Every year for the month of April, National Poetry Month in the U.S., some poets challenge themselves to write 30 poems in 30 days (sometimes called something like 30in30, 30-for-30, or just 30/30).
I first learned about this practice in 2012, and in 2013 I successfully completed my first 30/30—which was also my last successful 30/30, until, kind of as a joke, I started writing poems every day for the last three days of April, 2022, and then ended up going all the way to 30.
Since I now have both succeeded and failed at 30/30 multiple times, I feel like I can offer some general advice for anyone wanting to take on the challenge themselves, and also explain why a lot my poems this month were…pretty weird. Hopefully it will be helpful and/or mildly interesting.
General Advice
- Accept failure. I mean, it’s kind of my motto, but it’s especially true here. You’re not going to write 30 great poems in 30 days. You’re probably not even going to write 30 good poems in 30 days. That’s not the point. The point is to push your boundaries in a low-stakes environment. Write about things you wouldn’t normally write about, experiment with differents forms and processes, let yourself have some fun with it. All of these poems are first drafts, not necessarily the final product.
- Feed yourself. I don’t mean literal food, though obviously keep doing that. I mean make sure you’re taking in your daily dose of inspiration. Read or listen to poetry, or people writing or talking about poetry, every day, preferably early in the day so you can get those gears turning.
- Make notes. Any idea that comes to you throughout the day, be it a topic or formal experiment or an interesting line, make a note. You never know what’s going to kick things off once you actually sit down to write. This is also just generally a good habit to have as a writer.
- Experiment. I already said this in the first point but I’m saying it again because it’s that important. You’re never going to get through 30 days just doing the same thing you’ve always done, unless you’re already in the habit of writing a poem every day, in which case why are you reading this. Look up prompts and experiments, set yourself challenges, and even if you find a groove with a particular theme or form or process, don’t be afraid to change it up as soon as it stops working.
Methodology
- Day 1: “The English Major Dreams”
I was listening to Ross Sutherland’s podcast Imaginary Advice (which you’ll see pop up throughout this list) and it put me in the mood to write, so I decided as a bit I would write a poem every day for the next three days. For this one, I spent my morning work break just free writing for 10 minutes, and then had to turn that into a poem once I got home. The free writing session survives largely in the first few lines of the first stanza and the broad strokes of the final stanza. Starting with the free writing really helped loosen me up and let me go to places I never would have gone to otherwise, and I’m pretty happy with the results. - Day 2: “So, Knit Dice, Omit a Toe”
I had planned to use the free-writing method for the whole run (which I still thought was going to only be a few days), and then immediately realized that wasn’t going to work. For this one I did a homophonic translation, a technique I learned from Charles Bernstein’s “Experiments” page, though with an extra step.
I took Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18” (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” etc.), translated it into Latin with Google Translate, then applied the homophonic translation process to the new text, finding English words with roughly the same phonemes as the Latin. This process tends to produce absurd results, but I tried to massage some intriguing gestures at meaning into it, as well as some clues as to the source material for those wishing to solve the puzzle themselves. - Day 3: “April 30th Is”
For this one I used Googlism, which I also found through Bernstein’s page (I’ve been using his experiments since college, it’s a go-to source for a project like this). I put in “April 30th” as the seed text, copied the results, and then deleted and re-arranged them until a poem emerged. While this also tends to produce absurd results, it can be used for a more serious, if surreal, tone as well (e.g. “What Was Made and How”). - Day 4: “Literalisms”
At this point I could have stopped, the bit had run its course and April was over. But now I had a new bit, the “I’m still doing 30/30 even though it’s May” bit. Bits are often my greatest source of motivation, it turns out.
This poem is pretty self-explanatory. I just started writing “Your fly’s unzipped, / by which I mean” and the rest followed from there (I also looked up common idioms for inspiration). I want to come back to it at some point and maybe expand it, and/or replace a couple of the weaker stanzas. Also it should probably be sectioned. - Day 5: “Synonyms {Rough Draft}”
I used a random noun generator to generate pairs of nouns, then tried to make those work as—oh my god, I just realized I titled this “Synonyms” when I meant similes. I just…that’s pretty bad. How did I not notice that.
Anyway, moving on, I tried to make each pair work as similes and wrote the ones that seemed interesting. I didn’t get as many as I would’ve liked and the poem feels very incomplete as a result. Also the cancer stanza feels really out of place.
(Also this one may have been tangentially inspired by an Imaginary Advice episode but I honestly don’t remember.) - Day 6: “∑ “Trouble” + n, lower limit n=1, upper limit 8”
This is probably the one I’ve gotten the most questions about, but really it’s very simple. Using the lyrics to Coldplay’s “Trouble” as my source text, I applied my own version of the “n+7” technique used by the famous avant-garde collective, Oulipo, where you take all the major nouns in a text and replace them with the 7th noun down in the dictionary.
