Synopsis "Osmium: your ancestor is a jellyfish (in English)"
In April of 2010 (National Poetry Month for those of you who don't 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 we 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), and so on. April soon became May became another summer and then fall and winter and finally on into another April. In 2011, we selected 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 that April and wrote straight through for another year. In April of 2012, we created another full-length collection, Icarus Cannonballed: a lesson in cave diving in the Bahamas. From April 2012 - April 2013, the Universe provided us both with some seismic shifts. Yvonne was hit by a cargo van while walking across 5th Avenue at 12th Street & Mary Ellen fell in love. Despite, in spite, or because of these changes, we continued to write and in the summer of 2013, we released our third chapbook, And the waxing moon: back country skiing in Afghanistan. 2013-2014 brought yet more changes with Mary Ellen moving to Fort Collins and Yvonne finishing up two Masters degrees. What you're reading now is our fourth effort - the only rules: every poem must have been written between the two Aprils (2013 and 2014) and no editing allowed. Themes are broad in range and yet, often repeat over the course of days or months: love, pain, summer, NYC, loss, silence, love, sex, food, mountains, rain, injustice, sleep, nightmares, politics, sex, food, the ocean, grief, family, loud guitars, things that bloom, things that don't & things that go bump in the night. Like lovers or days 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. When we stopped, we cajoled each other into starting again. As we move into our fifth year of poem-a-day, certain themes repeat, new ones are introduced, but again, what is important is that we will keep doing this until we run out of things to say. From Mary Ellen: I confess to having poor grace in a dance, and the new rhythm in my life causes me to stumble with my poetry - now paired, now moved to Colorado, now working several jobs, now tending a garden. I trust I will find the steps and the time to urge more poetry onto the page, though for now much of it lives in my heart. Funny, for a person who spends so much time urging others to write! But it is a testament to tradition and to tenacity, that I produced JUST enough poems to hold up my end of the book this year. No choosing between good ones and poor ones, they all go in. This is all I have. But I do have these. We hope you will enjoy our words as much as we have enjoyed writing them and sharing them with each other.
