who only by moving can balance

Per the tag, this year (after jjhunter) I aimed to write fifty poems, one a week with two off. The tag currently stands at 53, which is a slight underestimate (posts that contain multiple comment-poems only add one to the total).

Poetry is a thing I come back and back to. I fell in love with it, properly, during my GCSEs: Keats, who showed me how to write a certain quality of light; Carol Ann Duffy, whose poetry pointed out to me that I'm an abuse survivor; Stephen Dunn and Simon Armitage and Monica Ali and on and on; close analysis didn't kill the poems for me, it made them more alive. It taught me to look at the world differently. It taught me the value of saying & meaning two things on their own, and both at once. It made me more okay.

And then I picked up a copy of Staying Alive, and that was... more-or-less that. In it I found - among many, many others - Machines, which is significant enough to me that I'm going to get the final couplet as a tattoo; I met Mary Oliver's Wild Geese for the first time. The reason I am so drawn to "beloved" as a term of endearment is in large part due to Late Fragment.

We were encouraged to write poems during GCSEs, and I wrote a few. And then I... stopped, pretty much until the year I took off from university: I was scared of failing, to the point of shying away from making the attempt - but poetry (like so much else) can only be committed by those

Who only by moving can balance,
Only by balancing move.

And so. A year in poems was designed and intended to give me permission to write imperfect work, to strive and value the striving, to explore and learn and do so in public and not get things right first time. I've grown much less scared of posting my poetry here over the course of it: back when I first really started, it felt as though I was offering up fragments of my heart and I was terrified you'd sneer at them and discard them and loathe me.

I still, often, feel that I am offering up fragments of my heart, but that no longer scares me. Partly it is that I trust you more; partly it is that I trust myself more, and I have turned this into something I am doing for me.

Why only often? Well -- before this year I tended to write a poem down only if it was insistent, if it rocked up in a flood of inspiration as a thing entire. This year I've been thinking about craft: I've been deliberately taking images and turning them into poems and rewriting them, daring to draft and redraft, instead of being so afraid that I couldn't look at a piece of writing twice. How I write's developed a little further too: it is usually the case that I will scrawl something by hand, type it up for DW, and then tweak it over several rounds of edits over several days as I read it aloud to myself and find infelicities and inclarities I wish to put better. I have been learning how to combine inspiration and craft, how not to dismiss craft as impure or unworthy or less real.

It's encouraged me to think in poetry more, to try to find ways of expressing the several-things-at-once, to permit myself complexities and nuance in ways that still feel safe. It's making me confront fears and insecurities - imperfection in public; trusting myself; inadequacy and dismissal by means of ~doing it wrong~ - through articulation and praxis, and it's been fantastic for me.

That's why I wrote and (yes): because I was angry and afraid about people sneering about confessional poetry; because I was angry and afraid that people would look down on me for writing about love and about loving. I claim this as my own; I will not be made small by people who think that I'm feeling too much or too loudly or too me; I will take the weakest thing in me, and I will beat the bastards with it.

So: I have used this year to face some of my fears. Making imperfect poetry public made it easier for me to make imperfect code public, and vice versa. My next fear is that I'm not a proper poet because I don't write sufficiently formally; so my artistic goal for this year coming, to produce some number of villanelles and sonnets, is aimed at that. Again, the idea is fundamentally to give myself permission to be imperfect: and in so doing (play away the chords) demonstrate that I can acquire new skills and I can acquire them well.

Plus, of course, I got a lot of damn good poetry written this year. It's weird and a bit exhilarating to realise how much good stuff I've produced in among the drafts-that-need-reworking and things-I'm-no-longer-happy-with. I'm occasionally (but increasingly frequently) astonished to realise that I think my writing is better than some published material; that I could in all plausibility sell it. And here's a thing: this year I have also given a poetry reading, reflected on it (I could probably get a great deal better at it but it doesn't matter if I don't, cf the fact that the Poet Laureate can't read for toffee, ask me how I know; my poetry by and large is intended to be read rather than spoken, and maybe that's another challenge for myself), and submitted to a range of publications. Every single submission was rejected but I am genuinely completely okay about this: and that is strength.

The greatest gift of all, though, is this: how often it is, these days, that I find myself reaching for a poem to express my thoughts and emotions (because by using poetry instead of my own prosaic present I get to call on the layers and the nuance and the intertextuality, and the meanings that flourish in the distance between author and readers) I realise that the poem I want is one that I have written.