My variation on this technique was to 1) change the number for each stanza, so it’s n+1 for the first stanza, n+2 for the second, etc. (the title is an attempt to reflect this mathematically), 2) change any words I feel like, not just nouns, and 3) instead of using a standard dictionary I used The Phrontistery’s Dictionary of Obscure (or Unusual) Words, finding where the source word would be on the list, and then moving the requisite number of words down from there.
Although I was aware of “n+7” beforehand, my use of it here was inspired by Ross Sutherland’s “Liverish Red-Blooded Riffraff Hoo-ha” as heard in Imaginary Advice episode 28, “If Hitler”. - Day 7: “The Composition”
Using a technique from Bernadette Mayer’s List of Journal Ideas, I took Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Philosophy of Composition” and added line breaks where it felt right, then removed all but the first and last word of each line (as Mayer’s cheekily says “without remembering that you were planning to do this.”)
As a side note, I highly recommend Poe’s essay, it really is fascinating, both for the intended insights into Poe’s writing process and for the unintended insights into his psyche—you can kind of boil down his description of writing “The Raven” to “I wanted to write the best poem so I wrote about the best thing in the best way.” - Day 8: “Hallelujah”
My coworkers and I were talking about the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens and one asked if he was related to Sufjan Stevens. He’s not (Cat Stevens isn’t even his birth name), but it gave me the idea to write a poem combining their words. First I went through and ran several of their songs through a word counter until I found two with the same number of words (give or take a few): “Morning Has Broken” and “No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross”, the idea being that I would write a poem that switched off between one word from Cat and one word from Sufjan (although somehow I lost track as I was writing and ended up using a lot more of one than the other). I wanted to use all the words from each (the stanza size was determined by dividing the total number of words by how many instances of “praise” I had) but I ended up with a bunch of pronouns and prepositions at the end that weren’t really useable.
Of course, the irony is Cat Stevens didn’t even write “Morning Has Broken”: the lyrics were by Eleanor Farjeon, the tune from a traditional Scottish Gaelic melody, and the piano part was composed and performed by…wait, Rick Wakeman? Did not see that coming. The point being really this whole idea was doomed from the start. I do like parts of it though. - Day 9: “Haiku for Failing to Write”
I was just too stressed out (not about poems, about other things) on this day to write anything, so I gave up and wrote a fake haiku on Twitter. Honestly, the number of poems in my first 30/30 run that were about how hard it was to write poems is staggering compared to just one out of 30 for this run, so I’ll take it. - Day 10: “Olympian Acrostics, Part Αʹ”
When in doubt, pivot to Greek mythology. All of the “Olympian Acrostics” are double acrostics, meaning the first letter of each line spells out one word and the last letter of each line spells out another word. In this case the first word is the name of the deity, and the second word is a word associated with that deity. I added the rule that I couldn’t use either word in the poem itself. Lists of “words that start/end with _” are pretty easy to find and can be really helpful for acrostics. - Day 11: “Olympian Acrostics, Part Βʹ”
See above. - Day 12: “Olympian Acrostics Part Γʹ”
See above. - Day 13: “[Sure I could celebrate each day, but how exhausting,]”
This is, perhaps ironically, a celebration poem. I’d been having trouble trying to write an acrostic for Artemis (see Day 14 below) when I got on Facebook and found out that Diane Seuss, a brilliant poet who I had the privilege to study under in college and who had a huge influence on my personal and creative development, just won a Pulitzer for her collection frank: sonnets. So of course I had to write a sonnet. I cracked open my copy of frank for inspiration, and then this just kind of happened. There are also a couple references in here to poems I studied in Di’s classes, namely “Song” by Brigit Pegeen Kelly (another one of my favorite poems) and whichever poem it is in which Whitman coined the word “yawp.”
And read frank: sonnets, it’s a tour de force, a modern classic, just all the superlatives (a more extensive and yet somehow less helpful review can be found in my 2021 Year in Review: Books). - Day 14: “Olympian Acrostics, Part Δʹ”
So, as I said, I’d been having trouble with this one, when suddenly, in a real “so crazy it just might work” moment, I decided to see if I could make it so the first and last words of each line came from the lyrics to “I Think We’re Alone Now.” I could, and somehow that led me into the poem in a way I don’t think I ever would’ve thought of otherwise. I like this version of Artemis, as unexpected as it is. Kind of an American Gods vibe.
Also, apparently when I changed the template for my site it also changed how it handles line breaking, so it no longer preserves line breaks on long lines even in preformatted blocks. It’s kind of annoying. - Day 15: “Front Porch”
Inspired by episode 54 of Imaginary Advice, “One More Song,” in which Ross Sutherland describes a technique of listening to the radio and writing short poems about each song that comes on, with the poem’s composition lasting only the length of the song. My variation was to put my library on shuffle and then use the songs that came up as verbal and/or thematic inspiration for one single poem. Sometimes this meant literally just inserting a word or phrase from the song into the poem, other times I used a feeling conjured by the song to guide the poem, or even recalled events associated with the songs and then incorporated certain phrases or ideas associated with those events. The point being you’re not going to be able to reverse engineer the songs I listened to just from a close reading of the poem, in case you were wondering.
