So, last year you may know I wrote 100 Poems In A Day. The idea was to give my muse a bit of an enema. I’m a vicious procrastinator and writing bits and pieces that end up going down well only makes my work-dodging tendencies worse. I wanted to force myself to produce 100 little poems, and do so publicly, as a reminder not to be precious about writing new stuff, because nobody cares.
Well, it seems I haven’t learned my lesson because on Friday November 26th, exactly one year since the original project, I’m going to try to go one better. Literally.
101 Poems In A Day will be a day where I try to… well, I’m sure you can guess. I’ll post each poem title up on my Twitter account @TimClarePoet as I write it, so people can join in if they want a go, and I’ll post the poems up on the blog as I finish them, so you can track my progress and sneer at my cackhanded verse. But hey… I need poem titles! Can you help me out? Last year, people sent me a bunch. I need more than 100 so I have a range to pick from over the day. You can send me silly ones, sensible ones, elaborate ones, one-word ones – anything that springs to mind! Just post them as a comment on this post, tweet me, or email me at joshureplied[at]yahoo[dot]co[dot]uk. If you send me a bunch, I’ll almost certainly use at least one.
Of course, I might fail. Mental exhaustion, technical hitches, unforeseen circumstances – all these things might keep me from my goal. Assuming I start at 9am, it works out I have, very roughly, 8 minutes to write and post each poem. I need to make time to pee, although I’ll pile up food and drink at my desk before I start. Last year I drank sooo much caffeine. And BBC radio called at 10am with a title for a poem that they had me read out on air at 4pm! I will never forget the sad, faintly baffled tone of the presenter after I had delivered it. By the time I got to the final ten poems, the screen was flexing and warping before my eyes, my ears rang, and I couldn’t feel my legs. Honey sweet times.
So yeah. Join me. Let’s do this important thing.