that you’re here and so excited to play together—to mix words like paint and see what colors emerge. As you’ve probably gathered by now, my intention is to write and share 100 poems with you this year. But I want so much more than just to create poetry myself. I want to create in community. I’m hoping that you share that desire! I’m hoping that the two poems I send you each week act simply as conversation starters for a dialogue that grows far beyond the bounds of my own poems.

Below are the nuts and bolts of how I imagine this working, but if this feels like too much reading for you right now, then feel free to scroll down to get to my first poem of the year, or feel free to head straight to the comments section to share a poem of your own!

First off, I want to acknowledge that I’m kinda making this up as I go! Things might change, which means things can always change for the better—so please be in touch with your feedback and ideas. Here are the basics of how I imagine this community working, though:

1)      I’ll post two times per week. Depending on your settings, you might receive these posts as emails, or they might simply appear in your feed on the Substack app. In each post, I’ll include a poem. 2 posts per week x 52 weeks in the year = 104 poems, which is great because that gives me the breathing room to slack off or take a breather a few times!

2)      In one of my weekly emails, I’ll include an optional prompt for you to play around with. This is a just-in-case-it’s-helpful sorta thing, not a gold-star-to-whoever-sticks-to-the-prompts sorta thing. If you ever dream up or stumble into a prompt you love, share it with us in the comments, or send it to me (by replying to my email) so that I can share it with the whole crew.

3)      Sometimes my emails to you might include other stuff, too—prose reflections on the creative process, for example, or things I’m learning about poetry that feel helpful to me. As with everything I send you, feel free to ignore my words and skip straight to the community gathering space known as the comments thread!

4)      When you arrive in our cozy little comment thread, take a breath or two and—to the best of your ability—leave behind your irritation with your boss or that stressful interaction with your family member. Or even better, let’s empty our stress into poems, then bring the most generous parts of ourselves to our interactions with one another! Let’s make this the kindest space on the Internet. Let’s make it a space where everyone’s creative efforts are celebrated.

5)      To that end, we’ll all need to be kind to ourselves, too. If writing 50 poems feels more like self-kindness to you than writing 100, then write 50! If letting go of numbers and just enjoying the community feels like kindness, please do that.  

6)      Finally, let’s remember that this is for fun! It’s just one big playdate, friends! Let’s mix words. Let’s cover ourselves in paint. Let’s laugh. Let’s connect and grow in the way children do—by getting messy together, taking risks together, experimenting, being silly, and following our heart’s desires.

Here’s my first poem of 2024, written as I waited for the sun to rise on the first morning of this new year. I ended up surprised by what emerged.

When I was a kid, maybe nine or
ten, I was set
on becoming perfect,
by which I meant
thin,
good at basketball,
and virtuous in all the ways
that Mormons define the word.
(It’s a long list of ways.)

So on the first day of each month, when my mother
flipped her calendar to a new page—a new
Monet or Renoir, or one year I think it was Van Gogh—
I set new goals,
new vows to God and self,
almost identical to the vows of the month before,
which of course filled me with shame and sick determination.

I wrote the vows in my journal, 
then descended to the basement,
climbed on the seat of the stationary bike,
black and white and wedged in the corner,
where I pleaded to God for help.

Pedal, pedal, plead.

Pedal, pedal, pray.

Pedal, pedal, petition. 

Perfection is hard and will make you sweat.
Perfection is hard and will make you weep, and
there are only so many turnings of the page,
only so many iterations
of water lilies and women with parasols
before your time on earth is spent. 
It’s best, then, to multi-task,
to pedal while praying,
to pedal while ripping yourself apart. 

I’d like to walk down to that basement now,
like to pluck that girl from off her bike—
pedaling so hard and going nowhere.
I’d like to tell her what I know now,
which isn’t much but includes this:
You’re already beautiful.
You’re already good.
You are brushstrokes on canvas.
You are lilies on a pond. 
Come out of that corner, and
enjoy your own becoming.  

Thanks for being here and reading. Let’s go find each other in the comments thread!