I also tried to emphasize the musical elements of the poem—alliteration, assonance, rhyme, meter, etc.—while writing, just for fun. - Day 16: “531.1 Terms.”
Another low energy day, so I took Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 53” and just ran it through half the languages in Google Translate and then back into English. It’s not great. - Day 17: “[pigeons pecking]”
Nothing experimental about this one, just my best William Carlos Williams impression, about a scene I witnessed while getting gas that morning. - Day 18: “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Division”
Inspired by Charles Bernstein’s “Mad Libs” experiment, I took Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and replaced several words in each stanza with random words, but being sure that they were the same parts of speech as the words being replaced. I also tried to make sure that I replaced all instances of a word with the same word. It turned out way better than I expected it to, and the fact that “songbird” made it in in place of “shadow” is poetry in itself. - Day 19: “Something to Chew On”
Inspired by Robert Hass’s collection Time and Materials, which I’d just started reading. Hass has a way of writing in the moment that I really appreciate, both in how he captures thoughts, sensations, and events as they’re happening, and in how he allows the process of writing to be part of the writing (thus my inclusion of the research I did as I was writing the poem in the poem itself). Also there’s a reference to “In Dead Earnest” by Lee Hays, which seemed thematically relevant.
I capitalized the first word of each line here because that’s what Hass (and most older poetry) does and I wanted to try and get a sense for why. Insofar as there’s a reason behind it besides tradition I assume it’s supposed to emphasise the line as a unit in itself, which I can certainly appreciate, but in general I much prefer standard or even no capitalization, as capitalizing the first word of each line can often lead to some awkward moments, like when you end a sentence on the first word of the line (or start the sentence on the last word of the previous line), or if the second word of the line is a proper noun. It just doesn’t look good to me. - Day 20: “[Split fairly like a check,]”
Just a free-writing exercise in music (again, alliteration, rhyme, meter, etc.), with a reference at the end to Alfred Bester’s “Fondly Fahrenheit,” one of my favorite short stories. - Day 21: “[Magic—magick, if you insist—relies on sympathies]”
Fairly self-explanatory, I think. Again, I took inspiration from Hass and left my research in (especially since otherwise I would have had to scrap the poem). - Day 22: “Haiku in the Midst of a Storm”
Had this experience on the way home from work and figured I might as well write a real haiku to make up for the the fake one from Day 9. - Day 23: “Going Going Gone”
Kind of a sequel to “Literalisms,” I guess. I really like the ending, even if I’m not sure the poem quite earns it. - Day 24: “Shuffle”
A bit of flarfy found poetry. Back in the earlier days of Facebook people passed around these kinds of games, this one being you’d have a document with all these questions in it and then you’d put your music library on shuffle and use the titles of the songs as the answers to the questions. My twist on it to try to justify calling it a poem is I took sections of the questions and rewrote them as anagrams. I also may have rigged the song selection a bit to try and get answers that were at least funny, though I didn’t put too much effort into it (as you can tell) because honestly the anagramming took way longer than I was expecting and I just wanted it to be done. - Day 25: “Still Fighting It”
I was going to try the song method again, then this happened. This is much closer to Sutherland’s original method, though it obviously took me longer than the length of the song to write this. The reader is free to decide for themselves how much of the poem is true. (Also the song is “Still Fighting It” by Ben Folds and see if it doesn’t make you cry.) - Day 26: “The Golem in Reverse”
Inspired by Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s “Reverse Orpheus” and “Reverse Eurydice”, as well as, obviously, the story of the Golem of Prague. This is my second poem about the Golem, the first one being inspired by me accidentally finding out that there’s a Prague in Oklahoma. - Day 27: “Corollaries, Remixes, and Rebuttals”
Along similar lines to “Literalisms,” this time taking on common aphorisms. I was originally going to title this simply “Corollaries” and then I added the other two to hedge my bets because I’m not sure any of these actually qualify as corollaries. - Day 28: “I Wonder If”
So at this point I was failing pretty empty, poetically. This is another poem resulting from running a text through about half of Google Translate’s languages and then back into English, the source text this time being the spoken word interlude from Elvis Presley’s “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” I was really surprised by how short the lines got, but I kinda like it. - Day 29: “Haiku For Times Gone By”
Self-explanatory. - Day 30: “Save Your Bathroom”
I wanted to do something in honor of Ross Sutherland, but I was also feeling completely dead, so this is the best I could do. I scrolled to a random spot in Sutherland’s Twitter feed and copied all of the text that got grabbed by Select All, which included both some of his tweets and the various menus and “trending topics” on the sides. I then ran that text through Google Translate as I did with Days 28 and 16, and then put in the minimum amount of effort by reordering the text into something approximating a poem (I also deleted a couple lines that were too explicitly referencing the recent mass shooting because that felt inappropriate for the tone of the poem, and a line that included a racial slur). For a finale it’s very “not with a bang but a whimper” but that’s what I was capable of at the time.
Anyway, if you take only one lesson from this list it’s that you should listen to Imaginary Advice, it’s one of the best podcasts out there and probably my favorite.
Certain of Eventual Failure 