In the vale of Slush poetry

I am almost three months into this project, writing as the Slush Poet to chronicle 2012 through the medium of poetry, so now would seem a suitable moment to pause, to set down my thesaurus, my rhyming dictionary and my fountain pen, and to take in the view. (That in itself is fanciful: I write almost exclusively on a computer using Google Docs, with frequent nods to Dictionary.com and B-Rhymes; but that's okay, we'll call it a metaphor.)

I am breathless. I keep falling behind; by the time I've wrung a poem out of my fickle muse, the world has moved on and there are new news events to versify. Today I am up to date, tomorrow I will begin once more to fall behind.

What can I see from my resting place? Poetry surrounds me, as does life itself; but what I'm most concerned about is the trail of poems I have left behind me. So far, I have written thirty-four poems, most of which I have published on the Slush Poet blog site. That's about one every two days. I've tried to vary the form, the timbre, the length, the voice. I want the poems to be enjoyable as a continuous sequence capturing the essence of, if not the year, at least my year, 2012 as I lived it and as it touched me.

But are the poems any good? I think some of them are. I've had a lot of encouragement from readers, not just from my friends but from people I previously didn't know. Some of the poems have had a better reception than others, but that doesn't mean the others should be omitted. Would you really want every day to be your birthday?

Who am I kidding? We all know it takes time to craft a good poem, a long time to craft a great one. It takes more than two days. So, why go on? Perhaps because the pressure to produce a poem every few days is what I need to make me grow. I'm realizing that deadlines (even self-imposed ones, maybe especially self-imposed ones) are a creative spur. Without that pressure to produce not just another poem but a different poem, would I really be so varied in what I write?

So where is the Slush Poet heading next? Like you, I'll have to open the papers tomorrow to find out.