I finally completed PoWriMo, albeit a bit late. I have a bad habit of demanding too much of myself, so I'm rather proud to say that I'm OK with being late in finishing- I've had a lot going on in my life besides the compulsion to meet PoWriMo's quota/deadline! I wanted to get my 30 poems in, though, especially given how much I had been looking forward to PoWriMo in the months preceding it.

Like last year, I found it therapeutic to dip into the intense experiences, memories, emotions, etc. that I did. Again, the time pressure of PoWriMo and the desire to come up with a poem worth a damn was not only motivating, but often disinhibiting. This is a good thing if you want good poetry, I think- it has to come from someplace real.

Since PoWriMo '08 I've rather clearly gone through some major heart-hurt, and (I hope) growing up as well. Some of the poems I wrote helped to process and pin down disconnected bits from the last year that liked to rattle their bones around in my psyche but hated to be succinctly looked at in full light. I know some things I'll never know, or see the same way from every angle. I've learned that for things like that, every faucet can be a poem. If life were linear, straightforward, coherent and cohesive, we wouldn’t have had to invent poetry to describe it.

Last year, stylistically, I was experimenting with punctuation (overuse of that fun little "&" symbol especially). This year I started paying more attention to line breaks and spacing. I have realized (with a bit of amusement) that poems look far more poem-y when they contain artistic spacing and line breaks. Almost all the poems I did were open poetry, but I was often trying nevertheless to maintain some visual effect- line length, number of lines per stanza, placement of certain line openers, variety in line openers, etc. It's probably a duh-duh thing, but I had been, I think, getting kind of lazy about the visual aspects of my own poetry.

This year's 30 poems: NaPoWriMo, 2009

Last year's 30 poems (for comparison, if you're curious): : NaPoWriMo, 2008

Last year's wrap-up journal (also for comparison, if you're curious): Thoughts on NaPoWriMo, 2008