NaPoWriMo - Why I'm Doing It

April is National Poetry Month and, in honor of this, many writers like to celebrate NaNoWriMo style.

For NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, which takes place in November) the goal is to write 50,000 words of a novel in one month, which breaks down to about 1,666 words per day.

NaPoWriMo is a little more simple. The goal is just to write one poem a day.

Poetry has been important to me for as long as I can remember. When I was a kid my parents gave me and all of my siblings journals to write in. I was only 3 years old when I first got the journal and couldn't write yet, but there are a few pages at the very beginning where my mom or a sibling wrote something down for me.

One of the first things written is a poem (or a song, I'm not really sure) that I made up when I was 3. It goes like this...

Soapy suds, soapy suds, what will be for you?
A heart that makes your dreams come true.

Yeah, that's it. I guess that I was into soap?

I was a huge bookworm when I was a kid and loved to read and to write.

As I got older I started writing more poetry and took every creative writing class that was available in middle and high school. I also started comparing myself to other people, and was dismayed by the talent of other kids my age. I realized that maybe I'm actually not a poetic genius after all!

I also started to think that maybe poetry wasn't really a thing anymore. Especially in college. I was an English Lit major and everyone was focused on the 'Great American Novel'. Nobody really cared about poetry.

So besides critical papers, I pretty much stopped writing in my twenties. As an adult I've continued to be an avid note-taker, journal-er, and fledgeling blogger, but poetry and creative writing has pretty much died out for me.

And that makes me really sad.

Because I think that deep down, I really still am a poet. Poetry is what stirs my soul. The idea of being an actual, for-real poet makes my heart race.

So, I'm going to be posting a poem here every day for the month of April. They're probably going to suck. I'm going to try to post an original photograph as the thumbnail for each poem too. We'll see how that goes.

I'm not a good poet. I'm not published. I don't practice. But I want to try. I want to find my very own poetic voice. And if it's silly and sentimental, like that poem I wrote when I was 3 years old, I don't care. It'll be mine.