Drawing the Chicken 15: The Art of Noticing

and why I am doing the 30/30 poetry challenge

Every April, thousands of poets around the world attempt a ridiculous challenge: Write 30 poems in 30 days. When I tell any not-poet (and, let’s be honest, many poets too) about this exercise, they usually look at me with a mix of concern and confusion: Isn’t poetry supposed to be meditative, drawn from deep wells of feeling, rather than a mechanical exercise? Also, is it really possible to churn out poem after poem, day after day, for a whole month— and if so, then why on earth do you take 5 years to write a book of poems?!

All fair questions.

But what if I told you I’m not trying to get 30 poems from the 30/30 challenge? That I am aware the majority of them will be mediocre, some open to revisions into actual poems, some intended only to toss away? I do believe you can’t get to the good poems without getting the bad ones out of the way, though, so part of how I look at it is this: If I get the first drafts of 5 or 10 actual poems from the 30/30 challenge, that’s first drafts of 5 or 10 more poems than I would otherwise have written this month, moving between teaching, a consultant gig, my non fiction book, and a million personal commitments.

But that’s the boring part of it.

The real reason I do 30/30 once every 2 or 3 years is because of how it shifts the way I look at the world. In order to write anything like a poem everyday, you pretty quickly start looking to the world around you for ideas and inspiration. You pick up a fork at dinner and ask are you a poem?. You walk under an Amaltas tree and look at its yellow flowers and ask are you a poem?. You pick up your cat at the neighbourhood park and ask her are you a poem?. Sometimes the answer is yes, sometimes the answer is leave me alone, I’m just a cat, but the regular asking shifts something profound about how I interact with the world.

Take this picture, for instance. Last week, I was on a group hike in the mountains, and someone built us this gorgeous fire to warm us up as we stepped out of our tents one morning. I brought my cup of tea to the fire, sat around it talking with other folks, but a part of my brain was obsessed with the shapes of these logs. I don’t know what you see here, but I distinctly saw a crocodile with its scaly skin, leaning into the fire, and a seal coming up to gently kiss its cheek.

Are you a poem?

Hell, yes.

As the fire blazed on, it eventually whittled the crocodile into a dragon, then into the skull of a T-Rex at a museum, and I stood there fascinated. I would probably have noticed some interesting animal-like shapes even if I weren’t doing 30/30, but the close attention I pay to the world when I’m doing it changes how I take everything in. It gives me permission — reason, even— to pause, to observe, to return to an image over and over, to make meaning of it. The odd-shaped log turns into a poem about how my high school art teacher taught us to squint in order to fully see the world. The log is never just a log again.

I do the same for my body. In order to create a clear image of my grief or my joy, I pay careful attention. It is easy to locate these in tired images of the heart, but I find, for example, that sadness always sits on my diaphragm, like a copper ball pushing it down. In order to write honestly, I have to pay honest attention— and if I do that faithfully every day for 30 days, it reshapes the quality of my interactions with my internal and external worlds.

I do not write to publish (although publishing is a happy way to share and begin new conversations). I write for what it does to how I inhabit the world. 30/30, done right, helps me notice, and there’s nothing I prize more.