A Poem a Day

Starting four years ago, in September 2021, I took up a suggestion I'd seen on Twitter: read a poem a month. Not a poem per day — which is catered for by many books and feeds — but per month.

Read the same poem. Every day. For a month.

I can't remember if the suggestion included reading it aloud or whether I picked that up from somewhere else, but read it aloud rather than in silence. That will slow you down. Sit with it rather than skim it. Hear the words. Feel the words. Over the month your understanding of and relationship with the poem will change, the imagery and feelings inspired by it will evolve.

Although I've read and enjoyed humorous verse from an early age, I'd never taken such reading either seriously or into more serious poetry. I even went so far as to say I didn't get along with or even 'get' poetry. This was not only not entirely true — I had attended and been moved by poetry readings, I had written (but never published) a few poems and, as part of my interest in flash fiction, I had written and read out prose poems — but it betrayed an inflexible approach.

This daily–monthly suggestion made me aware of my fixed mindset and offered some kind of redress: I had never really spent time with poetry. I had never really devoted much effort to it — more glancing at it than looking at it properly. It needed more time and space than I'd been prepared to give it.

Compared to prose, poems are typically much (much) briefer, simultaneously sparser but more compressed. Just reading through a short poem at the same speed as you would read prose will likely miss the depths and imagery on offer. Read it too fast and it bounces off you... you bounce off it. Instead of being drawn in, you drive past. And just reading it once won't let you see all that's on offer, all that's embedded and entangled in their deliberate structures and careful word choices. You need to make space and spend time with it.

But when someone suggests creating a daily routine, don't punish yourself with unnecessary perfectionism: dailyish is just fine. And that's what I've done for the last four years. This has changed how I perceive and receive poetry.

If you're interested in the poems I've read, here's a spreadsheet with them. There's no grand plan or specific criteria —  except brevity — in their selection. The choices are a mix of chance and recommendation. There is a not insignificant amount of autobiography in many of the choices, which in many ways reflect personal struggles, experiences and beliefs. There may be more of therapy in this poem-a-month practice than there is of literary. What I have learned is that appreciation of poetry, like that of music, can be very personal. Which is no bad thing.