It’s National Poetry Month and I’m feeling overwhelmed by poetry. Wait, that’s not an accurate statement. It’s National Poetry Month and I have a lot of things on my to-do list, some of them poetry related, and I’m feeling overwhelmed. That’s a true statement.

This month my independent poetry press, Riot in Your Throat, is open for full length manuscript submissions so I’m reading subs and hoping to find 2-3 to publish. (If you have a full length manuscript looking for a home, please submit!)

I’m also pulling together my new collection, which will be published spring 2023 by Write Bloody. For me this means printing the poems and then laying them on the floor, seeing what sort of cohesion starts to emerge. It’s also a little overwhelming because at first, it feels like there’s nothing to pull the poems together. And then slowly, as I start to move poems around, to pull poems out and insert different ones, it starts to come together. It helps that my dogs, Piper and Cricket, are there to supervise. Until they decide it’s time to play and nearly make a mess of everything.

In year’s past I’ve done the 30/30 Challenge during National Poetry Month – write a poem every day for the month of April. This month I opted not to actively do the challenge because I already had a lot of things I was juggling. So while I’m not actively doing it, I am still writing and working on poems, I’m just not pushing to write one per day.

Because I was feeling so overwhelmed by my to-do list I took a day off from work last week to focus on crossing things off the list. It helped and while I’ve since added several more things to the never-ending list, I don’t feel so overwhelmed by it.

If you’re doing the 30/30 Challenge what keeps you motivated? What prompts do you love to keep going?