My heart wants roots, my mind wants wings: NaPoWriMo 2022 wrap-up post

Well, I intended to post this nearly a week ago now, but it turned out that going back to work was a lot more disruptive to my life than I’d hoped (I’m planning to quit very soon, but I won’t go off on that tangent right now). I feel like I’ve kind of missed the window for any interest there might have been in a wrap-up post, but I want to do it anyway for my own sense of completionism.

Over the course of the month I posted 34 poems—I managed to write one every day, and multiples some days. I didn’t really stick with the my ekphrasis theme as much as intended, but that’s fine. A couple of things that emerged from the experience: I found it harder than I usually do, perhaps on a par with or even harder than in 2020, and a lot of my poems were about an inner conflict between wanting to stay in my quiet life and wanting some kind of adventure or freedom. There’s a Yip Harburg quote I’ve always loved: “My heart wants roots/ My mind wants wings./ I cannot bear/ Their bickerings.” That seemed to sum up what I was going through. For all that I found this year’s poems hard, I think they were therapeutic; I’ve come out of it with a deeper understanding of my own inner life. It’s never occurred to me to journal through poetry before, but it seems like it was more successful than most of my other journaling attempts. I’m almost sure I saw an Eliot quote at some point last month on how closed forms work to bring out sublimated truths; of course, I now can’t find it, and possibly I dreamt it or someone else said it, but regardless, that seems to have been my experience. I might try to make a consistent habit of journal poems in the future, though I think I’d have to sacrifice one of my other self-imposed projects to give myself time.

As so often happens with NaPo, there were quite a few duds or poems I wasn’t quite happy with. On at least three occasions, my poems were about how little I felt inspired to write a poem that night. Often, when I experimented with new or challenging poetic forms (the Pushkin sonnet, the ode and the sestina in particular, but also the villanelle and the triolets), I was glad that I had done it without especially liking the results.

There were a few poems that I was proud of. I really liked ‘Self Portrait by Elin Danielson-Gambogi’, the first poem I wrote for the month. It’s short, but I think there’s something effective about Day 4’s poem. My poem to my cat might be my personal favourite, even if it’s not the best thing I wrote. I like ‘Bianco B’, though I still think I didn’t really do justice to the piece. Day 15’s sonnet might be the one that best sums up my overall mood during the month. I think ‘Rose of the winds’ might actually be the best poem I wrote during the month, at least on a technical level. I think ‘Unimagined Communities’ is really interesting—perhaps the seed of a longer piece. Day 21’s piece, inspired by ‘Magic Garden’ by Paul Klee, unexpectedly turned out to be about grief in a way that I found surprising and moving. There are others I like, too, but I think that’s my highlight reel!

I made a word cloud of the poems, partly to help inform which words I used for my sestina (though I ended up overruling it quite a bit). Obviously, I made it before the sestina, so it doesn’t include the words from that; I think I might have included the cento, though, on the grounds that the lines I picked for it had added weight, since I singled them out. Anyway, I’m not really sure how illuminating it is, but I think it’s sort of fun!

I really want to thank everyone who read, liked, commented or did all three. I appreciated it so much. I hope some of you will stick with me for some non-NaPo posts in future.