The Stafford Challenge: Month 1 (Name:Memory), Thoughts and Reflections

The Stafford Challenge is a commitment to write a poem a day for a year.  I haven't really written poems for a year, and seeing this challenge pop up on my Facebook feed made me wonder why I haven't so before.  I think I'm one of those type of writers who tells himself it's easier to wait for inspiration rather than be more active in the writing process: research, writing, revision as a way to say to myself "I'll write it when it's the best time."  Well, there's no time like now, right?

In the past two years, I was able to do poem a day challenges that lasted for a month.  However, the way I wrote them was more improvisational journal entry: writing what I see that day, or what was happening, and since I did this type of writing for two challenges, I wanted to try something different.

So a week before the start date, I decided to list a bunch of themes, ideas, undercurrents, to latch onto and guide me as I explored what I thought about them through poetry.

The original title for the theme of the first month was inspired by a reading I went to probably twenty years ago.  This reading didn't have the poet available, but had translations of his work.  The poet was Ko-Un.  At the time, a translation of his collection "Ten Thousand Lives" came out.  The inspiration of the collection was for the poet to write down from memory people he knew outside of prison, and see how he remembers them.

Very recently, I looked up his bio and saw how his life turned out.  Here's a quote from Wikipedia:

In February 2018, Ko's legacy came under fire. In a poem that translates as "The Beast" or "Monster", published in the Korean literary magazine Hwanghae Literature in December 2017, poet Choe Yeongmi accused "En", a fictional character whose biographical details match those of Ko Un, of gross sexual misconduct. Other women in the South Korean literary community have afterwards accused Ko of decades of such conduct and allegedly using his power to coerce other vulnerable writers into sexual relations. Debate has followed, including leading to removing Ko's poems from South Korean textbooks.

Reading this made me think about writers who we find out later as horrible people, and what to do about their work and how they influenced me.  I don't have answers for every horrible person since my initial inclination is to cast them out my mind and give them no attention, but some people are so woven into my literary psyche that it's hard to be separated from their influence over me and the way I write.

In any case, I kept the spirit and idea of writing about people I just remember a name and a scene from -- focus on the theme and not the one who inspired it.

Things I learned during this process of writing:

• My initial instincts were to go as far back as possible, and that was Kindergarten.
• I mostly wrote about high school or early community college people I knew.
• I did try to look up people, but many don't have an online presence.
• This year is the 25th Anniversary from graduating from High School. 
• I lost and tried to regain and lost connections.
• How much I messed up in communicating what I was truly feeling and that lead to regrets. 

I wouldn't know what I would do now if I reconnected with any of the people on the list I wrote about.  It's been around twenty years or so and what is there to connect to now?  I feel I'm a different person than I was twenty years ago, but have the same anxieties. 

And with that note, one month complete and eleven more to go.