Oct 1 - House With Chimaeras
Oct 2 - Expert Advice for Your Flight from Dallas/Fort Worth to Chicago-Midway
Oct 3 - Expert Advice for Your Televangelism Ministry
Oct 4 - While Jobless, I Eat Snack Foods With Famous People
Oct 5 - Bayside
Oct 6 - Shit-Town
Oct 7 - Actaeon
Oct 8 - Box and Whisker Plot
Oct 9 - Falsely Accused of Being a Terrorist
Oct 10 - The Dog in Me
Oct 11 - Dumpstering
Oct 12 - Long Knife Night
Oct 13 - Claudius
Oct 14 - Ghazal Without Repeated Word
Oct 15 - Sick Herd
Oct 16 - Houses On the Street Where It’s Sunny
Oct 17 - Things I Tried to Forget You
Oct 18 - Owner of a Lonely Heart
Oct 19 - Expert Advice for Your Day at the Track
Oct 20 - K-I-S-S-I-N-G
Oct 21 - Christian Radio
Oct 22 - three poems– Lossless Audio, If Only I Could’ve Considered Machu Picchu, There Has Never Been a Famine in a Democratic Country
Oct 23 - The Dog in Me II
Oct 24 - Catbird Sleep
Oct 25 - Neurotic Friend
Oct 26 - It’s Barely Living
Oct 27 - Dinner Party with Co-Workers
Oct 28 - Man, Exploding
Oct 29 - Ocean Quahog
Oct 30 - Penalty Minutes
Oct 31 - Halloween

Happy Halloween, people. After racing home from work to get Halloween candy in time for all the tykes in my neighborhood, and buying a metric ton of those bite-sized candy bars, we’ve had one trick-or-treater. What the junk, kids? Get on the stick and ring my doorbell with your super-scary plastic Hulk costumes. Take this candy off my hands. I don’t really want it!

Today’s the last day of the month, and in about an hour and a half, I will have written a new poem for 31 straight days. Gluttons for punishment that we are, Matthew Olzmann and I will be continuing the experiment with slightly relaxed rules, all through November. I don’t think the rest of our gang will join us– and I don’t blame them. October has been mentally taxing; I can’t think of many days when I didn’t have a little demon on my shoulder all day reminding me that no matter what I accomplished, the poem wasn’t yet done.

But the exercise has not been an empty one– I have a few drafts headed straight to the circular file and a few I’m excited to keep working on. The goal is to try to practice so much that I’m able to internalize the good stuff– so when I have a poem that needs writing, the craft will be deeply a part of what I’m doing.

So, November. 26 poems in 30 days. Yup… I get one day off each week.