I meant to post this soon, anyway, but I see that it’s my 8th bloggiversary, so …

After writing and posting every day for the past month, I didn’t want to just stop, and possibly stay stopped for another whole year, but I also needed a break from all the personal stuff. What eventually evolved is that this month, I have a new project, and I plan to do a different project for each month of 2020.

Every month, I’ll post what my project is, in case you want to try it, too, and I’ll post a couple examples of my own work. I can’t continue the daily posting of poems because of the well-known Previously Published hex that renders blogged poems useless in terms of submitting to most publications. But I also don’t want to withhold everything, because I enjoy sharing and getting feedback — more than I ever get through publication. So, let’s try this for a while.

My project for December is that every day, I’ve been going through the current issue of one magazine (same one each day) and writing a bunch of found poems using only words and phrases that I find in it. I’ve been stitching them together in order rather than mixing them up. I guess these are erasure poems.

What I mean is that if you did this with my preceding paragraph, you could have:

For December, going through a bunch of words,
I find I’ve been mixing up …

but not:

I find a bunch of words
every day, mixing up …

I’m not telling you which magazine I’m using, but I will say that December issues of women’s magazines are especially good for this because of all the holly-jolly striving. It leads to rather jarring poems about sugarplums and stress.

Maybe the formula from now on is that I post what my project is on or near the first of the month, then post an example around the 15th and another at the end of the month. See you around the 15th, then!