You’re very kind. :) April has become the one time of year I devote significant time to poetry, carving time out from everything else I try to do. I try to write other times of year, but my good intentions never seem to really get very far. I don’t know how you do it!

Your weekly practice has really paid off for readers, though, I think — and for a blog like Velveteen Rabbi where poetry isn’t the whole focus, it’s definitely a good fit. As a promoter of poetry, I’m always most excited to see it appear in sites that aren’t exclusively literary (such as Via Negativa has now become). Which is not to say that doing the 30-poems-in-30-days thing is a bad idea, either. Glad it’s proving useful for you.

Yes, from what I’ve seen you always put NaPoWriMo to very good use.

I haven’t tried writing daily poems in years and years. I’m having a good time with NaPoWriMo, maybe because this discipline is (re)new(ed) for me — I spent a few years writing weekly poems (Torah poems, then mother poems) but that’s different from writing daily ones. I don’t think I could do it every day for years as Luisa has so brilliantly done, but trying to write a poem a day is an interesting spur to creativity, and an interesting reminder to me of how important it is to make space for creativity in my life.

That said: I also think you’re right that our culture fetishizes productivity. “Producing at an industrial rate” — oy. Yeah. So that’s food for thought.