A whole poetry book every day for a month?
As wild as this might sound, it's an annual tradition known as The Sealey Challenge, named after Nicole Sealey, the poet who came up with the idea. It involves reading one book of poetry every single day during the month of August. The idea scares me a bit, which is how I know I have to do it.
Why take on this challenge?
You might think I'm taking on this challenge because I'm a poetry expert or superfan, but that's not the case. I actually have kind of a contentious relationship with contemporary poetry in particular. I struggle to identify what makes some poems more than diary entries with line breaks.
Yet, at its best, poetry has a certain spark that I don't feel any other form of literature has. It's often one of the highest compliments to a prose writer to say that passages of their writing are poetic. Improving my understanding of poetry can only help me as a writer, even if I never publish any poems myself. And what better way to improve my understanding of something than to immerse myself in it?
How will I make this challenge work?
The first thing to point out is that even regular book-length poetry collections by single authors are generally much quicker to read than a novel or short story collection with a similar page count. And if that feels like too much, many poets have published what's known as chapbooks (sometimes called pamphlets in the UK), which are even shorter. So the time commitment isn't as large as you might think.
Sidenote: I'm using a Google spreadsheet to track my reading, and it asked me to write a few words describing what I'm doing so it could create a template for me. What it created wasn't groundbreaking, but it did save me a fair amount of typing and formatting, so props to Google.
Working in my favor are a Scribd account and access to an excellent library system. If I'd had more time and money, I'd have loved to plan this out better and support indie authors and publishers more, but I work with what I have.
I'm not going to act like I have the whole month planned out, but I can at least announce the first collection I intend to read, which is Dor by Alina Stefanescu (a Romanian author!). She gave a fabulous presentation last year through The Writer's Center and is one of my favorite people to follow on Twitter, as long as that's still a thing.
Posting daily probably isn't feasible, but I'll include some highlights once or twice a week. Who knows? Maybe you'll notice a more poetic flair to my writing by September.
Who are some of your favorite living poets? Let's talk about it in the comments!