In April of 2010 (National Poetry Month for those of you who don't know this already), we agreed to take part in the annual "Poem-a-Day" Challenge - a project wherein poets (and other brave souls) write at least one poem a day for the entire month of April. There are myriad blogs and websites that encourage posting these poems but being the private people we are, Mary Ellen set up a Wiggio site that only the two of us could view. Here, over the course of the month, we posted a variety of poems - sometimes only one a day, sometimes more. These poems were written during breaks at work, during lunch hours, on long subway rides, in parks in the rain or sun, in front of the 11pm news (or the 4am news), instead of doing our taxes (or because we'd just done our taxes), and so on. April soon became May and we continued - through summer and then fall and winter and finally on into another April. In 2011, we selected 25 poems from the year and put them into a book-length collection which many of you now own, waiting for the end of the world: thoughts of bullfrogs and guerillas. Instead of ending it there, we continued on and wrote straight through for another year. In 2012, we released Icarus Cannonballed: lessons in cave diving in the Bahamas. And again, we continued on through 2012 into 2013 releasing and the waxing moon: back country skiing in Afghanistan. In 2014, we released Osmium: your ancestor is a jellyfish, in 2015 The art of last night: a song of dancing narwhals and in 2016 split open the sky: eternity overwhelms me. All still available on Amazon! In 2016-2017, life (and death) got in the way. This new collection represents a selection of the few poems we each wrote between the two Aprils (2016 and 2017). The rules remain the same as in past volumes: no rewrites or editing allowed (except for obvious typos). The idea again is not so much to show that we are great poets (there are already enough people in this world claiming that) but instead to simply show friends, family and fellow writers something we did over the past year - in spite of or because of everything else that fills our lives. Themes in these new poems are broad in range and yet, often repeat over the course of days or months: mountains, grief, love, NYC, Mexico, gardens, cities, growth, pain, the universe, loss, anger, politics, sex, food, recovery, mountains, rain, grief, injustice, sleep, nightmares, politics, sex, food, the ocean, grief, family, love, broken bones, loud guitars - you get the idea. Like lovers or meals or rivers, some poems are better than others. Some are only a few lines, some cover pages. What is important here is not that this is "great art" but instead that we once again set out to write a poem every day. And (sometimes) we did. We have. We still do. As we move into our eighth year of poem-a-day, certain themes repeat, new ones are introduced, but again, what is important is that we do this, and we will keep doing this until we run out of things to say about Mexico, NYC, Colorado, the PNW, grief, love, food, sex, the ocean, the world, pain, injustice, prison, family, music, sex, death, and life in all its stinking, brutal, glorious beauty. We hope you will enjoy our words as much as we have enjoyed writing them and sharing them with each other.
About the Author: Mary Ellen Sanger writes from Fort Collins, Colorado (after 17 years in Mexico and 10 in NYC). Her prison memoir, "Blackbirds in the Pomegranate Tree" was published in 2013. She leads weekly workshops through CSU's SpeakOut! for women transitioning out of the Larimer County Detention Center. She also works on CSU campus for the same program, as Associate Director of the Community Literacy Center, and continues to work remotely as an administrator for a Manhattan nonprofit. You can find her blog at www.mesanger.wordpress.com. Yvonne Garrett has an MFA in Fiction (The New School), an MA in Irish Studies (NYU), an MA in Humanities & Social Thought (NYU), an MLIS (Palmer), and is currently working toward a Ph.D. in History & Culture (Drew University). Her poetry, fiction, and non-fiction have been published in a wide array of literary journals and music magazines. Recent fiction appears in The Reader: The Brooklyn Writers' Space Anthology and the NYWC Leaders' Anthology. She is Senior Fiction Editor at Black Lawrence Press where she also edits the weekly newsletter Sapling. She taught writing at the Brooklyn Veteran's Center for several years, lives in the East Village and hopes to one day return to the Pacific Northwest where the men are tall, the air is clean and the beer is good. You can find her on the web at www.yvonnegarrett.com and https: //drew.academia.edu/yvonnegarrett.