Marie Gauthier

I’ve never posted by any particular schedule here, no deadlines, no real structure to speak of.  When I still worked at the bookshop, I wrote about forthcoming books, new books of poems or books about poems, books that excited me.  With the bookstore gone, I still do that, but to a lesser degree:  I don’t have an office-ful of catalogs to mainline anymore.

April is the only time I work within a framework: NaPoWriMo.  Writing a poem a day, and then posting it for 24 hours, is exhilarating.  However, I don’t have that kind of stamina, or time, to do a poem a day, every day, forever!

I haven’t completed a poem since April. I let myself off the hook for May, because, hey, I needed it, I’d just written 30 poems!  But that’s the danger in any time off, isn’t it?  You lose the momentum, the habit, fall back into sloth.

Thus a new proposal, a new project, for which I have no snappy tagline:  I will post, for at least 24 but no longer than 48 hours, one new poem a week.  This is the most I promise.  I don’t know upon which day of the week the poem will fall, only that no week will pass without a poem.

I was hoping to end this announcement with a new poem, but I didn’t manage to get very far today — look for it  tomorrow afternoon, or the evening at the latest.

Let’s end with a poem anyway, just not mine.

Leslie Harrison’s Displacement was chosen as the winner of the 2008 Bakeless Prize in poetry by Eavan Boland, and her book was just released this week.  I read her poem, “Love”, in Memorious earlier this year, and was enthralled.  Go visit Memorious here and fall in love yourself.  She’s that good.