169+ Poems

I moved to Los Angeles just over six months ago, and I have been stuck since. This city is ugly, I have no friends here, I have a good job but it doesn’t fill my soul, and my usual passions are either currently out of reach or they feel stale.

This project is an attempt to pull myself out of the muck. I hope I will be more successful than the poor creatures trapped in tar pits down the road.

I am the best version of myself when I am learning something new, and lately I’ve been wanting to understand poetry. Reading it, writing it, allowing its beauty to wash over me even as I walk past garbage in the streets. I never went through a ”bad high school poetry” phase, and I feel I missed out on something crucial as a writer.

Because I am also an organized neurotic, I need to have a plan for conquering my new special interests. I found a list of 169 different poetic forms, and I am going to attempt all of them. Not in order, not once per day (or necessarily on any regular schedule), not by the end of the year, maybe I’ll try some multiple times. I’m just going to try. I’ll include the list here, and cross them off as I go. And, as an additional creative constraint, I plan to see how many I can write with Los Angeles as a loose theme – the city, me in the city, me and my partner in the city, leaving the city, etc.

If you choose to engage with my writing, please be kind. I’ve never done this before.

List of Poetic Forms (as found on Writer’s Digest’s website):