It's The 2025 Poem-A-Week Challenge Discussion Thread

I can’t write for shit
No inspiration
And afraid to start
I stay away
Feeling non poetic

Where did all my good ideas go?
September seems so far away
When poems fell outta my head

FF to the present
An occasional line here or there
Nuthin great
And no grand idea
Just writing raw
In the white box at the bottom of the thread
I stare At it
Unhappy
Change a few things

Fuck it
I press “post reply”
Profoundly unhappy
 
I can’t write for shit
No inspiration
And afraid to start
I stay away
Feeling non poetic

Where did all my good ideas go?
September seems so far away
When poems fell outta my head

FF to the present
An occasional line here or there
Nuthin great
And no grand idea
Just writing raw
In the white box at the bottom of the thread
I stare At it
Unhappy
Change a few things

Fuck it
I press “post reply”
Profoundly unhappy
🫂🫂

What does it say about me that I kinda love what you put here? Not because you feel unhappy, but because I think it's a good expression of a common emotion?
 
Arrrggghhh Poetica*

1. Thou shalt write a poem each week, whether thy cares to or not.

2. Thy poem may not be good, but thou shalt care less for quality, more for punctuality.

3. If thou be woman and write about fucking, men shalt be drawn to thee. They shalt buzz like bees unto pollen. If thou be male and write of fucking? Fugeddaboutit.

4. Ahem.

5. Thou shalt consider thy line breaks ceaselessly, moving words and punctuation back and forth in a neverending game.

6. Thou shalt count syllables and stresses in endless struggle and misunderstanding unless thy name is Tzara.

7. Thou shalt smite thyself for adverbs and gerunds, less so for adjectives.

8. Thou shalt exult thy nouns and verbs: whither nouns goest verbs shall follow.

9. Thou shalt despair because every poem thou reads is better than thine or exult because every poem but thine is shite. There shalt be no in-between.

10. Thy shalt watch thy calendar and write accordingly. Ahem.





*With apologies to Horace, 42Below and everyone who reads this. 🤭
 
6. Thou shalt count syllables and stresses in endless struggle and misunderstanding unless thy name is Tzara.
Well, syllables separate phonemes,
The basis of language. By no means
Should poets befuddle
And leave verse a muddle
Of undeconstructed Foucault scenes.

Now stresses give language its rhythm.
In poetry, though, there's a schism.
Our Formalists like them,
Free versers despise them—
They're split like light rays through a prism.

It's prosody that this is known as,
As singular as Leibniz's monads.
You like it or not so
(The topic is fraught, yo)
But fertile as lit'rature's gonads.
 
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40) Things I learned from the Poet’s Bro 42Below

Oh don’t get me started on the big morphemes
between my legs. Or the textual meanings in
sexual phonemes. When, I really need to know-

Is my horizontal bar stuck betwixt out and in?
Not sticking up—- damn my hyphen! Am I a
poetic (little dash)?

Or an emdash which is bigger than a endash—
which is slightly longer than a hyphen- which
is a little higher than the base line(?) Of what!!!

Oh gerundium! I am taking a very direct object;
a semicolon getting a big noun manly verb-ing—
ARSe- ASS– ARGGGH— Poetica!
 
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3. If thou be woman and write about fucking, men shalt be drawn to thee. They shalt buzz like bees unto pollen. If thou be male and write of fucking? Fugeddaboutit.
When women write poems on fucking
Or, just as bad, ones about sucking,
That's when men, spouting sleaze,
Inundate them with pleas,
And photos of dicks they'll be ducking.

But men, when on intercourse writing,
Won't find many chicks who'll be fighting
To flirt, flash, and swear
That they'd love an affair.
The poems are not quite inviting.

This puzzles the gentlemen, ladies.
They offer champagne and Mercedes
As their smut, finely wrought,
Hasn't brought them but naught.
Their sex life left somewhere in Hades.

Perhaps, guys, we need to be gentle.
Seduction's primarily mental.
Try just being more real
(And a little genteel)
And, honestly, more fundamental.
 
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