NaPoWriMo? Really?

Well, sort of….

NaPoReadMo for me this year.

As some of you may know (but most of you probably don’t), my wife and I have owned and operated a small catering company for the past nine years and are now celebrating the one year anniversary of the opening of our restaurant, which is in the same building as the catering company and where it just so happens that we also live.

My day usually starts at about 6am and doesn’t stop until at least 11pm.  We finally just started closing the café on Mondays, so that we do now get at least most of one day off a week (plus Sunday nights–after our Sunday brunch buffet), barring any catered events which trump our free time.  We are a very small business(-es) so we are basically on point the whole time.

I’m lucky if I can sit down while I eat.

Even luckier if my “meal” doesn’t get interrupted at least once.

We also just started opening at 8am instead of 7am on weekdays so we can now manage a whopping 5-6 hours of sleep a night….if we’re lucky….if we don’t take that time to do crazy things for ourselves like….write poems….or paint….or….

I am still writing, but not finishing much.  Mostly “doodling.”  I don’t have the time or the energy for the real work of finishing poems, of opening myself up to them, listening to them, letting them tell me what they need to say.

So this year for National Poetry Writing Month I’m going to be doing something a little bit different and just a bit scary for me.

I am going to read (out loud-gasp!), record and post one of my poems every day.

Much of what I have been reading and listening to has got me thinking about the orality of poems in general and my poems in particular.  I am also trying to work up the courage to read my work in front of real live humans (gasp! again).

I am interested in what a poem does when it exists in an aural space.  How it changes.  How it differs from the poem on the page, from the poem in the ear of the mind.

I am not interested in Slam or Spoken Word.  I’m not even sure I fully comprehend what those two sub-genres are about.

I will probably be recording a few poems at a time and then publishing them one per day as I still have to struggle to find the time to do this.

They will all be from the past 2+years of this blog.

I *might* get something new finished…..but no promises.

Everything comes at the cost of sleep.

The day pulls at my eyelids as I write this.

The days pull at my eyelids like this every day.

I will attempt to continue my Monday Music and Phriday Photo posts through all of this.

Wish me luck.