It’s April, and that means it’s time to write poetry. I had some trouble this year deciding what I wanted to do. Join a challenge? Design my own project? Follow the day’s whimsy? I found myself drawn to several different poetry projects, but the one I couldn’t stop thinking about was Christie Wyman’s Thoreauly Inspired. Here is Christie’s explanation:

Each day during April, I will write a poem-ish piece inspired by a word or phrase mined from the pages of Henry David Thoreau’s jewel-laden journals. I have left my challenge open so that the poems may take any form — haiku, free verse, borrowed line, blackout –and who knows which direction they will go in.

I’ve never read Thoreau’s journals, so I knew that reading Thoreau carefully and deeply this month and responding through poetry wasn’t quite what I was looking for. But an open challenge to write “poem-ish pieces” grounded in a close, slow reading of a personally significant text sounded exactly right.

And I knew immediately which writer and which book I would like to return to for inspiration. Virginia Woolf’s Diaries, specifically Volume 3, which begins in 1925 with the publication of Mrs. Dalloway.

I began rereading last night, anxious that I wouldn’t find anything that made me feel poem-ish, anxious that what spoke to me in my 20s wouldn’t matter to me at all now, more than two decades later. But there she is describing her friend Jacques Ravaret’s death, and I felt both poem-ish and like I needed to copy the entire passage into my notebook.

Day #1: Found Poem Haiku

someone stepping out–
unfinished sentence on lips
–into the darkness