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Grasmere: A Book of Days

 

Authored by
H. A. Maxson

4 February
Midges or small flies spinning in the sunshine
that filters late afternoon through the Plain trees.
I stop to watch the mass of them twisting as one.
I lean on the gate to stare. Days grow shorter
as midges or small flies are spinning in the sunshine
to punctuate that truth. And I think of the Master, Issa,
who would have fabricated a whole poem, a world
from midges or small flies spinning in the sunshine.

Collaborating with the Dead
In 2007-2008, I concocted an experiment I called the Quotidian Project in which I wrote the first draft of a new poem every day for a year. In fact it went beyond a year and I wrote 411 new poems in 389 days. Much was dreck—as would be expected—but many poems, revised, were better than I could have expected.

To jumpstart a poem-a-day I came up with a number of prompts—some more successful than others. One that yielded some very interesting poems came from borrowing passages from Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journal, excerpts of which appeared in a textbook I was using at the time.
~~H. A. Maxson