A Year of Poetry

 

Last month, while thinking over what I wanted to focus on in 2026, I quickly realized the answer was: poetry. I have spent years taking many classes centered on writing poetry, including one last summer at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, and I love writing it. 

There's something about creating a poem that is, for me, different than the pleasure I find in writing stories or novels (or even blog posts!) To write a poem I somehow access a different part of my brain, and it just feels different (in a good way) when a poem comes together. 

 I've experienced similar feelings while playing the piano, sight-reading a piece of music in a choral group, or even (weirdly enough) doing a mathematical derivation. Weird, I know, but it's true, and I've talked to enough people about this to know I'm not alone.

So, after thinking this over in January, I decided I would be more intentional about writing poetry. Instead of waiting to take a class before I put pen to paper to try writing a poem, I would do it without a teacher telling me to--the problem was, I still couldn't get started. 

I asked a former poetry teacher of mine who also works as a writing coach if she would mentor me, and she agreed. As we talked about what I wanted from the coaching experience, she came up with a name for it: "Raima's Year of Poetry." It made me laugh, I admit, but it's really helped to have a name for this project I'm doing. 

I meet with my coach every couple of weeks, which has been hugely helpful to me in discovering the issues that were blocking me. I also joined a critique group of other poets. We meet monthly, on Zoom, and just having a deadline to get a poem written and submitted every month has worked miracles.

The thing is, I knew how to do all these things with my other writing. I am starting to understand what was stopping me from writing poetry, a thing I love to do, and am happy to report that I've written two brand new poems this year already, and revised a couple of older ones. So--things are off and running in my Year of Poetry and I couldn't be happier.