Day 1: '40 Until 40'
My ‘40 Until 40’ poetry project has begun
‘40 Until 40’ is a poetry project to keep me creative over the forty days that lead up to my big 4-0 birthday. A gift to myself of time to write in the whirlwind of new motherhood. Each day I choose a 35mm photo I have taken over the last decade and see what words want to be with it. Process wise I’m open to whatever works on a given day, but I have some new methods I’m keen to try so let’s see where they lead me…
Day 1
The Photo
The Poem
I decided to start the project with the ‘found poem’ writing method as I’ve never done it before and I felt like kicking off with an unfamiliar challenge, which explains a lot of my personality. I’m quite comfortable in the uncomfortable and don’t shy away from being new or clueless about something. I love to learn and what I learnt today is that, with the right book to borrow words from writing found poetry is a lot of fun.
The book I used is a 1988 gardening manual for growing your own fruit and veg. You can get a poem out of that?! Yes, yes you can because there are some excellent gardening words that lend themselves to being used out of context. Also the author Denys De Saulles wrote the manual in such a rich, expressive way that I managed to create the poem from just one page.
I didn’t expect that I would start with the words before picking the photo. I decided to just to a trial run but soon realised I could link the words to that picture, leaning into the consideration of con artist vs mystical truth associated with fortune tellers.
Method wise, I jotted down words or phrases I liked and then found the connective words like ‘them’, ‘to’, ‘in’ that could be used to make whole sentences. I underlined those and then let my mind wander round the page and drafted the poem in my iPhone notes. It fell into place quicker than I imagined, mostly because of the context the photo gave me.
Overall I was really pleased with how this new method of writing enabled me to create something quite removed from my normal style. There will definitely be more found poems over the project.
My writing is free to access but if you wanted to show a small sign of appreciation, hot drinks on maternity leave are always welcome!
Jade x