What I learned from National Poetry Month

This is something I just sent Carrie, because she's compiling a post eventually about our class trip to poem-a-day month.

1. Writing every day is terribly exciting. It makes you feel like you've accomplished something important even when your laundry is piling up and the dishes are crusty and you are eating oatmeal out of a peanutbutter jar and you keep waking up 10 minutes before you have to leave for work.
2. Habit can be formed! This is reassuring. Holy cow is it reassuring.
3. For someone like me, someone who has been in a nonwriting slump for months, waking up the poetry muscles is kind of a dramatic process. I see a progression in my style from day 1 to day 30.
4. Holy cow, did I get desperate sometimes. Lacking an idea but still having homework led me to playing with formats, like meeting agendas and Google search protocols. This made me grateful for my desperation. I want to be desperate all the time.
5. I am still very bad at accomplishing anything non-mandatory in my before-work time. This is because I do not wake up earlier than I need to ("need" as defined by work, doctor's appointments, or yoga classes), like, ever. But for some reason, I got a lot of writing done while at work, sort of between phonecalls. I don't know if this is because I could let things simmer in other parts of my brain, or if I just wasn't paying enough attention to my job at that particular moment.
6. 26 poems, bitches!
7. But not 30. I only failed on days when work dragged longer than expected and my brain died on the drive home, though, so I feel okay about it.
8. Sitting upright at a desk is way more productive than slumping on a bed.
9. I read a lot, too, which was kind of a motivational kick in the pants. And it made me feel more like I was doing something worthwhile, arranging words together that had nothing to do with the price of gas.
10. Sweatshoppe was brills. I felt accountable even when no one said anything about the days I missed. You guys were like motivationfood. And reading first drafts is way more exciting, on some level, than seeing everything polished-up and in a book. It was kind of like touring a poem factory. Or, you know, sweat shop. On your left, the poems before they are pasturized and bottled up and given hand-sewn labels. On your left, the poet being fattened up for slaughter.