Reading · Every Note, Every Line | Hannah Abrahamson

I’ve had a big break from writing here on Every Note, Every Line! My break was mostly due to the fact that the school year gets very busy at the end. I did, however, spend a lot of time writing poetry in the month of April as well. I tend to rebel against “national months” like this one, but for whatever reason, this year I decided that the challenge of writing a poem a day seemed fitting for me. By writing a poem a day, I learned a few things about myself, my writing process, and my relationship with writing. This post will also include some of my poems from April. If you’d like to read them all, let me know and I can send you a PDF - plus a bonus poem from May 1, which I forgot wasn’t in the month of April.

First, I learned that I will eventually run out of things to write about, or rather things to say. I love talking, and I love writing, and I love singing - all interests that require me to take what is in my head and pull it out into the open - but the words in my head are exhaustive, not infinite, and I know that truth much better now. This forced me to look outside of my own thoughts, feelings, and ideas for things to write about, which was great, and incredibly helpful. I wrote about the wind, an ice cream cone in Chicago, a pigeon chasing down a sparrow for his french fry, and a ball I attended with my students as a chaperone. Writing poetry about concrete, everyday events is more important than I used to believe; I would like to write more about the world around me.

Second, I learned that I can be very particular with my words, even when I don’t need to be. The poems I wrote last month will probably be read by very few people, and I knew this as I was writing them. Some of them are personal and some of them are incredibly silly. (I’ll post a nice cross-section of them here.) Was it necessary for me to spend twenty minutes trying to write one line, the perfect transition from a concrete experience to the lesson I learned from it? Perhaps not, but I took the time anyway. This can be a good and healthy part of my writing process: the practice of being an excellent communicator who is intentional about what she writes. This can also be an unhealthy part of my writing process: the practice of over-analyzing everything I write to such a degree that I end up disliking my creative work. Writing a poem a day, with limited time, taught me to find the middle ground between these two extremes; if I spend twenty minutes on one line, I have to spend less time on another one.

Finally, my relationship with writing can be complicated, as I would imagine is the case for most writers. As I demonstrated in the above paragraph, sometimes creative work is really hard. I do, however, believe that writing, in any form, is worth the time, energy, and effort it costs. Although my relationship with writing can be complicated, it is still good and lovely and wonderful and ultimately helpful, an encouragement for me and the people around me. When I don’t regularly do creative work, I can get easily upset and stressed out from trying to keep all of my thoughts and feelings inside. Creative work, and writing in particular, is part of how I live my life to God’s glory. It is part of who I am, and part of the way God made me. I can’t escape it because any escape will be in vain.

Along the same lines, writing a poem a day helped give me the structure I needed to make sure I was writing every day. I have a fantastic evening routine now: I put my kids to bed, clean the kitchen, and then write. Since April my writing hasn’t been all poetry, but I have worked on some writing every evening, and if I don’t have a current writing project (I just finished a commencement speech), I go right back to poetry. Poetry has become my default writing form. This may not always be the case, as I’d like to work on some song lyrics as well, but I love the security of knowing that poetry will be there for me.

Thank you to those of you who read all that. I hope you learned something about your writing process from hearing about mine, and I’d also love to know if you participated in the poem-a-day challenge during April. It was a great experience overall, and I plan to do it again next year.

And now, the poems for which you have been waiting. I’ll give a brief explanation before each one.

I didn’t decide to begin the poem-a-day challenge until April 5, which was Easter Sunday. This is the first poem I wrote in April. I was imagining what it might be like to be one of Jesus’ disciples on Good Friday, not knowing for certain that Jesus would rise from the dead. I wrote this poem in blank verse.