What started out as play quickly started to feel like pressure, producing more anxiety than metaphors, more stress than stanzas, more guilt than good lines. So on the 7th day, as God himself reportedly did with all of his Creation, I rested, though I could not bring myself to call anything I had made that week good.

Truth be told, I didn’t exactly rest. What I did was give up on the enterprise of writing a poem a day, as I, and thousands of other poets had committed to trying to do for National Poetry Month. I gave myself permission to not create—at least poems, at least not on a daily basis. I was disappointed in myself—had been feeling that disappointment, and a sense of failure, every night when I went to bed without having written anything close to an entire poem, even a bad one—which is why I decided to stop trying. Instead, I headed outside to weed my garden, which was looking decidedly un-Eden-like, in desperate need of the attention I decided to give it now.

That year—2022—was the first time I’d ever even tried to commit to the “poem a day” challenge that has become part of National Poetry Month. Most Aprils since it was established in 1996, I had been too busy grading papers and portfolios, reading Masters’ Theses and Ph.D. Dissertations, attending Capstone Exams and Oral Defenses, plus all the other bureaucratic stuff one is deluged with at the end of an academic year to even dream about writing a daily poem. I was lucky to get a daily shower or to eat lunch sitting down. But then my university offered a buy-out which allowed me to retire and become a full-time writer or a lady of leisure, or whatever the hell it is I am going to be now that my thirty-plus years of teaching are over. Apparently, I was not going to be a person who writes a poem a day, though I signed up with one group that agreed to apply themselves to daily prompts that were generously sent to our emails every morning, And if that prompt was not the spark to light my creative fire, there were plenty of others being posted on Facebook and other social media, along with posts by other writers who were blissfully succeeding at getting at least a draft of what might be a poem done—every blessed (or damned) day—while the most I’d come up with were some not very memorable lines, a few observations from my morning walks, which I jotted down on the index cards I carry in my fanny pack, maybe a quote from a book I’d dip into instead of writing down words of my own. But nothing even close to a poem with a beginning, middle, and end.

Tackling my messy garden was a good distraction from words, and the sense of accomplishment was immediate—the obvious neatness of a weeded flower bed, the bright green of emerging shoots revealed. It allowed me to feel like I had “been productive,” though I hadn’t really produced anything, as such, and I knew a Spring storm might wipe out the green I had uncovered.

We Americans are all about production. About doing and making and being defined by what, and how much, we do and make. When people ask us “what we do,” they’re not asking for a list of the many activities that might fill our lives; they’re asking what our job is. Farmer, doctor, plumber, teacher, whatever—our answer will largely define us in many people’s eyes. “More is not enough” could be our motto, whether we are talking about super-sized meals, possessions, money—even poems. “One a day” like vitamins, or a book every year or two, which many poets manage to accomplish. There are contemporary poets in their forties who have published more books than some of an earlier generation—say Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Hayden, Theodore Roethke—did in their entire lives. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing—or a good thing—just a thing. A thing I can’t do.

Do you detect a bit of sour grapes in my tone? Why, of course you do. And grapes aren’t cheap these days! I wish I could write a good, or good enough, poem every day or even every week. That I could experience more often that rush of aha a writer feels when they know they’re onto something that might be something. But I’ve always written slowly, revised relentlessly—and, truth be told, have a tendency to procrastinate, maybe even be a little lazy. You might think the whole poem-a-day challenge, accepted along with a community of writers near and far, might be exactly what I needed to get my lazy, procrastinating ass in gear, but something about the effort felt wrong to me, or for me.

I’m not a total slacker, mind you. I’ve published six books and several chapbooks and edited two anthologies, all while working a fairly demanding day job. So, I am not completely lacking in some kind of work ethic. And now that I’ve retired, I do have a practice of keeping said ass in a chair for a couple of hours every morning with a mug of coffee, one of the yellow legal pads I tend to scribble first drafts on, and a pile of books I might dip into for inspiration scattered around me. But the practice is to see what happens. Could be a few images I jot down, maybe a phrase that’s been swirling around in my head, and sometimes those things take off into the beginnings of a poem. When beginnings elude me, I may turn my attention to drafts that are developing—stuff I’ve typed onto my laptop or printed out so I can tinker and polish, add to or cut from, re-visioning toward something I might eventually call finished. I may even assign myself a writing prompt or exercise, as I did with students for thirty years and as the committed NaPoMo people were doing with each other every day that month. Sometimes my few hours turn into the entire morning. Then I’ll go for a long walk, run errands or do chores, meet friends for coffee or dinner or a movie or to just hang out—the kind of stuff everyone does in a typical day. Sometimes I revisit the morning’s writing later in the evening. Some days a pesky passage will keep me up at night.

So what, you might ask, was my problem? Frankly, I’m not sure. Clearly some people—a lot of people—find that this committed communal effort boosts their creativity. Or they, at the very least, have fun with it. I had every intention of joining in the fun, being part of that far-flung aspirational community. But instead, I felt like I was punching a clock and taking my place on an assembly line, afraid that if I did not meet my daily quota, I’d be fired from a job I needed to keep. Never mind that it didn’t pay much and there was no factory per se, and I was really my own boss so I would have to fire myself. Instead, I granted myself a vacation. Or I assigned myself a different kind of job.

April can be a little dicey in Nebraska. Too early to plant anything, for sure, and one of those late Spring snowstorms could wallop us at any time, but I did what I could do in the garden as a kind of distraction. I still spent most of my mornings scribbling and reading and drinking coffee, but with no set expectations in mind. Before the month was out, I’d started a few poems that seemed to be going somewhere. Nowhere near thirty-one, but something.

Let me repeat that this is not a repudiation of the National Poetry Month challenge. I get that the effort can be fruitful and fun. For some people. And I know that most go into it not expecting their daily poem to be completely finished or “good” or publishable or whatever. I get that even if, let’s say, a mere ten percent of the daily poems you wrote meet your own version of any of the above criteria, that would still be three poems in a month, which is worth celebrating. I probably ended up with three myself that April, in my own haphazard way. Maybe all I’m really doing here is trying to convince myself that I didn’t so much give up as find, or make, my own way into writing poems.

Two years have passed since my aborted NaPoMo attempt. It’s February—which has always gotten my vote for the cruelest month. Winter in my new home in Philadelphia has been far milder than any I’ve experienced in over twenty-five years, but it’s still getting mighty old at this point, and I am longing for Spring. April is a mere seven weeks away—because, yes, I am counting—and the NaPoMo alerts will be hitting my inbox before too long. Social media sites will be alive with people sharing their efforts and cheering each other on. I will, again, be tempted to join them, but I will acknowledge my limitations or contrariness or whatever you might want to call it, and not commit to any challenges. I no longer have a garden I can turn to for distraction, though there are plenty of neighborhoods I have yet to explore, and there is always the expanse of a blank page to stare into as into any unfamiliar landscape. Though I will not aim for a poem a day, I will make what I can of words, as I do every month. And I will call that good.