Poetry Isn’t a Speed Sport
I was excited to learn about National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo), which I discovered while thinking about starting something similar. I had enjoyed doing National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) a couple times many years ago and wanted to do something similar with poetry.
What I’ve learned over the past month is that while it is fine to bang out raw ideas and drafts of poems at a good clip, it doesn’t align with my idea and experience of poetry to churn out and publish a poem every day. It works for a novel because it isn’t out of the question to turn out an interesting, albeit jagged first draft in a month. It can really help to get out of my head and just write. There’s no time to do anything else.
What sets poetry apart for me is not just the much slower pace of writing, but the extended, meditative process of crafting and honing a poem line by line over time. That is what gives poetry its power. When I’m reading a great poem, I can feel the heft of minutes or hours or weeks of thought and effort behind every line. It is something akin to savoring each bite of a family heirloom recipe that has been crafted and enjoyed over generations. There is magic that makes the dish far more than the sum of its ingredients.
Does this mean I won’t do NaPoWriMo again? Absolutely not. Anything that brings attention to poetry and literature and invites more people to create and enjoy it has my support. I’ll continue to participate, and I’ll use the month of April — National Poetry Month — to put poetry center stage in my literary life. When I’m reading more poetry, and especially when I’m working on a poem or two, I see the world poetically. Nothing is extraneous or mundane, because poetry—like magic—is everywhere.
What I won’t do anymore is publish my raw first drafts, as I did for NaPoWriMo 2025 this month. What we publish online can feel like ephemeral ones and zeros. If it is on our own site, we can edit it any time, and if we change our mind, what goes up can come down with a couple clicks of our mouse or trackpad, right? The problem is, with more and more search engines, AI bots, and other entities crawling, scraping, indexing, and archiving online content, we may not have as much control over what we publish online as we once did.
Rather than give in to the draw of that short-term rush of publishing something online, I’m going to stick with the meditative, creative magic of poetic time. I want to focus on the joy that is found in laboring over every word, syllable, and sound in a poem, and then laboring more over how all these hang together to make music.
I hope you’ll join me on the journey.
